News You Can Bruise for 2012 June 26 (entry 0)

Tue Jun 26 2012 09:21 Constellation Games Author Commentary #31: "The Peaks of Eternal Light": It's feast or famine! Specifically, it's famine. After a huge chunk of commentary for chapter 30, I don't really have much to say this week. This chapter cashes a lot of checks I wrote earlier in the novel, and I feel it would be tedious and insulting to your intelligence to just list them all.

Because there's not much commentary this week, I want to commemorate the beginning of part 3 with "Human Ring", a little toy I made in Minecraft's creative mode. Back around April or so I was jealous of how Andi Buchanan had thought to get Minecraft auteur Vechs to create a custom map for her novel Gift, so I spent a couple hours creating a little diorama approximating what Human Ring and Alien Ring would look like in Minecraft. It's not a game, and it relies heavily on easily-broken tricks of perspective, but you might find it fun to walk around for a bit.

If not, at least there's a couple posts in last week's microblog archive. And there's this list I found lying around:

• I've been banking the peaks of eternal light for a while: 1 2.
• One of the things that stuck with me from Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff was that the voice I used for Colonel Mason, the voice you hear from male airline pilots and air traffic controllers and fighter pilots and Apollo astronauts and Space Shuttle pilots, all derives from Chuck Yeager's West Virginia mannerisms. Everyone's imitating the other boys in the club and their elders, and those elders learned it from their elders, and the original guys picked it up because they really admired the way Chuck Yeager took enormous risks without losing his cool.
• As I hinted earlier, as the story wraps up the narrative focus is tightening on Ariel and Somn. Last week was Tammy's final onscreen appearance, and this chapter's Jenny scene is the last in the book. I'm not gonna tell you when every single character drops out of sight (or that they already have), since that would create big spoilers through process of elimination, but I wanted to mention those two by way of pointing out that both of Ariel's final scenes with the women he loves (or is willing to say he loves) end so poorly.
• This chapter includes what I consider to be Ariel's Crowning Moment of Awesome: "I already have this skill. We call it computer programming." I know that "We call it computer programming." doesn't really come off as a DUN DUN DUN kinda thing, so maybe you'd prefer the highly cinematic Moment of Awesome he's got coming up. But without giving anything away, this here is the moment when Ariel a) decides to grow up, b) changes the course of history.
• Somn's "No kidding!" is the Purchtrin-English translator censoring something closer to "No shit!" OTOH, "Let's enjoy doing it," which shows up twice, is just a quirky translation of something like "I'm happy to help."
• On October 19, after his conversation with Jenny, Ariel writes something that you won't see until chapter 36. Just letting you know. (This is the out-of-order bit I mentioned earlier.)

  Related: even though she's incredibly (and understandably) pissed at Ariel, Jenny was careful to mention the "seven-page letter" in that conversation. She's still willing to keep secrets.

• It's embarrassing how long it took me to realize that Ariel wants recreate his Austin house. I don't think I came up with that until I started this chapter. After I'd written Curic scanning his house and everything in it, and the BEA destroying his house, and then Curic recreating some of its contents, and then Ariel abandoning his home planet for a space station where he hates the accommodations.

  The best you can say is that I eventually pick up on where my subconscious wants to take a story. "It's a pretty lossy line but I receive signals eventually."

• I consider the garbage patch scene to be the world's most accurate fictional depiction of the Pacific Garbage Patch. But with my luck, Kim Stanley Robinson already beat me to it.
• The art references kick into high gear in part three which is after all called "Artwork". I tried not to refer to real video games in the novel, but fine artists are fair game. Early on you got fictional artists like Erica Fujii and Trent Fellersen, but now it's mostly real artists.

  I dunno how much of this comes through in the manuscript, but Ariel's knowledge of and taste in art is almost entirely secondhand through Jenny. Which is why Jenny references highbrow stuff like Picasso and Judy Chicago, but when it's Ariel's turn he compares Jenny to pop surrealist Brandon Bird. Which, as you'll see in the last chapter, is a damn good comparison.

  BTW, if you're a fan of Brandon Bird, I suggest you check out the work of my friend Beth Lerman. Among other things, Beth drew Jenny's Twitter avatar.

OK, that wasn't too light. Next week will feature a number of exciting scenes including the book's final full-length game review. It all kicks off when Ariel says "So there aren't any fossils."

Image credits: yours truly, John W. Young, Colin Chudyk.

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