News You Can Bruise for 2012 July 10

(3) Tue Jul 10 2012 09:24 Constellation Games Author Commentary #33: "Infinite Lives": This is another one of those "last chance" chapters, so a lot of stuff got crammed into it. Curic's version of the Austin visit back in chapter 8, Tetsuo's villain monologue, and Ariel's Reflex Games moment of truth. "A Few Ip Shkoy Games About Asteroids" is the last blog post in the book.

When I first wrote all these commentaries out this one was pretty light, so I saved the final deleted scene for this chapter's commentary, even though it was cut from chapter 30. But then I thought of a lot more commentary for this chapter. So this week you get a big commentary and a deleted scene! Live the excitement.

It's been a while since the microblog was an accurate real-time representation of what Ariel and Tetsuo were doing, but now it's just getting ridiculous. Chapter 33 takes place over an entire month (November 11 to December 12). The rest of the stuff in the Twitter feeds—mostly EVERYTHING IN AUSTIN stuff—covers the timeframe of chapter 33. There's nothing in the feeds about what happens in chapters 34, 35, or 36.

Of course, since chapter 33 takes place over an entire month, spreading its microblog over three weeks actually gets us closer to the microblog being an accurate real-time representation of what Ariel and Tetsuo are doing.

This might make more sense next week.

Before we get started, a couple commentary bits I forgot to include in earlier chapters where they would have been more appropriate. First, I can't believe I never mentioned where the code name "Ragtime" comes from. It's from "Hello! Ma Baby", the song Michigan J. Frog sings. "Hello, my ragtime gal." No particular reason, I just like that song and it seems like the kind of random thing used to generate code names.
Second, chapter 21 ("Her") includes the sentence "I ducked back into my house for my keys and walked through the port." That sentence was originally something like "I walked through the port," but then I had this conversation with my beta reader Sumana (reconstruction):

"Wait, does he leave his door open?"
"He shuts the door."
"How's he going to get back in? He just has his keys in hand when he answers the door?"
"Uh, he goes back for his keys before he leaves."
"It doesn't say that."
"I think it's okay to omit that kind of detail from the narrative."
"Noooooo!"
"Okay, I'll say he goes back for his keys."
"Thank you."
Original title of this chapter: "Infinite Lives, Infinite Ammo." Bleh.
The design of Somn's bikini and her general nest posture was inspired by a line in the pre-Vanilla song I mentioned in the chapter 29 commentary: "bejewelled now and nervous is/the lizard queen he services".
The "peed in the sink" thing in 8 was originally just a joke, and I backfilled its significance later. Adding significance to stuff you wrote earlier: the writer's secret weapon!
The '"Yes." Yes.' at the end of the Curic scene, that is, the sentence "Yes." as a quote and then in narration, was supposed to be a callback to '"Don't care." Don't care.' at the end of chapter 11. But I looked back and chapter 11 just ends with 'Don't care.' in narration. I never had Ariel say it out loud. Oh well.
When he was on Ring City, Tetsuo was like the smartest kid in a small-town high school. He was an expert on cultures very similar to modern human cultures, and everyone valued his opinion on humans. But then he (literally) went to college. Now he's valued for his knowledge of the Constellation, and he's just average at that. Tests are being administered about random who-cares shit like Ragtime. So he gets bored and annoyed, he becomes political, and he starts playing pranks.
If you're following Tetsuo on Twitter (which I still recommend!) you've seen his other big prank: EVERYTHING IN AUSTIN, the tour company he started with Jenny to help ETs evade the Hierarchy Interface restrictions on unescorted travel. This is the big bonus storyline that will keep Twitter buzzing away while Ariel is off working on his metafractal.
After all the awful things Ariel did in part two, for the past couple chapters I've been rehabilitating his character a little. The obvious trick is I've been showing him doing nice things for a pregnant woman. (Well, a nesting woman. What's that called? You tell me.) But there's another, more subtle change at work.
In the final chapter, Ariel will trace the shift in his character to October 16-17, chapter 31, when he "spent twenty-five hours sitting at the bottom of a crater on the moon, doing absolutely fucking nothing." But I think that's just the reset button Ariel had to hit before he could change. I think the change in Ariel's character comes from his work with the Raw Materials overlay, excavating the dumps, explaining what they find in the dumps, and generally just being a human presence in the lives of people who have never seen a human. Lois McMaster Bujold described science fiction as "fantasies of political agency", and that's what's going on here. For the first time in his life Ariel feels like a) it matters what he does, and b) he has control over what he does.
The scene with Canadian Adam is a deliberate echo of Ariel's visit to the Reflex Games office in chapter 5. Even though the chapter 33 scene was written first, I knew when I wrote it that I'd be going back and writing something like the chapter 5 scene. Canadian Adam offers Ariel more or less what he asked for in chapter 5, but Ariel's not interested anymore. His experience has changed him. He's done playing by the rules of scarcity-based capitalism. (Unlike Tetsuo, who—and I think this is representative of Tetsuo's character flaws—seems happy to play along with it as a kind of Creative Anachronism.)
This scene also shows that, despite my rehabilitory efforts, Ariel can still be a pretty huge jerk.
The dumb plot of Constellation: Disputed Space bears a strong resemblance to The Lightspeed War, a Constellation novel I started after finishing "Vanilla", and abandoned almost immediately. In The Lightspeed War Earth and the contact mission are ambushed by a rival civilization that's been stalking the Constellation. I quickly discovered that that was a dumb story that didn't fit the themes of the Constellation universe at all, and cancelled the novel. But I am going to explore some similar territory in the novel I'm working on now, in a more mature fashion that's also funnier.
So you can see how I've progressed as a writer since The Lightspeed War, one of the code names for the current project is The Furniture War.
I've mentioned a couple times that the Tetsuo scene and the subsequent reviews were written after I sold the book, to bring closure to the Ragtime subplot and to give Tetsuo a proper sendoff. In the second and third drafts, Tetsuo was working on Disputed Space solely as a practical joke, making up fake Constellation weaponry for use in the imaginary war. He'd named the fake weaponry after Ip Shkoy food items, such as the uiur, a "beverage made from an animal whose skin and bones have been removed."
But given his reaction to Temple Sphere that doesn't seem like a cruel enough practical joke for Tetsuo. He must have some other motive for working on Disputed Space, and this scene provides it.
The final set of game reviews was daunting. I wasn't sure if I still "had it". It had been months since I'd gotten into Ariel's head to do cranky game reviews, and even longer since I'd gotten into the heads of the Ip Shkoy to figure out what kind of games they developed. Without a common theme like "asteroids" for me to work with, I don't think the games would have come out nearly as well.
I am glad I could bring back the G'Go Corporation for G'Go Station: Beseiged in Space, the insane Policenauts-type game that makes Ariel ragequit his review. You might remember that they made G'Go Investigation: When You Gotta Die back in chapter 10. "G'Go" isn't a Pey Shkoy word, so I imagine they were a foreign company that was popular internationally.
I know Canada isn't called a dominion anymore, but I couldn't resist the joke. Think of this as the flip side of "the nation-state of Greenland."

Enough stalling, here's the final deleted scene of the book. Perhaps the most forgettable detail in chapter 30's letter to Jenny is the other letter Ariel says he wrote, the one to his dad, apologizing for stealing the Scotch decanter. Here is that letter. I cut it before finishing it, so I've filled in bits of missing narration. There are also details that don't fit with the final draft, like the idea that Ariel's parents might not have noticed the theft yet.

October 12
Dad,
Strange to write you a letter by hand and put it in a mailbox but I need low QoS on this message and the post office knows how to be slow.
By this time you may have noticed that your cut-glass Scotch decanter is missing. This letter is to confess that I stole it when I came up with Tetsuo last month. I was at our old house with its quiet and its familiarity and I thought: what would I take as my inheritance if I could only take one thing?
Kind of a morbid question, but urgent because I am leaving the planet and I may not be back. I have a variety of reasons, some of which I hope will make sense to you later.
[Ariel then talks about his dad's usage of the decanter when Ariel was a kid:]
I would sit on the couch in your study, reading or drawing or playing with the Game Boy while you worked. When you heard about a paper being accepted, or you met some other accomplishment, there would be the ritual of getting the bottle down from the closet shelf and pouring yourself a toast.
Please understand what follows. I know you hate when I use these video game analogies, but what I'm trying to explain is not the thing being analogized but why I did and I do think in these analogies.
Sitting on the couch while you typed, I would play an RPG with the utterly generic title of Magic Quest, which you bought me for my ninth birthday. One of the character classes in the Magic Quest series is the essence mage (or FORCMAG in the Game Boy version), whose magic power comes from his "life force". Where most RPG magic users can recharge magic points just by resting, an essence mage must sacrifice some of their life force, incurring a small but permanent penalty.
There are three strategies for playing an essence mage. 1) You can use their incredibly powerful magic relentlessly at the start of the game, rapidly boosting the party to the point where fancy equipment can make up for the character penalties. 2) You can play them as a melee specialist and only pull out their magic when absolutely necessary to save the party. 3) You can play them as evil and vampiric, draining the life force from NPCs and other party members.
This became my model of manhood, a bank account that you gradually drew down, a magic meter that depleted as you fought and won the conflicts of the working world.
[There was going to be something else here, but I think it works as is. Not sure why I even put in this note.]
I'm sure you refilled the decanter occasionally, but I never saw it. It always seemed to be three-quarters full, and I felt that once it was empty, that would be it for you, and for me as well.
Anyway, I took it with me and now your decanter is orbiting the moon. Please get in touch with Jenny and she will pay to replace the decanter and its contents. I know it's not about the money but about the betrayal of trust etc. I also know what my act of theft implies in terms of the essence mage analogy. I'm the son of two English professors, I don't need the subtext spelled out.
I'm sorry that I won't make it for Thanksgiving. Tell mom not to worry about me. Tell yourself as well.
Your ~~loving~~loving son,
Ariel

It's in a rough state but it's a pretty good scene. It's not necessary to the plot but it does some good character development. The problem is it's completely overshadowed by Ariel's letter to Jenny. I couldn't even put this scene in the commentary for chapter 30 because of all the commentary about Ariel's other letter. But it's a nice little scene. Good night, sweet scene; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

With this chapter the normal part of Constellation Games is OVER. Tune in next week for the first part of the shocking two-chapter climax, when Ariel will say, "They don't conserve anything except mass and angular momentum."

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons user Jacawa, Flickr user opacity, Alan Light, NewNation.sg, Flickr user Ata B.

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