As Kate will attest, this is not the first time I've said one thing about the bonus stories and proceeded to do the exact opposite thing. To nip confusion in the bud, I've swapped "Dana" and "Somn" in the commentary list and we'll proceed.
But today, I offer pencil art of Her's glider form and aquatic form, drawn by pop painter Beth Lerman, inspired by Ernst Haeckel's zoological illustrations and my own crappy sketches. Unfortunately, because I switched "Dana" and "Somn" in the commentary list, I asked Beth for her art on very short notice and she didn't have time to draw Her's vacuum form. Beth still plans to draw all three forms present in "The Time Somn Died", and I'll let you know when I get the finished drawing.
On Thursday I'll reuse Jenny's Twitter profile image (also drawn by Beth) for "Found Objects". I don't have anything planned for "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans"; maybe I'll draw some stick figures and blame them on Tetsuo. What I'm hinting at is, someone who can draw could get their art into this commentary series pretty easily. HINT.
One final note. Did you order bonus stories and never got them? Check the email that contains your compiled Constellation Games ebook. You never got that email? Then we got a problem; let me know. Let's begin:
"The Time Somn Died" is the story you got if you bought
the cheap but not-too-cheap package. I decided to send you this one
because I think it's the best of the three. This is a prequel to Constellation Games, the story of how
Somn railroads herself into making the biggest mistake of her
life. It's the missing left parenthesis to her letter to Tetsuo at the
end of Constellation Games, in which she's coming to grips with
the idea that she may not have made a mistake at all. She may have
done the right thing for completely the wrong reason.
This is tricky stuff. I knew I was playing with fire. But there was
no other material to play with. I needed to convey that Somn has a tough time adapting to the contact mission because she's not a misfit. Unlike Tetsuo and Curic, she was perfectly at
home in the Constellation. What gets Somn is a hidden nugget of greed
that's never had a chance to come out: her desire to have a scarce
experience, to be the first one to see something. She's pushed through
the contact port by that little bit of greed and her family's pride in her
smarts and her own damnfool stubbornness.
Tetsuo's version of this story would be like Ariel's story: the
ennui would build up to a "screw you guys, I'm leaving" scene. Curic's
story would be like Tammy's story: no time for ennui, just a
lifetime of probably-pointless training that turns out not to be
pointless after all. To make "Somn" anything other than a repeat of a
story you've already seen, I had to show Somn soaking in the ennui but
not consciously aware of it. And I couldn't have the in-story ennui
instill real ennui in the reader.
The solution to both problems is pissy family drama.
"Somn" is nothing but a series of family arguments. Great thing
too, because as I mentioned earlier, arguments are the best way to do
exposition. I needed to show how the other-room works and how Slow
People and fleshy people interact, so I wrote Somn's mothers
reinstating Dad-Tessererre over Somn's objections. When Tessererre is
reinstated, his character is immediately defined by his kvetching
about the guys his wife and daughter hooked up with after he
uploaded. I needed a lot of exposition from Her, the only character
who understands what's going on, but infodumps are boring, so I wrote
the bitchy antagonism between Her and the passive-aggressive
Constellation Library.
I think it works great. I'm really proud of this story. For a work of short fiction
I think it packs an immense emotional punch. Her's "tired of begging for mercy" speech gets me every time.
Before the miscellaneous commentary, I want to discuss the
exciting issue of the units of measurement I made up for this
story. I've never seen a clearer example of the tension between
building a realistic alien world and evoking certain emotional
responses in the human reader's mind. When I was just starting to
write SF, I would have loved to see a detailed walkthrough of this
sort of decision process. So here it is, in a special section I like
to call "the time, the distance, and the mass":
I knew right off that using human units of measurement was
out. There are no humans in this story. No one in the story even knows
that humans exist. But in several places I needed to convey rough
measurements, especially time scales, to human readers. I didn't want
to make up fake names for the units, for the same reason I didn't want
to spend Constellation Games calling the Aliens and Farang
"kej" and "metrase". Every term you make up for a story takes up space in the reader's mind and makes it harder to read the story. So I presented all the measurements in the stories as estimates, as unitless powers of two.
But if I define 20 to be the Planck time, then one
second is about 2116. That's a huge number! It's way
outside your experience and mine. To human brains, 2116
doesn't look much smaller than 2137. But
that's the difference between a second and a year.
Problem #2: I wanted to use a negative exponent for the scene where
Somn imagines Dad-Tessererre speeding up his consciousness faster and
faster. This conveys the idea that post-upload Tessererre inhabits a
completely different cognitive universe from pre-upload
Tessererre. But if 20 is the Planck time, negative
exponents are impossible. Instead of going from 20 to
2-8, you're going from 2116 to 2108,
which doesn't seem like a big difference at all.
For a phrase like "the minds below 20" to make sense,
20 has to be concomitant with the speed at which Somn's
brain (and yours) works. So I defined 20 time as about a
quarter of a second.
Now, if I wanted to be consistent I'd define 20 distance
to be either the Planck distance (so that one meter would be about
2155), or the distance light travels in 20 time
(so that one meter would be about 2-16). Neither of those
is a good reader-scale number. The only distance measurement in the
story is the diameter of the contact port, and as with the mass
measurement in the first paragraph, the only thing that number needs
to convey is "that sounds pretty big."
2155 is way too big and way too precise. Somn wouldn't
estimate any measurement that precisely, even though 2154
is half the size of 2155. And 2-16 doesn't seem
very big at all. So again, I calibrated the distance measurement
according to a natural scale for someone as big as Somn. 20 is about
a quarter of a meter, giving the contact port a diameter of about 32
meters.
Of course, now I'm stuck with these units for any future
Constellation stuff. But since I set the time and distance units to
Somn-scale for story reasons, it should work out fine if I need to
use them again for story reasons.
On Twitter last week Emile Snyder suggested using made-up abbreviations instead of leaving the numbers totally unitless, which would also have worked.
PS: If you go through my math above you'll probably find some conversion errors, and if you tell me about the errors I'll fix them, but I don't care all that much, since my point is that the numbers in the story are Somn's rough eyeball (eyespot?) estimates.
Even then. I had to use basic expository tricks like
having Somn begin the story alone, far away from people and
technology, and drizzling in characters and concepts one at a
time. You may recognize this trick from a ton of other science fiction
stories.
Elsewhere I used whichever English word would give the right
connotation, except for "mistress", which was deliberately wrong for
comic effect. But here, I played up the freewheeling, decadent nature
of life within the Constellation by using "boyfriend" and "girlfriend"
for all romantic relationships, even for Somn's parents, who in human
terms have been in a group marriage for decades. That's also why I use
the "Mom-" and "Dad-" prefixes for Somn's parents rather than
something more formal.
This doesn't really come up in "Somn", since there are no human characters, but it came to mind because of the "boyfriend" thing. And hopefully you see how natural "Hey, lady!" and "ever since she was a little girl" seem when there are no human characters to anchor your perception.
Although I don't like the specific wording I changed it to, I do wish I'd done more in this story to stop using "planet" as a shorthand for "big rock that might have life on it." "Planet" is a human social construct, and the Constellation would also be interested in gas giants that might have life-supporting moons.
Also, Somn's "Ha ha ha... stop it!" was originally "Ha ha ha stop it," which I think better conveys the subtle nuances of situationally inappropriate sexual tickling.
It's similar to Ariel's
Cherenkov-radiation technobabble in chapter 34 of CG. I somehow feel this is
a more honest approach than just giving up and leaving it all in the
hands of... Creative License.
Don't get used to this much bonus commentary; this is the longest one by far. But be sure to come back on Thursday for the comparatively minuscule commentary on "Found Objects", when Jenny will say, "Ariel's not the most reliable."
The drawings of Them organisms are by Beth Lerman. Other image credits: Wikimedia Commons user Miya,
National Bureau of Standards,
Makuahine Pa'i Ki'i,
The Planetary Habitability Laboratory.
Tue Aug 07 2012 09:20 Constellation Games Bonus Commentary #1: "The Time Somn Died":
Surprise! Last week's plan was to post the bonus commentaries in the order in which I wrote the stories, starting with "Dana no Chousen". But a while back, when I gave Kate a suggested reading order to send y'all, I suggested chronological order, which is the opposite of that order.
In another shocking twist, I hereby announce that two of these bonus commentaries will feature brand-new art! Brendan Adkins, William F. Buckley-esque thorn in my side, will be drawing something for "Dana no Chousen". I can only hope Dana's boobs will be tastefully covered with a gun or something.
This story took a lot of inspiration from Iain M. Banks's Culture
novels, which periodically show slices of life from a mannered
post-scarcity civilization, slices of life which I find immensely
dull. Reading those passages of Banks I truly understand what Douglas
Adams meant by the long dark tea-time of the soul. I wanted to capture
that uncomfortable feeling, to use it as setting, without actually
instilling it in the reader.
My original concept was that the unnamed Constellation units were
based on the Planck units. For mass, this worked out fine. One
kilogram is about 225 Planck masses, so the 231
mass mentioned in the first paragraph is about 64 kilograms. That fits
the story. 231 sounds like a lot, but not an astronomical
number. It's about a gigabyte of mass. And that's the only measurement of mass in the story, so I
went with the Planck unit for mass.
As you can see from the foregoing, setting a story inside the
Constellation was tough. The environment, the technology, the
relationships between characters, and the issues at stake are
completely foreign to the reader but very familiar to the
characters. It's a good situation to start a novel in, but I don't
think you can do it in a short story... unless the short story is a
direct tie-in to a novel and you can assume everyone's read the novel
first.