And here, in chapter 18, there was originally a very small subplot
about Umi, the Farang you saw on TV in chapter 15. It didn't go
anywhere so I moved its exposition (fluid overlays, how do they work)
to the Ariel/Tammy scene in chapter 17. Incidentally: "umi" is Japanese for
"sea", and I had in mind "uni", which is sea urchin. Lazy naming!
So in his initial handwritten note to Curic, Ariel asks her about
Umi, the person who "occasioned this clusterfuck" as he put it. Curic
sends a heavily censored response dissing Umi and revealing that many
people on the ice-transfer overlay don't really care what happens to
Earth's sea level: they're trying to save the ice, which
contains valuable paleoclimate data and ancient pollen that can be
cloned. I took this out because this callous obsession with data collection
is more typical of the Constellation Library than of people who might
join a heavy-lifting overlay. (see "The Time Somn Died" for a similar
situation)
But now the disaster. Like I said, Curic's response was heavily
censored, but it also contained a secret message from Curic to Ariel,
steganographically encoded through the deliberate insertion of
fake censorship markers. Decoding the secret message was supposed
to be a fun little puzzle for the reader, but nobody in my writing
group even saw that there was a puzzle to be solved. They said
"where's the secret message Ariel talks about?"
The simplest way to explain the formatting of the secret message is
to present the Python code I just wrote to re-extract it from the
second draft:
So this scene was screwed up on every conceivable level including
spelling, and the really important thing--Curic jerking Ariel around
w/r/t the importance of the shipping container--was lost in the
noise. It had to be rewritten. But I still wanted it to feature some
clever evasion of the censorship system.
The breakthrough idea was to make the cleverness Ariel's, not
Curic's. Since Ariel is the narrator, I can show the uncensored
message, use exposition to explain what's going on, and just assert
that Curic (with Tetsuo's help) was able to decode it.
I tackled the rewrite in April 2010, about two years ago, on an
Amtrak train coming back from North Carolina. I put myself in Ariel's
shoes and tried to communicate just one thing--we want Dana to learn Edink--past the censor. Without letting on to the eavesdropper what "Dana" is or what it means to teach her Edink. That's when I came up with the highly redundant
medium of limericks. The poems won't win any Pulitzers, but now the
subterfuge serves the plot.
Tune in next week for the shocking chapter 19, in which Ariel
travels the well-worn road from "unreliable narrator" to "flat-out
liar." The chapter in which BEA Agent Fowler will say the ridiculous
line everyone tried to get me to cut, but I refused! For you, my
readers.
Image credits: Flickr user windygig, Pepe Medina, Danny Cornelissen.
(1) Tue Mar 27 2012 09:03 Constellation Games Author Commentary #18: "The Amazing Colossal Man-in-the-Middle":
Be warned! This week's commentary goes deep into the workings of
a scene that was originally a disaster, and the rewrite process that
made it hopefully only a minor disappointment. Fortify yourself with
last week's Twitter archive before proceeding.
We start with Tetsuo's review of Ariel's last game, PĂ´neis Brilhantes 5, a well-behaved scene which has never needed rewriting and is a common reader choice for favorite scene in the book. Tetsuo uses a kind of
post-scarcity Marxist analysis to reach pretty good conclusions about
the civilization that created the game, but is utterly baffled by the in-game economy, in which you do work for ponies who pay you in gold so you can buy them hats.
First, a little background. In the third draft I removed an
Ariel/Curic scene from chapter 10, in which Ariel was afraid that if
the contact mission ever turned into a "clusterfuck", he'd get shot as
a collaborator for his relationship with Curic. Curic said that Ariel
couldn't even imagine what a clusterfuck would look like in
this context. She was trying to be encouraging.
import string
for chunk in plaintext.split(" XXXXXX "):
words = chunk.strip().split()
print string.uppercase[len(words)-1],
If you run that code on Curic's second-draft message it says "STILL
NOT A CLUSTERFUCK". Except actually it says "RTILLNTACLSTRFUCKJ",
which is worse than "BESURETODRINKYOUROVALTINE." Not only is the
message impossible to decode and disappointing once you read it, it
doesn't advance the plot and serves no purpose but to show Curic
caring about Ariel's well-being, her committment to which will be
periodically questioned in the chapters to come.
- Comments:
Posted by Ben Heaton at Tue Mar 27 2012 15:10
I'm not sure it's my favorite Tetsuo scene, but his attempt at imitating Ariel's writing style is pretty delightful.