News You Can Bruise for 2012 March 27 (entry 0)

(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, Pôneis 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.
• Tetsuo's reference to "the mysterious Curic" is just him teasing her; he doesn't really find her mysterious. Oh, and the thing I said in chapter 4's commentary about Ariel's old company never being named isn't true--it's here in the metadata for the game review.
• The last paragraph of Tetsuo's review predates the ICP magnets meme, but sure, I'll take it.
• The chapter title is of course my tribute to one of my favorite B-movies, The Amazing Colossal Man, prefigured here. There was going to be another TACM reference in the book, but I botched it. Starting in chapter 20 there's a minor character, Colonel Mason, who was supposed to be named after Colonel Manning from TACM, except "Mason" isn't actually the same name as "Manning". I decided it didn't matter and stuck with "Mason".
• The "used-to-be-a-paint-store" vibe of the BEA field office was inspired by surprisingly classy old buildings in downtown Bakersfield, buildings which always house something super boring. Later on we actually get a street address for the field office, and I thought I'd show it to you on a map, but turns out it's a made-up address. Curse you, previous self! Here's the neighborhood, though.
• Nice moment of connection between Ariel and the right-wing gardening lady, who both hate the BEA but who frame it completely differently.
• I had a chance to put in a semi-Bechdel-passing scene by making the BEA clerk a woman, but I decided not to do it. Ariel doesn't hear what they're talking about, but it's probably not a man.
• The third draft features HUGE changes to the scene in the field office, an important scene that originally didn't work at all. Allow me to walk you through my shame.

  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.

  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:

  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.

  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.

• Apropos the censorship system itself: a real system of this type wouldn't rely so much on heavy-handed automation, given the low volume of traffic and the fact that there's already a human at one end of the air gap typing in the message. But 1) this is a satire, 2) real-world government firewalls work not just by denying access, but by degrading performance and inserting fake connection errors. For Pete's sake, allow me a little... Creative License.

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.

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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.