News You Can Bruise for 2012 April 17 (entry 0)

(7) Tue Apr 17 2012 09:14 Constellation Games Author Commentary #21, "Her": This is one of the most important chapters in the book. I need you to start feeling the weight of the Constellation as a geological-time, astronomical-scale project, not just as the country where Tetsuo and Curic were born. The best way is to show you the Earth contact mission through the eyes of the one who's seen it all: the Her superorganism.

Twitter was quiet last week, and will be even quieter this week because the whole chapter takes place between 3 and 5 AM on a Tuesday. I think you should do some work this week instead of checking Twitter all the time.

Today is the official release of the paperback edition of Constellation Games! How does this work? I have no clue. I believe those of you who ordered the paperback will be getting it sometime this week, and those who have been resolutely refusing to preorder will soon be able to order it from the online store or get it from a local indie. In the meantime, how about a bulleted list? I know all about those.

• The other Constellation species take their human names from human words for "outsider". But some words for "outsider" you don't want to say; not in front of the children. So you might say "them" instead. You can't trust them. Who do they think they are. In honor of this, the members of Her are simply called Them.
• My high-concept idea for Her is a hive mind whose members are themselves sentient. Smoke is a recursive version of the same idea. I don't know of any preexisting examples of this in SF, apart from Internet-like "world minds", but I'm sure there are some and I'd like to hear about any you know of. It seems like a fun thing to read about.
• I like how a lot of Them strongly disagree with what Her is doing and talk back to her. (I should just abbreviate "conflict between partners" as CBP so I can refer to it more easily.) Her seems to operate on a system of democratic consensus with a supermind veto, which Curic interprets as an intolerable fascism.

  Curic's "problems with authority" bit was one of the last things I added to the manuscript. I think it works really well, especially given what happens between Ashley and Her in "The Time Somn Died".

• I came up with Her around the time I abandoned the first draft. In the second draft she was mentioned a couple times before showing up, but come chapter 21 the writing group felt like they had no forewarning of her existence whatsoever. Maybe you feel the same right now, but I did try to prep it a little better in later drafts. The biggest change was in chapter 9, where I greatly expanded an Ariel/Jenny disagreement about the relationship between Them and Her. (I think disagreements are the best way to do exposition.)
• Grammar time! Her's name is "Her", and she does identify as female, although I don't know what that means. So: "I met some of Her's members and they told me her opinion." You don't capitalize the pronoun; she's not God.
• There's a little bit of Arrested Development reference going on here ("Her?"), but not much. In related news, I did name a character Daisy just so I could have her say, "Hi, I'm Daisy!"
• Ariel's explanation of how game sequels get made is taken almost wholesale from a conversation I had with a friend who'd worked for one of those social-games companies. (I'm making this vague just so I don't burn bridges they'd rather leave uncharred; if they read this, they should let me know if they want real credit.) I've never worked in the game industry at all, so it's probably the novel's most accurate bit of insider info.
• Is Her's choice of Sarah Vowell's voice for her English vocalizer a good detail? I dunno. I mentioned earlier that the celebrity-vocalizer thing was from "Vanilla" and probably not something I'd use nowadays. But, when I was writing "The Time Somn Died", I imagined Her sounding like Fluttershy from My Little Pony. So the quiet cutesy voice is definitely part of the character.
• Back in January I had a dream about Constellation Games, a dream that tried to convince me that I'd written and taken out a scene in which Jenny has sex with the Her superorganism. Not the individual Them, but Her herself. I resisted this idea for the usual stodgy author reasons: I didn't remember writing any such scene, it made no character sense, it was ontologically impossible, etc. It was one of those early-morning dreams where you wake up briefly and go back to sleep, and when I went back to sleep I was presented with an actual draft of the Jenny/Her scene! A smoking gun! I thought to myself "wow, I guess that dream I had earlier was accurate WAIT A MINUTE THIS IS THE SAME DREAM."
• That binary star patch complicates the story so much. At least for someone like me who's spent months thinking about the characters. After reading the third draft, Brendan said he'd assumed Ariel was lying about this meeting with Tammy. It would be a lot simpler if Ariel were lying, but it clearly happened. It's a "real life" section, Tetsuo and Daisy were there, and Ariel even switches narration to the present tense and implies that he still has the patch.

  I use the patch in ways I'm really proud of, dramatically, but for a long time I couldn't imagine what Tammy might have said to go along with the patch, given what happens later. Fortunately, while writing this commentary I came up with something. I can't say more without big spoilers, so I'll come back to this later.

  The meeting only happened because of weakness on my part. In the second draft, chapter 21 ended with Ariel talking to Tetsuo and Daisy, then going back through the port. And then I wrote chapter 22, which did not turn out at all the way I thought it would. It turned out so poorly for Ariel (I don't think this is a spoiler--he warns you about it in this chapter) that in the third draft I added the meeting with Tammy beforehand. Remember how I said that every time Ariel gets laid, I'm about to ruin his life? The first time, I had dramatic irony in mind, but this time I felt sorry for him.

  This is the last time I'm nice to Ariel for the rest of the book, so enjoy it.

On that note: tune in next Tuesday (or read the paperback) for Ariel's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. During the course of which he will say, "I'm more worried about my friend's problem than in coming up with the perfect urine-related analogy for the problem."

Image credits: Joachim Barrande, Flickr user fubsan

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Comments:

Posted by Yatima at Tue Apr 17 2012 12:56

I am too old and too complicit not to cry at this chapter.

Posted by Brendan at Tue Apr 17 2012 14:05

Does the telepresence robot only work without lightspeed lag if it's carrying a port around? Or does it have some internal Constellation ansible? (I am too complicit to cry at this chapter, apparently.)

Posted by Leonard at Tue Apr 17 2012 14:27

A telepresence robot could show lightspeed lag, but it doesn't come up in the book. Every time you expect lag and don't see it, a port is involved.

Posted by Zack at Tue Apr 17 2012 15:22

After last week's chapter I was wondering which Constellation species is the oldest, and I was planning to ask you if it wasn't addressed in this chapter, AND THEN IT WAS.

I am a little confused about why the contact mission destroyed their original port-back-to-civilization (which I presume they also used to get here) in the first place. It seems like they could just, I dunno, put it at the bottom of the hole on the moon and not use it unless it became necessary--then, if it did become necessary, there wouldn't be any delay. Is it the case that ports can only be moved around at sublight velocities? If so, they're looking at tens of years before the replacement can make any difference...

Posted by Leonard at Tue Apr 17 2012 18:25

Yes, ports can only be moved at sublight velocities. In chapter 26 Curic says it'll take about seventy years to drag a port back to Constellation space. But that figure is probably the product of negotiation, not the fastest they could possibly get it there.

A lot of the rest of Part Two is convincing you that destroying the port was the right thing to do, that opening another one would be a huge disaster, but that a reasonable person might think it better than the alternative.

Posted by Zack at Tue Apr 24 2012 14:44

Something just occurred to me: there logically has to be more than one of Her, because the Them on Ring City are not in communication with the rest of Them (unless there's an ansible hiding somewhere). How does that work? The simplest explanation that occurs to me is that Her can merge and split herself as groups of Them come in and out of contact, but then I wonder how long a group would have to be isolated before it couldn't merge back anymore.

Posted by Leonard at Tue Apr 24 2012 17:52

Yeah, they split. "The Time Somn Died" mentions Her "breaking huge parts off of herself" to go on contact missions.

I hadn't given any thought to the logistics of reintegration, but it shouldn't take more than a generation to bridge and merge two colonies.