News You Can Bruise for 2011 December 6

It's that time of the week again, the time when the air is filled with the navel-gazing sounds of Constellation Games author commentary. You can read chapter 2 for free, but this is the last week. Subscribe some time this week, or the commentary on stuff you haven't read will become increasingly mysterious.

The microblog archive for chapter 1 is up for those who don't use Twitter. I don't know how readable all that text is, but I also don't know how to design a website anymore. Let me know if you have suggestions. Note that, for your convenience, the tweets are filed under their in-story date, not the real-world date.

I'm trying out a list format for commentary this week. It might look weird, but coming up with segues between completely unrelated things looks weirder.

• The first chapter barely changed between first draft and publication, but chapter two is the geologic column of the book laid bare. The Quexx review was present in my abandoned first draft and didn't change too much. The bike ride to the landing site was in the original draft, but only as a short bitchy blog post; I dramatized it in the second draft. Ariel's date postmortem was laid down in the third draft. And the conversation with Smoke was one of the very last things I wrote, after selling the book.
• The Quexx review lays out one of my "big idea" goals for the book: to go past the fictional game designs where the game is just a metaphorical space, past the realistic alt-history game designs I did in "Mallory", to explore what software you might write for entertainment if you were a space alien—someone with a drastically different body, sensory apparatus, psychology, and culture from a modern human.

  I certainly didn't abandon this goal, and hopefully when you read the whole book you'll say "yeah, there was plenty of that", but it was originally the central focus of the book, and I had to tone it down in order to end up with a story rather than a Perfect Vacuum-esque series of game reviews. But if you like that stuff and want more than you're getting from the book, a lot of the ideas that didn't make it into the novel will be showing up in the Twitter feed.

  (I did come up with another solution, which was make one of the weirder ET games into a MacGuffin. I immediately rejected this idea because my original conception was "Lucky Wander Boy type crap", a much less sympathetic presentation than "video game as MacGuffin". I'm glad I didn't do that, but I think it could work. Still not a huge Lucky Wander Boy fan, though.)

• This chapter is also the first we see of Jun-Feng Bai (KThxBai in the June 11 text chat), a character who's not my favorite. Throughout this commentary I'm probably going to be saying "I just love this character" over and over. Well, an author has to love their characters to spend so much time with them. But I don't love Bai as much as the rest. I originally defined him in terms of another character, and I don't think he ever escapes that. He has really fun problems. He's the most science-fictional of the human characters. He's good to have around when you need some plot to happen but Ariel and Jenny are too emo to go it alone. But he rarely surprised me.

  I dunno if I should even be saying this kind of stuff when you barely know the character at this point, but I'm playing this author-commentary thing by ear.

• This chapter also introduces Smoke, the AI that operates the Ring City space station. I do like Smoke a lot, so it's a shame you're not gonna see it/them again. Not in this form, anyway. Smoke's fractal personality was inspired by Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence and Daniel Dennett's multiple-drafts theory of consciousness, both of which present intelligence as the interaction of several less-intelligent parts. Not the first time I came up with an alien based on someone's theory of consciousness, as you'll see next week.
• While I'm talking about characters who don't show up again: I think the hippie is a pretty good bit character. The kind of character I like to see in other peoples' stories. He's clearly got a whole story of his own, but this isn't it, so you just get a glimpse. Sumana thought he was kind of preachy. Maybe, but he's not an author mouthpiece, just a dude with strong opinions.
• Microblog bonus: last week Ariel mentioned someone named Charlene Siph in his Twitter feed. Charlene Siph is the Constellation's ambassador to the United Nations. She's going to drift in and out of the story without ever showing up in person, because Constellation Games is not a story about people who know ambassadors. Anyway, I figured if you're interested in the Twitter feed you won't mind having a few things explained before they show up in the book.

There we go. Tune in next week for chapter 3, when Ariel will say, "So are you female right now or what?"

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