News You Can Bruise for 2011 December 13

It's Tuesday, and time for the first subscriber-exclusive chapter of Constellation Games. (Check your spam folder.) Been holding out for a better deal? Here it is: for the rest of December, when you subscribe you get a gift subscription to give to a friend, so you'll have a speculation partner.

Here's the microblog archive for chapter 2, let's get cracking on chapter 3! Sumana requested appropriate pictures to break up the huge wall of commentary text, so I'll be picking some from Wikimedia Commons/Flickr every week. This week's pictures are by Mike Baird and NASA Langley.

• Yay, Curic. The most non-human of the non-human characters. All my characters have problems, but I think Curic's are the best. A bit on her/his (henceforth "her") origin.

  In 2007 I wrote a novella called "Vanilla" which laid out the Constellation universe more or less as you see it in Constellation Games. I couldn't get the novella published so I left it in the metaphorical drawer until Simon Carless asked if I wanted to write a serial novel for GameSetWatch, and then I sucked out all the worldbuilding for Constellation Games.

  I'll mention "Vanilla" several times in this commentary, but here's what I want to say now. "Vanilla" had a bunch of ET characters and I was happy with their diverse physical designs, but most of them had minds similar to human minds, or had adopted human ways of thinking as part of the contact mission. I'd mentioned a species called the Farang, and implied that they were a big deal, but none showed up in the story and almost nothing was said about them. I'm pretty sure I was leaving myself some space to fill in later, so thanks, previous self.

  At the time I was starting the novel I had just read The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and I thought it would be cool to write a character with a dual mind. Not as described in Jayne's book, because I felt like Neal Stephenson had already gone there, but someone whose brain was dual-booting two different operating systems. Thus was born Curic, the furry ocean-predator anthropologist(s).

  When I wrote Constellation Games I left space for "Vanilla" to happen afterwards. If you know what happens in "Vanilla" you can read between the lines of the novel and see "Vanilla" shaping up. But I dunno if I'm actually going to rewrite it--I had my chance when we were deciding on bonus material, and I chose to write new stuff with the CG characters instead. I think that's what you'll want, and I feel like CG says a lot of what I wanted to say in "Vanilla", more effectively.

• "You've seen the anarchists in Austin. They couldn't hold a city park." is one of those lines that shifts connotation dramatically between the time you write it and the time it's published.
• Ariel's chat with Bai re: why only certain kinds of ETs go on television is also addressing a fact about this novel. Most of the ET characters in Constellation Games are Farang or Aliens, because those two species are the most human-like, because I need to mostly write computers that Ariel can physically operate. The twenty other species on that space station stay mostly in the background, more so than in "Vanilla".

  I'm not really happy with this, but it came out of writing a relatable story about computers instead of (first draft) accurately recreating someone's boring retrocomputing weblog.

• This is probably obvious, but all the Constellation species have names taken from different human cultures' terms for "alien" or "outsider". Later on you'll see Gaijin, Inostransi, etc. Basically, I didn't want to come up with made-up names that you wouldn't remember. I tried pretty hard to get these right and to not use terms solely intended to offend, but if I screwed up, let me know and we can probably fix it in the paperback.

  After I wrote "Vanilla" I read a Steven Baxter book (one of the Manifold series) where humans discover but can't communicate with an alien species, and name them the Gaijin. Same idea.

  This convention was, of course, inspired by the Ferengi from Star Trek. When I was a kid I read in some behind-the-scenes book that the Ferengi were named from the Arabic "faranji". What? Who named them that, in-universe? Was it humans? Why did the Ferengi go along with it? It can't just be their name in English, because the name of their home planet is "Ferengenar". That naming convention doesn't make much sense for Star Trek Ferengi, but it could conceivably happen in a situation like the Constellation contact mission.

• The June 13 blog post is all that remains of a complete review I wrote of the Sun/Voice 2 RPG (first draft). I spent so much time coming up with that game's backstory, how the series was Sega's "edgy" response to the runaway success of Nintendo's Mother series. I was so sad to cut all that stuff out, but none of it matters. What matters is Ariel's increasing dissatisfaction with the status quo. And that's all I needed from the Sun/Voice 2 review. Lesson learned.
• If you buy the Adamantium Package, the USB key you'll get is a recreation of the "Constellation Shipping" USB key Curic drop-ships to Ariel at the end of this chapter. When selling a novel you send out the first three chapters, so I considered it absolutely vital that the third chapter end on this kind of cliffhanger.

That's plenty long for one week's worth of commentary. Tune in next week for chapter 4, when Jenny will say, "We're going to use as little alcohol as possible."

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