News You Can Bruise for 2012 June 19

Here it is: the weird chapter. The chapter that takes what was fairly realistic SF and does I don't know what to it. Why? Because, like Her, I despise being dull. I despise it enough to risk pulling a Battlestar Galactica and ruining the reader's experience of the entire book. Amazingly, the only major complaints I've gotten so far came from writing group in the second draft, saying that the emotional tone of what came before was never as powerful as this. But if you want to complain, you're welcome to do so.

As you may have gathered from the text, I don't like the idea that certain fictional characters "belong" together in a teleological sense, an assumption that underlies a lot of art and fandom. I think it's lazy character development and I think it encourages people to think that way about real life, where it's absolutely false.

On the other hand, fiction is teleological, and fictional characters are puppets. Declaring romantic destiny between two characters is no more difficult than saying how tall they are. You just have to be careful not to contradict your statement by the characters' words or actions.

"Explain why Ariel and Jenny aren't together" annoyed me, perhaps unfairly, because the need for an explanation reminded me of this assumption I dislike. I mentioned this earlier in commentary, and also mentioned that I'd decided to include an explanation if I could think of one that wasn't a cliche. This is what I came up with: the One True Pairing phenomenon is real, but it's a curse. Any two parties so affected are the Keymaster and Gatekeeper of a door that opens into stark, existential horror.

This was kind of inspired by a story idea (I don't remember if I came up with this or read it somewhere) where an intelligence augmentation technique is invented, but people who use it too much become listless and nihilistic because they can see the true nature of the universe unfiltered by the usual coping mechanisms. There's no plot there, which gives it the hallmarks of a story idea I came up with, but I'm not laying claim to it.

On the off chance that you are really really bothered by this shift in the rules of the book's universe, here's an easy out. Ariel is an unreliable narrator! He's writing this letter to distract Krakowski as much as to communicate with Jenny. So he exaggerated something that actually happened. What happens in "Found Objects" is compatible with either interpretation of Ariel's letter.

(But it totally happened the way Ariel says.)

• Speaking of teleology, what happens to Ariel when he goes to see Tammy is me directly punishing him for lying to her. The story could conceivably have gone differently, with a Ariel/Tammy reconciliation, but what Ariel says in his letter to Jenny makes that almost impossible dramatically.
• The final paragraph of Ariel's letter, the one that makes it clear he's about to lie to Tammy, didn't exist in the second draft. The whole story was ambiguous because you never got that straight answer from him. In the third draft I knew that his letter would end with that paragraph, and I added lots of stuff (Tammy's personal allowance monologue, chapter 27's deleted scene, "she threw up on you" in chapter 2, "I take the costume off" in 17) so this letter would fit the story and this paragraph would fit the letter. But then I wanted to chicken out at the last minute and not include that paragraph.

  Why? Because it's really mean to Ariel, given what happens immediately afterwards. But without that line, Ariel is being incredibly cruel to Jenny. So I included that line, and that was the last time I ever felt bad about being mean to Ariel.

• The other major change: in the second draft, Ariel caused existential nausea in Jenny but not vice versa. This did not work. There was no explanation for Ariel's superpower; it was clearly the hand of the author screwing him over. Plus, it made his letter to Jenny seem spiteful, like "Tammy can give me what you can't". I don't know when I came up with the idea that the effect should be mutual. Maybe around the time I got to Ariel's first trip into space. The OTP explanation, without which the scene still doesn't work, didn't come to me until I was rewriting the letter itself. But I must have known it subconsciously from the beginning.
• We're now at the point I can talk a little more about the symbolism of everyone having two names. (I mentioned this earlier, but for the record: Ashley/Somn, Tetsuo/whatever, Curic/Huric, Dana/Svetlana, Tammy/Miss Ion Specialist, Jun-Feng/Bai, and even Phillip/Moe.) Although Ariel doesn't have two names, throughout the book you've seen two of him: the "blog post" Ariel and the "real life" Ariel, each putting forth an account that contradicts the other.

  Which Ariel is real? That's like asking which Curic is real. Both Curics are real, and both Ariels are fake. The "real life sections", as much as the blog posts, are written by Ariel to convey a certain impression to you. What you read as "Jenny" is actually a story Ariel tells you about Jenny, and if you read "Found Objects" you'll see Jenny telling a different story.

  Jenny's unique in that she has an infinite number of names. She takes on new identities as a hobby. In the chapter 30 flashback, she and Ariel discover that "Jenny" and "Ariel" are themselves forms of cosplay, identities just as artificial as "Skewer Sue". This is the closest they'll come to realizing that they're fictional characters.

  (n.b. even Jenny's cosplay identity has two names--Ariel mistakes her Skewer Sue costume for a Taikan-Victory costume)

• The sonnet that begins part three is the one mentioned in chapter 26: "Mom herself was with Tetsuo in the living room, translating some kind of Pey Shkoy poetry into English." I'm no poet but I think it's not bad.

  

  The Long Way Around showed up in the Twitter feeds back in part one. It'll come up again, and Af be Hui herself will make an appearance, but the importance of this game to its creator and to Ariel is mostly being saved for a sequel. Suffice to say it's a Minecraft-like game about a man who gets fucked over by his government and dies alone on a strange planet. And if you like hunting around for clues, chapter 16 shows what the sonnet's last line refers to.

• Terraforming Mars is difficult because it has no real magnetic field. You can't just dump more atmosphere onto the planet; it'll boil off into space. So oxygenizing whatever carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere is a doubly bad strategy. I think we should just assume the FERNs are part of a multi-pronged terraforming plan, and not the whole thing. A terraforming plan brought to you by... Creative License.
• I have no idea in what sense "FERN" is an acronym for High-Dimensional Fractal Carbon Accumulator. I've given myself blanket permission to give lines to Gaijin characters without worrying too much about what they mean. Sort of like Mr. Jinx from Starslip. (Actually, there's a lot of Mr. Jinx in This Guy Loves Salt!, the ur-Gaijin from "Vanilla", and thus in all male Gaijin.)
• Every chapter between now and the end of the book will have some largeish revelation and/or emotional smackdown. As I mentioned in the first spoiler thread, reading the paperback was probably better for Part Two, which was a slow burn. But at this point readers who are still waiting a week between chapters are probably in a better position to digest the story.

The train we call Part Three is just getting started on its rampage down the track. Destination: the end of the book. Don't miss next week's installment, when Ariel will say, "Your gender-neutral use of 'men' isn't nearly as endearing as you think it is."

Image credits: Flickr user frostnova, NASA, Alan Shepard.

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