News You Can Bruise

As a fan of high-quality 2012 releases, I'm sure you also enjoy Subset Games' FTL, a death-in-space simulator that inspired certain bits of Situation Normal. Now I'm closing the circle with an fanfic called Try, Try Again, where I used the gallows-humor style of Situation Normal to tell a story in the FTL universe.

Wherever you find yourself today, I wish you a happy new year, and happy reading and writing!

Two excellent tabletop games stick in my mind: the thrilling Pandemic Legacy, about which much has been said elsewhere; and the unassuming Stinker, which once you play it is revealed as an absolute marvel. Stinker cleverly fixes all the problems, large and small, with "spell-something" games and "one-person-judges-everyone-else" games and "come-up-with-something-funny" games. It's not as surefire a hit as Snake Oil, but I love it and it's usually a hit when I introduce it to new players. Stinker is the Crummy.com Board Game of the Year.

Three years ago I closed the book on non-tactical RPGs and declared Mother 3 the all-time winner. Well, now I gotta re-open that book because Undertale improves on the formula. It's clearly based on the Mother series, but it has a solid new combat mechanic, a lot of memorable characters, and a type of humor I like better than the humor in the Mother series (which I do like, quite a bit). I really disliked the climax of Undertale, but a lot of Mother 3 was rambling and unfocused, so it kind of cancels out. Undertale overcomes my prejudices to become Crummy.com Computer Game of the Year.

Runner-up is Duskers, the space exploration game which combines survival horror with system administration. Your typing speed can make the difference! Super creepy, but feels a bit unfinished.

Other computer games I enjoyed a lot in 2016: Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, RimWorld, Beglitched, Brogue, Caves of Qud, Sunless Sea, and XCom: Enemy Unknown.

I practiced reading the review and also practiced another scene: Ariel's first conversation with Smoke from Chapter 2. No one suggested that scene, but it's one of the last scenes I wrote, so I personally haven't read it a million times and gotten tired of it. I abandoned this idea after a test reading because it's really hard to do a dramatic reading of a chat log, especially when most of the characters have insanely long names. So, Pôneis Brilhantes it was.

However, shortly before the reading I learned that Anne and I were each going to be reading two excerpts! Uh-oh. On the spur of the moment I chose to read a scene I had never practiced and that only one person (Adam) had suggested: the scene from Chapter 11 where Ariel meets Tetsuo and Ashley and they go visit the moon.

That scene has three good points: a) it introduces Tetsuo, increasing the chance that the Pôneis Brilhantes scene would land; b) it's full of the most gratuitous nerd wish-fulfillment I could write; c) it ends strongly with the call from Ariel's mother, which unlike a chat log is very easy to read because it's a Bob Newhart routine where you only hear one side of the phone call.

This was a really good idea. People loved the moon scene, even though my unpracticed reading stumbled and ran too quick. But when I read the Pôneis Brilhantes scene, it wasn't such a great hit! The room wasn't really with me. That's the scene I had practiced, and I think it's the funniest, most incisive thing in the whole book. Not a big hit! I think if I'd only read that scene I wouldn't have sold many books that night.

So, thank goodness for the moon scene, is all I can say. But what was going on? How had I misjudged my audience so badly? Sumana said she'd read Pôneis Brilhantes and gotten big laughs.

I think you have to be a very specific kind of computer geek to find Tetsuo's Pôneis Brilhantes review funny as a review of a video game, rather than as an expression of the personality you've just spent seven chapters with. That's the kind of geek that Sumana and I habitually hang out with, but it's not representative of the SF-reading population as a whole. I think that computer-geek population hosts a lot of the readers who wish that the second half of Constellation Games was more like the first half. Whereas someone who really digs the moon scene is more likely to stay with me the whole book.

I guess you could say the moon scene is just more commercial. And I guess I subconsciously knew this, because my current project gets more of its humor from the plot-driven character interaction found in the moon scene, and less from high concept Pôneis Brilhantes-style set pieces.

And for people who discover Constellation Games based on this bundle, this is my occasional notification that there are tons of free extras: four bonus stories, in-character Twitter feeds, and an episode guide with commentary.

Side note: the bundle was assembled by Simon Carless, who is the reason I wrote Constellation Games in the first place.

"Bugs," said Krakowski. "In-tell-i-gence gathering devices. The Constellation loves recording things. Now they're going to record every conversation anyone ever has."

"I think you might be projecting a little."

You might also be interested to know that you get a DRM-free PDF version of the novel by buying direct from the publisher.

Now would also be a great time to mention that Constellation Games is eligible for this year's Hugo.

One thing the published interview doesn't include is a question about Tetsuo Milk, which Jeanne cut before submitting the interview because it was kind of inside-baseball. But hey, inside baseball is the whole point of News You Can Bruise, so with Jeanne's permission I've reproduced the original question and my answer here:

I would feel remiss in not asking you about Tetsuo Milk, a character whom you’ve said (in your really, really mind-blowingly extensive commentary on the novel) essentially ran away with the book. Tetsuo is a brilliant character, but also feels at times like a heterogeneous element. I like this effect a lot, but I’m curious as to where this guy came from, what you’re saying through him, and how you see him fitting into the overall mix.

Maybe this will help: Tetsuo Milk is the ET version of Ariel. His silly mistakes and misunderstandings are mirror images of the mistakes Ariel makes trying to understand the Constellation. We don't laugh because we're not the ones being misunderstood. When Tetsuo does it to us, it's funny.

Here's a spoiler-free example. One of Ariel's post-contact hobbies is posting reviews of alien computer games to his blog. There's one really important scene that reverses the roles: Tetsuo writes a review of a game Ariel worked on as a developer, Brilhantes Poneis 5. Brilhantes is a stupid Farmville-type mobile game where you have a pet pony and do pointless tasks to earn coins to buy accessories for it. Tetsuo tackles the game from a post-scarcity Marxist perspective, putting a lot of work into understanding how a game's economy can work when the player is the employee of an animal. He gets a lot of it right (i.e. he recognizes that the game demeans both its players and its developers), but he's operating from completely the wrong framework.

That's the kind of mistake Ariel makes. He brings his human assumptions to everything, whether he realizes it or not, whether or not Tetsuo or someone else calls him on it.

(This is why there's a reference to "Tetsuo-like ideas" later in the interview; we shoulda cut that reference.)

But it turns out there's not much money in nickel-and-diming you (specifically, there's about $0.15), so we've agreed to make all four stories available under the CC-BY-SA Creative Commons license. That's about seventeen thousand words of free fiction: the post-scarcity family drama of "The Time Somn Died", the foul-mouthed artistic angst of "Found Objects", the headshot violence of "Dana no Chousen", and the bubble-pipe erudition of "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans".

The catch is that the stories contain spoilers for Constellation Games, and won't really make sense unless you read the novel first. And the novel still costs $5. At least, that's the pro forma warning I feel like I need to give you. But I remember when I was a kid and I discovered that the Arvin Public Library had the third book of the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy but not the first two. I had no idea what was going on, who these characters were or why they were stranded in caveman times, but I devoured Life, the Universe, and Everything, reading it multiple times, and the lack of knowledge as to what was going on just made me determined to get a ride to the library in Bakersfield where I could check out the books that would explain it.

So... go ahead and read the stories first, if that's your thing. I think they might pique your curiosity. And remember that you can also read the first two chapters of Constellation Games online.

PS: if you order Constellation Games from the publisher you'll now get PDF copies of the bonus stories along with the ebook.

My writing group met on Monday evening; we had dinner afterwards, and the topic of the Constellation Games bonus material came up. The relationship between the bonus stories and the writing group is a little weird. The point of the writing group is to make stories saleable, and the bonus material was pre-sold, so after getting some good advice for "Dana no Chousen" and a "looks fine" for "Found Objects" I didn't even workshop "The Time Somn Died" or "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans".

And when talking with the group over dinner I got an impression I've also gotten elsewhere, that people don't really know what to do with "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans". That it's a worldbuilding document thrown in for completionists, like the Star Trek Technical Manual. I feel like I'm starting this commentary from a position of weakness, needing to justify the existence of "Humans" in the first place.

Looking through "Humans" now I think I repeated the mistake I made in the first draft of Constellation Games. I focused too much on creating a realistic in-world artifact, and not enough on the sleight-of-hand necessary to make a constructed narrative look like an in-world artifact. I even did this deliberately, because I had a fixed idea that all the "bonus stories" would be from the POV of the novel's women characters.

Unlike Ariel's boring first-draft blog, though, "Humans" is at least fun to read on its own. And although it doesn't tell a story, it comes from a story I could have told: the story of why Tetsuo left his wife and children on the space station to come to Earth.

Tetsuo really loves the Ip Shkoy. His love is not returned—if he lived in Ip Shkoy times they'd treat him as a second-class citizen—but we can't always choose our obsessions. Tetsuo didn't fit in at home, so he joined the contact mission the way an aimless American might join the Peace Corps, hoping to "do" some unspecified "good".

In terms of finding "good" to "do", Tetsuo hit the jackpot. Not only is his the very rare contact mission that finds a live civilization, but the new species they discover is physiologically similar to his own. They can pronounce the same sounds and operate the same computers. (As Adam points out below, the whole narrative of Constellation Games is based on this anthropic coincidence.) Even better, Tetsuo's one of a handful of experts on the Ip Shkoy, a culture that looks to be kinda translatable to the dominant culture on this planet.

Except this culture is doomed, just like the Ip Shkoy were doomed, just like all cultures based on the manipulation of scarcity are doomed. After leaving home Tetsuo met Somn, the first woman he's ever wanted to have children with, but while that was happening he saw the first wave of contact experts come to Earth and point out "hey, you guys are kinda doomed," and that didn't seem to help at all.

So Tetsuo leaves, again. He goes to Earth and makes a plea on behalf of the Ip Shkoy, the same plea Ariel makes to the future on behalf of humanity: play our games and read our stories. Humanity doesn't need lectures from the Constellation, any more than an alcoholic needs a temperance sermon. Humanity needs a sponsor: strength from someone else trying to beat the rap. And that's why Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans. Tetsuo's writing a work of science nonfiction, using space aliens to hold up a mirror to human culture.

Origins

Ever since Kate first raised the idea of bonus material, I wanted to collaborate with Adam on something. Since Adam and I have both written interactive fiction, my original idea was a project Adam called "the textuo adventure": an educational game written by Tetsuo to teach you, the visitor from Ring City, how to get through US Customs and Immigration without causing a diplomatic incident. I would write the prose and Adam would do the programming.

This didn't happen because the worldbuilding problems from "The Time Somn Died" come back and they're five times worse. Although "Somn" is written from a Constellation POV, there's no infrafictional audience, and the actual intended audience (you folks) is human. In the textuo adventure, the infrafictional audience would be Constellation, meaning that you, the actual audience, would be put into ET shoe-equivalents.

The main idea I had for conveying this feeling was to implement NPCs not only for the people present in the room with you, but for the organizations and overlays they belong to. So if a BEA agent was in the room, the BEA itself would also be in the room, and you could talk to the BEA through its human agent. This idea was inspired by Curic's "K'chua!" interaction with the customs official, and I like it a lot, but it would mean creating tons of NPCs for a supposedly simple game with only three or four characters.

While I agonized over this we did the cover design, and I asked Adam to come up with some Pey Shkoy characters for the fictional computer. That's when I remembered that if there's one thing Adam loves more than programming interactive fiction, it's making up fake languages. So I replaced the IF project with something simpler (for me): I asked Adam to turn the fragments of Pey Shkoy found in the novel into a coherent language. I gave him permission to add any weird features he wanted to the language, and I specifically asked him to do things with Pey Shkoy that are not done in any human language.

Adam delivered! But I'll let him explain exactly what he delivered, after I go through "Humans" and write a couple miscellaneous comments:

• The original title was "Pey Shkoy For Humans", but when Adam translated that title into Pey Shkoy he got "uiksel pey shkoy a hiyuban", which literally means "benefit (from) Pey Shkoy (accrues to) humans", or "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans". That seemed very Tetsuo-esque on its own, so I changed the title.
• Ever since I invented the Ip Shkoy for Constellation Games I had the idea that historical Alien societies were dominated by their women. I didn't want to make a huge deal of this, so in the novel I only used it in subtle ways. We learn about two famous Ip Shkoy women (Af be Hui and Ev luie Aka) and one nonentity man (Dieue). In *'s porno scene, the woman is literally on top. Even in modern times, Somn is physically larger than Tetsuo and I generally portrayed her as tougher.

  But enough of subtlety! For "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans" I wanted to really bring this out, to show the weirdness of Tetsuo's nostalgia for the old days. So I wrote all this Ip Shkoy sexism into the first draft of "Humans", including the totally onerous gendered registers, and then brought it up to my editor, who... hadn't noticed. Despite my OBVIOUS HINTS, she thought of the Ip Shkoy as an egalitarian or even male-dominated culture. So, enough of subtlety again! Tetsuo wrote a section about how horrible things were back in the day.

  The one countervailing detail to all this is Ariel's conception of young Af be Hui as a "booth babe" whose job was to wear a "sexy outfit". This is Ariel projecting his own culture onto the Ip Shkoy. Af be Hui was the equivalent of a Best Buy sales associate, and what he considers a "sexy outfit", Aliens would consider an "outfit". As Somn demonstrates in Chapter 14, even Alien spacesuits are sexy.

• When reading the tor.com review of Spock's World, probably my favorite Star Trek tie-in novel, I realized/decided that the Ip Shkoy had been inspired by Diane Duane's depictions of the early Vulcans as bloodthirsty creeps. (Or something like that--haven't read the book for a while.)
• The timeline of this pamphlet is six months to a year after Constellation Games. I don't think this matters much, but there you go. That ties into my next comment:
• Despite his general hatred of fake replicas, Tetsuo was willing to settle for fake replicas of the childrens' computers, so that his kids wouldn't get electrocuted by shoddy Ip Shkoy electronics. The paragraph that mentions this also implies that he has seen his children by this point.
• Tetsuo's sample American names are all women he knows from Constellation Games. The one you might not remember is Linda, who is Ariel's mom.
• "Take me to the top level of your hierarchy" is of course how someone from the Constellation would interpret the stereotypical alien greeting, "Take me to your leader."
• And we end on a Monty Python reference. Classy!

A final note from me: if you have the Constellation Games trade paperback, you'll see some Chospe writing on the back cover, near the UPC code. This isn't Pey Shkoy; it's transliterated English. If you transliterate the text according to the rules laid out in "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans", you'll get a silly joke. I will eventually post the transliteration in an update, but give it a try on your own.

Now, I'll hand over the mic to Adam Parrish, who will commentate the process of turning the individual Pey Shkoy words in the novel into a coherent, maximally weird language.

Introduction

Hi, I'm Adam. I'm a computer programmer, sci-fi fan and amateur (con-)linguist. Leonard approached me a little over a year ago to help him create a few phrases in Pey Shkoy. I had already read a draft of the novel by then, and I adored it—so of course I agreed. Who could turn down the opportunity to put words into the mouth of a character like Tetsuo Milk? Eventually, Leonard decided that a few phrases weren't enough, and that he'd like to produce an entire Pey Shkoy guide and phrasebook as a bonus reward for early Constellation Games adopters. My role was to supply the language design; Leonard did the hard work of rephrasing this as Tetsuo-ese. After a few collaborative work sessions and a few months of elbow grease, we were able to put together the document that many of you now have in your possession: Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans.

My goal in this commentary is to show how our collaborative process worked, and to show a few details about the language that didn't make it into the final document.

Adventures in alien physiology

The very first part of the process was to figure out what Pey Shkoy sounds like. Is the Alien vocal tract even vaguely similar to the human vocal tract? The only reference to the way that Alien speech sounds like in the book is when Ariel describes Tetsuo as "twist[ing] some vowels into balloon animals," which is a vivid description but doesn't help much from a linguistic point of view. I ended up having some unusual e-mail conversations with Leonard about Alien physiology, like:

Me: do aliens have lips? a lot of words in the corpus have "p," "v," "f,"
    "b"---which I assume would only be used to describe sounds made by blocking
    the airflow coming from the mouth entirely with something other than the
    tongue. so, by lips I mean: fleshy bits at the front of the mouth that can
    connect to form a seal.

Leonard: Yeah, they got lips.

I spent a good deal of time imagining how Aliens might produce and perceive vowels. I considered a system wherein Aliens (being lizard-like in some respects), have two syringes at the base of their bronchioles that produce tones at different frequencies, the interval between which determining the identity of the vowel. Leonard's response to this idea was "I don't understand any of this, but you're awesome."

I interpreted this lack of enthusiasm as a sign that I might be overthinking things.

Eventually I just decided to go with the flow and accept that Alien languages and human languages are (by some bizarre cosmic coincidence) remarkably similar, owing to the two species' similarities in physiology and cognition. (Arguably, it's this coincidence that makes the novel's story, or at least the strong relationship between Ariel and Tetsuo, even possible. Let's call it the anthropic principle of sci-fi linguistics.) Accepting this fact made designing the rest of the language much easier, since I could rely on tried-and-true human linguistics to do my job.

Sounds

With this in mind, I was able to make the assumption that the letters used in the transcriptions of Pey Shkoy words found in Constellation Games must represent analogous human language sounds. I tried to come up with the simplest possible phonemic system for Pey Shkoy that could account for everything present in the "corpus"—by which I mean the Pey Shkoy phrases and names that occur in the novel. (If you're wondering why Pey Shkoy doesn't have a bilabial nasal, this is the reason: "m" doesn't occur in any canonical Pey Shkoy words!)

Here's the phonemic system I came up with: Pey Shkoy has five vowels and eighteen consonants. There appears to be a voiced/voiceless distinction with stops and fricatives (p, t, k vs. b, d, g, etc.). Pey Shkoy doesn't have any allophony or morphophonemic processes significant enough to be reflected in orthography. (This is because, intrafictionally, Pey Shkoy is a highly regularized and simplified language used mainly in government documents, education, and commerce, along the lines of Bahasa Indonesia.)

The only really unusual sound in Pey Shkoy is the "dental chafe," represented by the character '. I had originally suggested to Leonard that the language have what human linguists call a "bidental percussive," or the sound of hitting your teeth together. I explained this to Leonard:

Me: the bidental percussive is the sound your mouth makes when you bang your
    teeth together. it's a perfectly valid way of making sound with your mouth,
    but for whatever reason it's not used by any human language. I thought it
    might be a fun addition to pey shkoy for that reason.

Leonard: This is a good idea but it should be modified as Aliens don't have
         teeth. How about a sound for scraping the oral ridges against each
         other?

... which was fine with me.

Chospe

With the questions of physiology and phonology handled, I was ready to design the writing system. The writing system is a syllabary along the lines of katakana, in which every syllabic nucleus has its own symbol and syllabic onsets/codas are indicated with diacritics. The Chospe glyphs you see in the guide are in the "idealized" form you might see in a textbook, or in a typeface designed to ease OCR. The cover of Constellation Games shows what the forms might look like with a bit more typographic imagination.

I had a lot of fun designing the glyphs. The idea was to create something that is plausible as an everyday writing system, but that nevertheless feels a little bit alien and off-kilter. The idea that Chospe letterforms were "burn[ed] into thin sheets of cma" occurred to Leonard after he saw my initial draft of the writing system, and I think it's a pretty cool idea.

Shortly after I finished designing the writing system, Leonard asked me if it had a name, and I suggested "Dr. Nif's Litigation-Free Language Symbols." Leonard tugged on this idea a bit and came up with the (hilarious, and now canonical) idea that the Ip Shkoy used the writing system of a conquered people because no one was willing to pay anyone else's license fees for existing writing systems.

Registers

"Register" is the technical term for how language is spoken in specific contexts—for example, "formal" language and "informal" language. Pey Shkoy's register system is unusual in that it only affects the words that speakers use, not the grammar or phonology. In this way, Pey Shkoy's system of gendered registers is more similar to the concept of a mother-in-law language, an elaborate system of taboo words and lexical replacement found most famously in Australian Aboriginal languages like Dyirbal.

My original idea was that Pey Shkoy would have two registers, formal and informal. Leonard liked the idea of registers with distinct lexicons, but suggested that they be based on the more sophisticated gender constraints you see in the final version. This lines up well with the existing facts about Ip Shkoy society. I designed the language in the Dasupey register, and only later came up with translations for the other registers as needed.

(As a side note: "How was your inspection of the sewer system?/It was grate!" is my now my favorite joke ever. Thanks, Tetsuo!)

On prepositions

Tetsuo's explanation of how Pey Shkoy's prepositions work is fine as simplified explanation for the layman, [gee, thanks—LR] but I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the linguistics behind the system. (Experts will forgive me if I get some of the terminology wrong in this section. It's been a long time since undergrad.)

Talking about Pey Shkoy's "prepositions" is a simplified way of getting at the real story, which is that Pey Shkoy doesn't exhibit any systematic relationships, across verbs, between grammatical roles and thematic relations. I've been toying with this idea for a long time, and Pey Shkoy seemed like as good a time as any to try to put it into an actual constructed language.

Relations and roles

So what are thematic relations and grammatical roles? Let's look at the sentence I like cheese. The verb "to like" requires two nouns—the person doing the liking (the experiencer), and the thing that that person likes (the theme). (We might say that "to like" has two semantic "arguments," in the same way that a function in a programming language might have two arguments.) In English, we make the experiencer the grammatical subject of the sentence, and the theme the grammatical object of the sentence: I (subject) like cheese (object). Experiencer and theme are terms for thematic relations; subject and object are the grammatical roles.

Now, not all languages use the same grammatical roles to express these same thematic relations. The Spanish equivalent of the sentence above is Me gusta el queso. When you use the verb gustar, the experiencer is the indirect object of the verb, and the theme is the subject: Me (indirect object) gusta el queso (subject). (Note that even though "queso" follows the verb, it's still grammatically the subject of the sentence---the subject/verb agreement on "gusta" is third person, not first person.)

Usually, languages tend to use the same grammatical role to express verb arguments with similar semantics, across all verbs. For example, in English, agents are usually subjects of verbs, and patients are usually objects (which is why we say I hugged John and I cooked fish, not, e.g., John hugged to me or It cooked me to fish). There's tremendous variation among human languages in how they map thematic relations to grammatical roles. One of the most difficult tasks in learning a language is figuring out the patterns (and exceptions) in these mappings.

If you're feeling particularly Sapir-Whorfian, you might make psychological conclusions about the speakers of a language based on the way that the language maps thematic relations to grammatical roles. Take the two sentences "John despises circus clowns" and "John stabs circus clowns." John's thematic relation to the verbs is very different in these two sentences (an experiencer in the former; an agent in the latter); yet English expresses both relations with the same grammatical role. Does this mean that English speakers are more prone than speakers of other languages to turn their dislikes into violence? That's for the philosophers and pop-sci journalists to determine, I guess.

Lojban and Pey Shkoy compared

Artificial languages take different approaches to the relationship of thematic relation to grammatical role. Lojban, in particular, takes an extreme approach wherein every verb has a number of positional arguments (again, like a function in a programming language), whose meanings you have to learn along with the verb. The Lojban verb tavla (glossed as "talk"), for example, is listed like so in the dictionary:

tavla: x1 talks/speaks to x2 about subject x3 in language x4

The x terms refer to where the corresponding argument is placed in relationship to the verb. The x1 position occurs directly before the verb; the others (x2, x3, etc.) occur after the verb, in order. To illustrate, here's tavla used in a sentence:

Lojban:         mi tavla do la lojban. la gliban.
Word-for-word:  I(x1) talk you(x2) lojban(x3) English(x4)
English:        I talk to you about Lojban in English.

(Here's a better introduction to Lojban positional arguments from this Lojban Textbook on Wikibooks.)

Lojban makes an effort to make the positional arguments correspond more or less with existing expectations about the semantics of the verb. It makes sense for the speaker to be the first positional argument, the interlocutor to be the second position argument, and so forth—since that corresponds, in the estimation of the designers of Lojban at least, to how most humans think.

In Pey Shkoy, however, no effort has been made to align argument order with human social or cognitive expectations. The relationship between the order of the verb's arguments and the meaning of that order is, in fact, always arbitrary. As a quick example, the closest verb to "talk" in Pey Shkoy is chan. Here's the dictionary entry:

_chan_ be the audience, speak on a topic
  ∅: those addressed
  a: the topic of the speech
  be: the speaker

This dictionary entry gives the basic meaning of the verb, along with a description of which semantic role goes with which preposition. Here's an example sentence (Pey Shkoy is verb-initial):

Pey Shkoy:      chan upa a shtay be adam
Word-for-word:  speak I/me prep-a tongue prep-be adam
English:        Adam speaks to me about a tongue.

Another entry in the Pey Shkoy dictionary:

_iaf_ be located at, stand
  ∅: the thing in a place
  ioh: the place

... and in a sentence:

Pey Shkoy:      iaf upa ioh shiw
Word-for-word:  stand I/me prep-ioh cma
English:        I am at a tree (cma).

(Reminder: cma is a Purchtrin word, not a Pey Shkoy word.) As you can see, the roles in the verb chan are nothing like the roles in the verb iaf. (In fact, the verbs use almost entirely different subsets of the five possible prepositions.) It's like this across the board: every verb uses the prepositions in its own unique way.

The aftermath

Whenever I needed to invent a new verb in Pey Shkoy, I looked up similar verbs in the Lojban dictionary, FrameNet (an excellent resource for English verbs and their associated thematic roles), and even poked around Wiktionary to make sure I wasn't getting stuck in an English-centric mindset. Once I figured out what the "arguments" of the verb were, I assigned them to prepositions, either by a chance procedure (rolling dice), or by intuition.

The main effect of this scrambled relationship of grammatical role to thematic relation is that Pey Shkoy—even for me, the guy who made it up—is really difficult to think in. Existing cognitive frames were turned topsy-turvy; sentences never quite fit together in comfortable ways. It's one of the features of Pey Shkoy that makes it feel, well, alien. (Or should I say... Alien.) [[Takes off sunglasses]—LR]

Other grammar notes

A few other quick notes on Pey Shkoy grammar:

• Pey Shkoy is verb-initial (as noted above). The verb always comes at the beginning of the sentence or clause.
• Pey Shkoy really has only three parts of speech: verbs, nouns, and particles. Particles include the five prepositions (∅, a, be, ioh, ksey) and a handful of determiners (like eshi "this"). Most nouns in Pey Shkoy are formed from verbs through a series of nominalization affixes (e.g., peiu "cut" becomes peiuu "knife"), but a small number are atomically nominal, such as shtay "tongue."
• Pey Shkoy doesn't have conjunctions of any kind, opting instead for verbs with coordinating meanings that take clauses as arguments, such as ektie "do something until."
• Pey Shkoy has a large category of verb suffixes that carry a wide range of meanings, including modality, mirativity, manner, degree, etc. A few of my favorites: -tiuk "sexually"; -shoy "in a manner that contravenes the expectations of the speaker"; -ktok "tragically."
• Pey Shkoy doesn't have a closed set of pronouns. Speakers instead use (sometimes elaborate) circumlocutions, such as chanan uippee eteii "my esteemed audience" (for plural "you") or up yatata "this individual" (for "me"). There are, however, verbs that translate as "to belong to me" and "to belong to you": uip and tep, respectively.

Ironically, the part of Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans that took the longest—the translations—takes up the least amount of space in the actual document. I offer here in the commentary a few interlinear translations, showing the underlying grammatical structure of the Pey Shkoy phrases. (Some of these are from the phrasebook, some were intended as book cover copy, and some are from Tetsuo's Twitter feed.)

"Warning: This device will catch on fire if you look at it funny." [A classic example of shveil.—LR]

Pey Shkoy:      siukuy kefef be eshi chawa ioh chkekeshoy
Word-for-word:	happen-warning ignite-NOM prep(be) this device-this prep(ioh)
                  observed-NOM-unexpected
Literally:      this device's igniting happens (WARNING!)
                  under-the-circumstances-of being unexpectedly-observed

"You look even more beautiful in ultraviolet light."

Pey Shkoy:      siu uineetiukpefkiur ksey uippee shiefiui ioh ufuoo ioh shpape
Word-for-word:  happen attractive-NOM-sexually-looks-surpassing prep(ksey)
                  belong.to.me-NOM-NOM quiet.speech.interloc-NOM prep(ioh)
                  light-NOM prep(ioh) violet-NOM
Literally:      your seeming more sexually attractive happens (when) you
                  (my quiet speech interlocutor) [are] being lit ultraviolet

"You get to keep your blade."

Pey Shkoy:      iten tepeploh a peiuu
Word-for-word:  permit belong.to.you-NOM-continuing prep(a) knife
Literally:      (it) permits the continuing belonging-to-you of the blade

"Eat before using."

Pey Shkoy:      tepep foii a voiee be alauu
Word-for-word:  belonging-to-you.NOM before.NOM x1 eat.NOM x2 use.NOM
Literally:      your beforing eating (this) to using (this)

Back to Leonard

Thanks, Adam. With this, I declare the Constellation Games commentary series complete! I have a little more to say about the series itself, and a couple overall notes on the novel writing process, but that stuff is so self-indulgent I think I'm just going to post it as a separate entry, not as part of this educational series.

Image credits: U.S. War Department, Huw Williams, Chris Sobolowski, Wikimedia Commons user NJGJ, A.E. Shipley, Wikimedia Commons user dozenist, Wikimedia Commons user Robbiemuffin, NASA.

← "Dana no Chousen"

And I'm less interested in Dana's source material than in Dana herself. There are a lot of unanswered questions and just plain plot holes in Constellation Games, but the only ones that still bother me have to do with Dana. As Brendan points out, Dana gets a really raw deal in the book—not just from humanity but from the Constellation. Why did Curic agree to uplift Dana in the first place? It seems like asking for trouble. Why did Smoke agree to send one of its subminds to be a human's girlfriend? And why does Dana never come out of the sandbox at the end of chapter 35?

I tried out a number of explanations: 1) Hypotheses about the behavior of fictional alien anarchists cannot be tested. 2) Back before the Greenland Treaty was a sure thing, Dana 2.0 looked like a good opportunity to land a spy on Earth. I did not like these explanations. The explanation I used for background in "Dana no Chousen" is that Dana is caught between different conceptions of identity.

Daniel Dennett's multiple-drafts theory of consciousness suggests that human minds, like Dana's and Curic's and Smoke's, are made up of subminds. Human psychology makes the simplifying assumption that the subminds add up to a single "person". But Curic and Smoke accept persons as the emergent properties of other, smaller persons.

To Ariel, splitting Dana out of Smoke feels like creating a new person. But as far as Smoke and Curic are concerned, that person already existed within Smoke. When Curic looks back on this, she's going to think her big screwup was trusting the human socialization of Smoke-Dana to a couple of videogame-obsessed flakes like Bai and Ariel.

(This is hard to square with Curic's guilt-trip of Ariel in chapter 9, the first time he asks for an Edink-English translator. I wrote that section very early, and I should have come back and revised it after adding Smoke to the story. But I think the problem is a lot smaller if you read Curic as suggesting the creation of a brand new AI for purposes of the guilt trip. Sometimes when we don't want to be bothered we exaggerate how much work it really would be to do something.)

A person can function even if some of its subminds are unhappy or psychotic. Sometimes an unhappy or psychotic submind can even help the larger mind get something done or come up with new ideas. But an unhappy submind of Smoke might be as big as a human, or bigger. Should you worry about that?

Curic doesn't worry because she doesn't believe Smoke-Dana is all that big. Smoke will worry if it feels a problem, but Smoke is the size of a society. It doesn't have the computing power to police the happiness of its entire tree. But Ariel, uh, knows Dana. And Ariel can't let this go. A person went in there and didn't come out.

So Ariel puts on his pith helmet and goes into Smoke with his human outlook and his human standards of morality, and it turns out there's a problem with the sandbox. Dana found a way to game the system without her supermind finding out. Ariel goes in and rescues Dana from her own cruelty and Smoke's complicity. A happy ending! By human standards.

• Yeah, for the record, Jack Stout is Ariel, not Bai. Among other things, Jack quotes Curic on sentience, and says "un-be-fucking-lievable", which Ariel says in chapter 22 of CG. To me the real tip-off is "seduced by a fucking spreadsheet." But I didn't decide this 100% until writing the "someone who fixes software" line at the end of the first draft.
• The title is a reference (and the story itself a tribute) to the Japanese workplace satire Game Center CX. In a segment called "Arino no Chousen", comedian Shinya Arino is required to play old video games for up to sixteen hours at a stretch, racking up hundreds of in-game deaths to meet a pointless goal through sheer determination. I consider GCCX a workplace satire because of the way Arino acts like a terrible boss to his more skilled underlings, and because of the clear implication that office work in general is no different from "Arino no Chousen".

  Tangent: the segment is called "Arino no Chousen", but the GCCX DS video game is called Arino no Chousenjou. "Arino no Chousen" itself is a reference to the first game so challenged, Beat Takeshi's infamous Takeshi no Chousenjou. What's the difference between "Chousen" and "Chousenjou"? With the Portuguese stuff like Pôneis Brilhantes I was able to run my machine translations past a native speaker, but no such luck here.

  At the time, Google Translate translated 挑戦状 as the meaningless "letter of defiance". There's a GCCX where Arino, having clearly tried the opposite translation, says that the English name of his game is "Arino Challenge Paper." But now Google Translate translates 挑戦状 as "challenge", "letter of challenge", or "gauntlet." I'm pretty sure "Arino no Chousen" means "The challenge Arino undergoes" whereas "Arino no Chousenjou" means "The challenge Arino issues to you". Thus, "Dana no Chousen" is the correct title. I think.

• For obvious reasons, I use light as a symbolic mood-setter throughout the story, but it's not light vs. darkness (which Ariel uses in CG); it's just different kinds of light. The sunset over the harbor and the melancholy pier were inspired by Ivan Cockrum's 1997 IF game Sunset over Savannah, which I haven't played since 1997, but which was clearly very effective.
• This is not a thing you're really supposed to notice, but it is the sort of thing I'm supposed to point out in commentary. This story shows most clearly my bonus-material technique of taking tons of details from the novel and recontextualizing them from the POV of a character whose POV we haven't seen before. In particular, look at Dana's subminds.

  The Dana-Marcos submind is more or less equivalent to the virtual girlfriend software we saw back in Chapter 7, a dumb simulation designed to "eat popcorn and follow directions." I was going to say I don't know where the name came from, but I just figured it out. That program wanted new accessories all the time, so I named the submind after Imelda Marcos.

  Dana-Svetlana is Dana 2.0, the uplifted version of Dana designed to "decipher dead languages", the one who could have been happy with Bai if Bai could have been happy with her. Dana-Svetlana is also Svetlana Sveta, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Ariel invented so he could talk about Dana 2.0 publicly.

  And this story's "Dana", the one who becomes Svetlana-Dana, is the cruel part of Dana's personality, the part modeled after the canonical Dana Light. This Dana first flares up in chapter 23 ("the fucking Cayman Islands computer program"). By chapter 34 canonical-Dana has taken over completely, and by the end of the novel she has consolidated control of the "Dana" personality from within the very environment designed to rehabilitate her.

• Finally, one more thing you're not supposed to notice, something I was reminded of when I mentioned the sunset earlier. The line "like living under two suns, one pale and weak" is a callback to chapter 29's "One bright distant star and a dim one that's really close". The bonus stories are full of these textual callbacks, and I haven't been listing them because I think you'd find that boring and I don't remember a lot of them anymore, but I hope they've proven effective on a subconscious level.

We're almost done! Come back in two days for the Leonard/Adam joint commentary on "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans," when Tetsuo will say, "Hot damn, it's business!"

"Dana no Chousen" banner by Brendan Adkins. Savannah photo by Scott Oves.

← "Found Objects" | "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans" →

If I'd thought of it earlier, I could have told the story you saw in Tetsuo's Twitter feed after Ariel left Earth. The story of Jenny and Tetsuo picking a fight with the Hierarchy Interface overlay by starting the EVERYTHING IN AUSTIN tour company. That story also takes place during Constellation Games, but involves characters that are almost entirely offscreen at the time. Whereas "Found Objects" has to weave between scenes dramatized in the novel.

The main goal of this story, the story I actually wrote, is to portray Jenny as significantly different from the way Ariel portrays her in the novel. Not just "careful meticulous Jenny", but kinda ruthless in ways her friends find scary. In Constellation Games Ariel is pretty unsparing about his own flaws, but generally careful to present the "beautiful practical Jenny" for posterity. But this does her a disservice. By excising Jenny's talent for creative obscenity, Ariel makes her a less interesting character and obscures their bizarre chemistry. And his attempt to "protect" Jenny from Bai's business offer is just a dick move.

The "ruthless" stuff is me retconning Jenny into a more interesting character, but I'd always imagined that she and Bizarro Kate were super raunchy when they were together, and there's no reason why she would tone that down around Ariel. So Ariel must be changing the story. In Constellation Games Jenny and Ariel tease and provoke each other in almost every scene they share, but Ariel files the edges off in narration. (Brendan has done a good job of pointing this out, but after you read "Found Objects" you might like to reread the first part of chapter 14.) Jenny gives it to you straight.

A few misc. comments:

• This story did force one change in the novel: the size and dimensions of the Brain Embryo's reentry foam. It was originally a cube three feet on a side; now it's an egg five feet long, more in keeping with the shape of the computer inside.
• The "abundance privilege" Jenny identifies in Curic is a trait I wrote into all the ET characters to some extent. Somn is horrified into inaction by the unthinkable poverty and coercion of Ariel's middle-class American lifestyle. Tetsuo thinks he understands humans because he studied a culture that was kinda similar. Curic starts off making basic mistakes about the nature of money (here and in chapter 8), mistakes that Tetsuo would never make. But Curic soon realizes that Ariel's dependence on scarcity-surrogate, and her ability to promise an alternative, makes him a perfect patsy.
• In the first draft Jenny imagined the crotch-mash maneuver but didn't actually perform it. In general, if you have a character imagine doing something that they could really do, it'll be a better story if they actually do it.
• Bizarro Kate was named long before I sold Constellation Games to a publisher run by a woman named Kate.

  Jenny calls her that because there's another Kate (Kateastrophe) in their circle of friends. Nothing is known about Kateastrophe other than her name. I never even considered her as a non-background character, and given that Bizarro Kate herself was almost entirely written out of Constellation Games when her boyfriend Bruce was merged into Bai, I'd say she did well not to get involved.

• Super minor point: I like the way this story rounds out Bai's character a little. He gets to be passionate about something other than Dana, and he shows he cares about Jenny in a way that Ariel doesn't, even though Jenny's not his friend. Of course, he's still a d-bag.

We're halfway through the bonus material! Be sure to tune in next Tuesday for the rescheduled commentary on "Dana no Chousen", when Dana will finally get her chance to say, "Americans cost extra."

"Protector of Earth" blueprint by Beth Lerman. Other image credit: Unknown 19th-centry land company.

← "The Time Somn Died" | "Dana no Chousen"

What? You don't love DRM? Boy, is my face red. Fortunately, now that the serialization is complete, you can also now buy a $5 unencumbered PDF at the publisher's website. Or buy the trade paperback from the publisher, and get the PDF for free.

You can't buy the bonus stories right now! They've gone into a Disney-like "vault" of artificial scarcity, as a way of increasing the social standing of those forward-thinking individuals who bought the bonuses as part of the serialization. They'll shuffle blinking out of the "vault" at the end of November. At that point you'll be able to buy the bonuses from Candlemark & Gleam, either on their own or along with the novel. And only then will the stuff I'm saying over the next couple weeks make sense.

That's the business stuff; now I want to toss out a topic to get the open thread started. There's a weird plot hole in the novel that I don't think anyone else has noticed. Way back in chapter 2, Jenny and Ariel are picnicking in the hills on the way to the landing site. They encounter a hippie who's been to the landing site and who's now heading back to Austin. He talks like he just decided to go check out the landing site. How the hell did he get there so quickly? He's on foot, and the site's fifteen miles out of town. Did he just happen to be taking an early morning stroll in the country? That's a really big coincidence.

This little discrepancy has nagged me for a while and I've got a variety of solutions. Some of them are boring, some are way too interesting. Want to give it a try? Leave a comment.

As Kate will attest, this is not the first time I've said one thing about the bonus stories and proceeded to do the exact opposite thing. To nip confusion in the bud, I've swapped "Dana" and "Somn" in the commentary list and we'll proceed.

In another shocking twist, I hereby announce that two of these bonus commentaries will feature brand-new art! Brendan Adkins, William F. Buckley-esque thorn in my side, will be drawing something for "Dana no Chousen". I can only hope Dana's boobs will be tastefully covered with a gun or something.

But today, I offer pencil art of Her's glider form and aquatic form, drawn by pop painter Beth Lerman, inspired by Ernst Haeckel's zoological illustrations and my own crappy sketches. Unfortunately, because I switched "Dana" and "Somn" in the commentary list, I asked Beth for her art on very short notice and she didn't have time to draw Her's vacuum form. Beth still plans to draw all three forms present in "The Time Somn Died", and I'll let you know when I get the finished drawing.

On Thursday I'll reuse Jenny's Twitter profile image (also drawn by Beth) for "Found Objects". I don't have anything planned for "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans"; maybe I'll draw some stick figures and blame them on Tetsuo. What I'm hinting at is, someone who can draw could get their art into this commentary series pretty easily. HINT.

One final note. Did you order bonus stories and never got them? Check the email that contains your compiled Constellation Games ebook. You never got that email? Then we got a problem; let me know. Let's begin:

"The Time Somn Died" is the story you got if you bought the cheap but not-too-cheap package. I decided to send you this one because I think it's the best of the three. This is a prequel to Constellation Games, the story of how Somn railroads herself into making the biggest mistake of her life. It's the missing left parenthesis to her letter to Tetsuo at the end of Constellation Games, in which she's coming to grips with the idea that she may not have made a mistake at all. She may have done the right thing for completely the wrong reason.

This story took a lot of inspiration from Iain M. Banks's Culture novels, which periodically show slices of life from a mannered post-scarcity civilization, slices of life which I find immensely dull. Reading those passages of Banks I truly understand what Douglas Adams meant by the long dark tea-time of the soul. I wanted to capture that uncomfortable feeling, to use it as setting, without actually instilling it in the reader.

This is tricky stuff. I knew I was playing with fire. But there was no other material to play with. I needed to convey that Somn has a tough time adapting to the contact mission because she's not a misfit. Unlike Tetsuo and Curic, she was perfectly at home in the Constellation. What gets Somn is a hidden nugget of greed that's never had a chance to come out: her desire to have a scarce experience, to be the first one to see something. She's pushed through the contact port by that little bit of greed and her family's pride in her smarts and her own damnfool stubbornness.

Tetsuo's version of this story would be like Ariel's story: the ennui would build up to a "screw you guys, I'm leaving" scene. Curic's story would be like Tammy's story: no time for ennui, just a lifetime of probably-pointless training that turns out not to be pointless after all. To make "Somn" anything other than a repeat of a story you've already seen, I had to show Somn soaking in the ennui but not consciously aware of it. And I couldn't have the in-story ennui instill real ennui in the reader.

The solution to both problems is pissy family drama.

"Somn" is nothing but a series of family arguments. Great thing too, because as I mentioned earlier, arguments are the best way to do exposition. I needed to show how the other-room works and how Slow People and fleshy people interact, so I wrote Somn's mothers reinstating Dad-Tessererre over Somn's objections. When Tessererre is reinstated, his character is immediately defined by his kvetching about the guys his wife and daughter hooked up with after he uploaded. I needed a lot of exposition from Her, the only character who understands what's going on, but infodumps are boring, so I wrote the bitchy antagonism between Her and the passive-aggressive Constellation Library.

I think it works great. I'm really proud of this story. For a work of short fiction I think it packs an immense emotional punch. Her's "tired of begging for mercy" speech gets me every time.

Before the miscellaneous commentary, I want to discuss the exciting issue of the units of measurement I made up for this story. I've never seen a clearer example of the tension between building a realistic alien world and evoking certain emotional responses in the human reader's mind. When I was just starting to write SF, I would have loved to see a detailed walkthrough of this sort of decision process. So here it is, in a special section I like to call "the time, the distance, and the mass":

I knew right off that using human units of measurement was out. There are no humans in this story. No one in the story even knows that humans exist. But in several places I needed to convey rough measurements, especially time scales, to human readers. I didn't want to make up fake names for the units, for the same reason I didn't want to spend Constellation Games calling the Aliens and Farang "kej" and "metrase". Every term you make up for a story takes up space in the reader's mind and makes it harder to read the story. So I presented all the measurements in the stories as estimates, as unitless powers of two.

My original concept was that the unnamed Constellation units were based on the Planck units. For mass, this worked out fine. One kilogram is about 2²⁵ Planck masses, so the 2³¹ mass mentioned in the first paragraph is about 64 kilograms. That fits the story. 2³¹ sounds like a lot, but not an astronomical number. It's about a gigabyte of mass. And that's the only measurement of mass in the story, so I went with the Planck unit for mass.

But if I define 2⁰ to be the Planck time, then one second is about 2¹¹⁶. That's a huge number! It's way outside your experience and mine. To human brains, 2¹¹⁶ doesn't look much smaller than 2¹³⁷. But that's the difference between a second and a year.

Problem #2: I wanted to use a negative exponent for the scene where Somn imagines Dad-Tessererre speeding up his consciousness faster and faster. This conveys the idea that post-upload Tessererre inhabits a completely different cognitive universe from pre-upload Tessererre. But if 2⁰ is the Planck time, negative exponents are impossible. Instead of going from 2⁰ to 2^-8, you're going from 2¹¹⁶ to 2¹⁰⁸, which doesn't seem like a big difference at all.

For a phrase like "the minds below 2⁰" to make sense, 2⁰ has to be concomitant with the speed at which Somn's brain (and yours) works. So I defined 2⁰ time as about a quarter of a second.

Now, if I wanted to be consistent I'd define 2⁰ distance to be either the Planck distance (so that one meter would be about 2¹⁵⁵), or the distance light travels in 2⁰ time (so that one meter would be about 2^-16). Neither of those is a good reader-scale number. The only distance measurement in the story is the diameter of the contact port, and as with the mass measurement in the first paragraph, the only thing that number needs to convey is "that sounds pretty big."

2¹⁵⁵ is way too big and way too precise. Somn wouldn't estimate any measurement that precisely, even though 2¹⁵⁴ is half the size of 2¹⁵⁵. And 2^-16 doesn't seem very big at all. So again, I calibrated the distance measurement according to a natural scale for someone as big as Somn. 2⁰ is about a quarter of a meter, giving the contact port a diameter of about 32 meters.

Of course, now I'm stuck with these units for any future Constellation stuff. But since I set the time and distance units to Somn-scale for story reasons, it should work out fine if I need to use them again for story reasons.

On Twitter last week Emile Snyder suggested using made-up abbreviations instead of leaving the numbers totally unitless, which would also have worked.

PS: If you go through my math above you'll probably find some conversion errors, and if you tell me about the errors I'll fix them, but I don't care all that much, since my point is that the numbers in the story are Somn's rough eyeball (eyespot?) estimates.

• As you can see from the foregoing, setting a story inside the Constellation was tough. The environment, the technology, the relationships between characters, and the issues at stake are completely foreign to the reader but very familiar to the characters. It's a good situation to start a novel in, but I don't think you can do it in a short story... unless the short story is a direct tie-in to a novel and you can assume everyone's read the novel first.

  Even then. I had to use basic expository tricks like having Somn begin the story alone, far away from people and technology, and drizzling in characters and concepts one at a time. You may recognize this trick from a ton of other science fiction stories.

• I use "boyfriend" in this story for Aei and Shlir's relationship to Somn. In Constellation Games Tetsuo introduces both Somn and Daisy as his "wife", and Somn's translator refers to the never-seen Esteban as Somn's "mistress". Tetsuo will mention "cohusbands" in "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans". In Purchtrin, these are all the same word and the same (gender-neutral) concept.

  Elsewhere I used whichever English word would give the right connotation, except for "mistress", which was deliberately wrong for comic effect. But here, I played up the freewheeling, decadent nature of life within the Constellation by using "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" for all romantic relationships, even for Somn's parents, who in human terms have been in a group marriage for decades. That's also why I use the "Mom-" and "Dad-" prefixes for Somn's parents rather than something more formal.

• I really hate the SF technique of referring to nonhumans as "males" or "females". I wouldn't even call it a technique; it's more like a tic. In Constellation Games the human characters fumble around a bit ("boy-Curic") but eventually extend human terms to cover ETs. ("Tetsuo was talking to an Alien woman from Hierarchy Interface, and then they suddenly disappeared.") The only character who reliably says "females" instead of "women" is Tetsuo, and that's clearly one of his English idiosyncrasies. (It's also me making fun of the whole idea.)

  This doesn't really come up in "Somn", since there are no human characters, but it came to mind because of the "boyfriend" thing. And hopefully you see how natural "Hey, lady!" and "ever since she was a little girl" seem when there are no human characters to anchor your perception.

• "Moms" (as in "did you talk Moms through the data?") is a reference to Infinite Jest, except here it's literally multiple moms, not one person with the nickname "Moms".

  

• Tales of editorial meddling! Shlir's line "There's life on at least the second potential site out" was originally "second planet out." Whatever telescope they're using only sees the big planets, so Earth is the second planet out. Well, Kate made me change this since there was no way to explain that.

  Although I don't like the specific wording I changed it to, I do wish I'd done more in this story to stop using "planet" as a shorthand for "big rock that might have life on it." "Planet" is a human social construct, and the Constellation would also be interested in gas giants that might have life-supporting moons.

  Also, Somn's "Ha ha ha... stop it!" was originally "Ha ha ha stop it," which I think better conveys the subtle nuances of situationally inappropriate sexual tickling.

• I mentioned earlier that this story shows how Somn chose "Ashley" as her human first name, but doesn't make it really blatant. In case you didn't see it, it's Aei + Shlir. She was trying to hold on to the names of her boyfriends as well as her own.
• I'm pretty sure the Them organisms only express individuality when they're in a group. In chapter 21 of Constellation Games, Ariel is mobbed by Them organisms, all of which have their own voices and some of which violently disagree with the superorganism. But in "The Time Somn Died", Somn encounters the organisms one-on-one, and they always speak in the consensus voice of Her.
• I really have no idea how ports work, and I strongly suspect there's no conceivable physical model for a one-way port like the one seen in this story, even if you were to allow two-way ports like the ones in the novel. Her's monologue about the virtual particles and the mass limits is deliberately written to make it unclear how much is factual within the world of the story, how much is Somn misunderstanding what Her is saying, and how much is Her trying to "confuse [Somn] with gibberish".

  It's similar to Ariel's Cherenkov-radiation technobabble in chapter 34 of CG. I somehow feel this is a more honest approach than just giving up and leaving it all in the hands of... Creative License.

Don't get used to this much bonus commentary; this is the longest one by far. But be sure to come back on Thursday for the comparatively minuscule commentary on "Found Objects", when Jenny will say, "Ariel's not the most reliable."

The drawings of Them organisms are by Beth Lerman. Other image credits: Wikimedia Commons user Miya, National Bureau of Standards, Makuahine Pa'i Ki'i, The Planetary Habitability Laboratory.

← Last week | "Found Objects" →

Now that I've buttered you up, I want to once again ask you to do what you can to get other people interested in Constellation Games. "What's in it for me?" you ask, because buttering you up only goes so far; I get it. Well, maybe you want a sequel. I have an idea for a sequel. But I can't justify spending the time to write a sequel to a book that wasn't a big hit. I'd be better off writing a totally new novel, as I'm doing now.

Hopefully getting people interested will a lot easier now that serialization is done. Ebooks will soon be available for $5, which should take the book into the realm of instant-gratification impulse buys. You'll be able to get a PDF direct from the publisher, or to get Nook and Kindle versions from B&N and Amazon.

It would also help a lot if you left reviews of the book on the bookstore sites, Goodreads, LibraryThing, and so on. Or just post a review on your blog. And remember that someone who's on the fence can read the first two chapters for free as PDF or HTML.

I'm still trying to line up podcast appearances and so on. But I've learned that it's really difficult for an author to effectively promote their own book, because everything I say sounds like an ad. Well, it is an ad. That's why books have quotes on the back covers from people who didn't write the book. Fan-driven publicity is a million times more effective than anything I can do. (n.b. I haven't actually measured this, but a million times seems about right.)

Hopefully after that you're ready for some commentary:

You can read the end of the book as an unimitigated "yay, Ariel", and I deliberately didn't spend much story time on what I'm about to say, but... Ariel's redesign of Human Ring is an incoherent mess. His appreciation of art does not extend much past "art is good and we should have more." He's not a curator, an architect, or a designer of ecosystems. He didn't even get to finish his metafractal before instantiating it.

But this huge mess pushes a habitable Human Ring into the realm of the imaginable. Ariel gets in your face with a really cheesy version of whatever you're good at, and gets you thinking about how amazing it would be if you could redo it properly. (Most of what Ariel does between December 26 and April 22 is working with people with real domain knowledge.)

I used The Dinner Party to dramatize this. Judy Chicago's piece is a monument to dead and mythological heroes, realized in media traditionally associated with women: ceramics, sewing, weaving, embroidery, lace, and (implied) food. It serves as a counterweight to all of history's monuments honoring men.

Like all monuments, The Dinner Party works by overwhelming you. In the Brooklyn Museum the piece has three parts: you walk down a hallway hung with very 1970s tapestries, then you turn a corner and enter a dark triangular room containing nothing but the installation, and you're overwhelmed. Finally you leave the installation room to a big Mathematica-like timeline explaining who all the women mentioned in the piece were. (I get why the timeline is necessary, but it leaves me with the feeling that I've just visited a state park.)

Ariel does not really understand The Dinner Party. Even Somn, who understands it less, can see this. Ariel's reproduction omits the timeline, the hallway with tapestries, and the dark triangular room. He just reconstructed the table in the uniformly-lit docking bay along with everything else. This ruins the overwhelming effect.

It's highly questionable whether Jenny would want to put Protector of Earth in that room. Setting up The Dinner Party next to Trajan's Column doesn't do either piece any favors. But it does put them on the same rhetorical level, and putting hundreds of those pieces in a room a mile square creates its own overwhelming effect. In the docking bay, the monuments humanity has built to its accomplishments are themselves recognized as accomplishments.

Even before the contact event, Ariel knew what this tasted like. He had an archive of all of humanity's Games of a Certain Complexity, acquired through software piracy and playable whenever he wanted to play them. Now he's demonstrated that kind of abundance in a way that people who don't care about video games can appreciate.

Of course, all the artworks on Human Ring are replicas. Even the "fucking Banksy mural" got destroyed by the matter shifters and had to be restored from backup. But as Tetsuo says in chapter 12, there are no un-replicas. Even the original artwork is an imperfect replica of the pure idea in the artist's mind.

And every replica is imperfect. Duchamp's famous "readymades" are, less famously, not ready-made. They've been altered, or they're nonfunctional replicas, or (later on) they're laboriously reconstructed (and further altered) replicas of the original replicas. When BEA Agent Krakowski smashes Fountain in chapter 34 he's destroying a replica of a replica of a possible replica.

Constellation Games is full of replicas. Ariel's house, Dieue's apartment, the shipping containers, Ariel's notebooks, the CDBOEGOACC games and hardware, the golden cellular-automata machine, the periodically resurfaced lunar field, the Disneyland environments of Ring City, Jenny's cosplay, Tammy's missions in the Orion simulator, Ariel's recreation of Tammy's go bag, Dana Light in all her forms, the game companies making the same game over and over, Recapture That Remarkable Taste and Sayable Spice: Earth Remix, the imperfect copy of Tetsuo that Somn has in her head, and the imperfect immortal electronic copy that could have existed instead.

Negative space is Ariel's theme, and replicas are Tetsuo's. Throughout the book, Tetsuo concerns himself with the negative space that separates real replicas from fake ones. The way someone from a culture with less history might care a lot about originals vs. replicas. He cares because the original was trying to tell you something. Probably unintentionally, probably not what the original creator was trying to convey, probably something about that person and their society. A real replica will let that message come through. A fake replica will preserve the text of the article but lose the revealing advertisements. And how you use a replica will, in turn, reveal something about you.

Maybe miscellaneous notes are an anticlimax after that, but here they are anyway:

• In the second draft, the novel ended with Somn's letter. I still prefer that ending! But man, the writing group hated it! They said that Somn was not defined well enough to handle this (definitely true in the second draft, and arguably still true), and that the book needed to end with Ariel's voice in particular, because he's the narrator.

  As far as I'm concerned, Ariel yielded control of the narrative at the end of chapter 35. But everyone was so adamant, I caved and wrote that last email of Ariel's. And no one has complained about the ending since, so I guess I did the right thing. But I don't think it's necessary.

• The first email in this chapter, the automated reminder, is also not strictly necessary, but it's funny and it sets up the "Vanilla" rewrite that probably won't happen. To the extent "Vanilla" still contains an exploitable idea, it's that after the events of Constellation Games, America (and Earth in general) is on the wrong side of a gravitational Berlin Wall. That's what I've been getting at with stuff like Ariel's need for an exit visa, and the "request the presence of a Constellation observer" in this email.
• If the last chapter is not part of Ariel's manuscript, what does this imply, ontologically, about the text of Constellation Games? Well, it implies it's a story I made up. But if you're Adam Parrish and you're not satisfied with this answer, it can imply that Constellation Games is the result of someone in the future annotating Ariel's text with excerpts from Ariel's email archives and Somn's published correspondence.
• I wrote Ariel's note to Jenny about the FERNs long before that final Tetsuo scene in chapter 33, which showed that Tetsuo is more complicated then "has no filter between his brain and his mouth." But it works out, because Ariel wrote that note in October, a month and a half before seeing the other side of Tetsuo.
• Argh, Ariel mentions a blog post he wrote about FERNs, but in the final draft the FERNs scene is a "Real Life" section. Let's just say Ariel also put up a blog post about FERNs that didn't make it into the final curated document.
• Somn's reaction when Ariel puts a finger in her son's mouth is a direct callback to Ariel's reaction when Tetsuo touches him in chapter 11. ("I flinched as he touched me, because I'm a big ol' racist.")
• Cerise and Drew, the two kids not named after Ariel, are tuckerizations of Cheryl Barkauskas and Andrew Willett, the two members of my writing group who critiqued Constellation Games from beginning to end.

And that's Constellation Games. This commentary series will continue for two more weeks, with commentaries for the bonus material posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you ordered the bonus material, you should be getting it soon along with the complete ebook. If you ordered the USB key, the bonus material's on there. If you're not sure what to read first, here's the commentary schedule, and my recommended reading order:

• August 7: "The Time Somn Died" (the Somn story)
• August 9: "Found Objects" (the Jenny story)
• August 14: "Dana no Chousen" (the Dana story)
• August 16: "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans" (with guest commentary by co-author Adam Parrish).

Update: I originally put the stories in this list in the order I wrote them. But when I suggested a reading order to Kate, I suggested chronological order, which is the exact opposite order. I've changed the commentary schedule to reflect the order recommended in the email that contains the bonus material.

If all you're getting is "The Time Somn Died", then your task is easy. Otherwise, tune in next Tuesday, when Dana will say, "Americans cost extra." Tune in next Tuesday, when Somn will say, "Ha ha ha... stop it!"

Pictures from the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Botanical garden are ones I took on March 9, 2012. Other image credits: NASA, Jerry Paffendorf, and Kevin Stefanovitch.

← Last week | "The Time Somn Died" →

When I look at my narrative arcs I see myself shovelling coal nonstop into a locomotive which builds and builds up speed, until it's travelling at relativistic speeds, like the locomotive in Einstein's thought experiments, going so fast that Lorentz contraction becomes apparent, and then the locomotive crashes into a wall and that's the end. If you've seen me give a technical talk you've seen the same thing; my talks generally end with "And that's the end of my talk." Not saying that's a good thing, but that's kind of where I am as a writer.

We start this chapter in the middle of the big action scene, the climax of the climax, the moment at which the locomotive is going as fast as it's ever gonna go. As with chapter 22, I came into this scenario treating it like a puzzle. I put Ariel in peril, wrote down all the details that might be relevant and tried to figure the best way out.

The difference between this and chapter 22 is that, as Curic says after the locomotive crashes, Krakowski's failure is overdetermined. He's operating on enemy turf and his plan is insane. He only gets as far as he does because Dana is enabling him. Dana having somehow gotten the idea that a huge dramatic rescue is a good way to spark romantic interest in the person you rescued.

So here the challenge was coming up with the most interesting way to solve the problem. The only restrictions were that Ariel had to take an active role in saving the day, and I didn't want Krakowski to die. As in chapter 22, Ariel tries a lot of stuff that doesn't work, and with the introduction of Dana his problem gets even worse, but here in the second part he's able to save the day in suitably dramatic fashion.

I think this sequence is pretty good for a first try, but in the future I'm going to try to plot these big action scenes a lot better. The "write everything down and figure something out" technique is a little sloppy. I should have had this planned much further in advance.

Before the misc commentary I want to announce that the microblog archive is complete! I wrote 403 tweets for Ariel and 173 for Tetsuo, not to mention the software that scheduled their posts in a realistic way, and it was all super time consuming. There are two tweets that haven't been posted yet, but I went ahead and added them to the archive. Ariel's final tweet I wrote just now, to give his feed some closure. I didn't like the idea of the top of his Twitter feed saying I don't think that deserves a special "freezer edition" for the rest of time. That looks the Twitter feed of someone who died suddenly.

As you find out this week, Ariel doesn't die, and this isn't the end of the stuff he and Tetsuo post in-universe, any more that "A Few Ip Shkoy Games About Asteroids" is the last thing Ariel ever posts to his blog. But it is the end of the slice you'll be able to see, because the novel's just about over.

• This chapter ends the framing device, the document Ariel constructed out of his blog posts and his recollections. You could stop reading after this chapter and it'd be a good ending. (After all, that's what people are supposed to do in-universe.) But you're not in-universe, so you get one more chapter, made up of miscellaneous documents that wrap up some longstanding mysteries.

  Ariel doesn't bother to reveal these mysteries in his book because he figures they'll be old news by the time the fate-lock expires, but I thought you'd like to know.

• "Might be relevant" details that turned out not to be relevant include the earlier running gag w/the strawberry pie, and the fact that Alien Ring's atmosphere is full of nitrous oxide.
• I believe "wearing your appearance like a hat" is the only explicit nod to Starslip in the novel, but see last week's commentary for an appreciation of Kris's influence.
• I think the last scene with Ariel and Curic is some of my best writing. The've been working together for pretty much the whole book, each trying to manipulate the other in various ways, and they still don't understand each other.

  This scene has my two favorite Curic lines: "It's quite simple to play poker against an opponent who never bluffs." and "It wouldn't be the first time the power of love was responsible for a whole lot of bullshit."

  Note the similarity between Curic's "Why would I play poker?" and frat boy's unvoiced "Why would I play a Japanese RPG?" in chapter 5. And the difference between "opponent who never bluffs" and Tetsuo's "declining to play my cards upfaced" in 33.

• I discovered a HUGE continuity error in this chapter while writing an earlier commentary, and asked to have it fixed it at the last moment. Here's the problematic paragraph, see if you can spot the error:

  I ripped open the velcro pockets on the chest of my spacesuit and pulled the two strings simultaneously. Like I always did at the end of a day's work in Utility Ring.

  That's right, it's already been established that Velcro doesn't exist in this universe. No, just kidding: chapter 30 mentions Velcro. The real problem is that Ariel's hands have been bound behind his back with reentry foam, so he can't pull those strings. Fortunately, I'd already established the tongue-based interface to the spacesuit HUD, so it was easy to fix.

  

• There's clearly some backstory between Dana and Krakowski, some story I could write about the gaslighting that went on between chapter 30 and now. But I'm not really interested in that story, so it kinda got short shrift. And by the time I started "Dana no Chousen" I'd moved on to other ideas.
• Krakowski took unknowing posession of Dana right after Ariel moved to Ring City. After going to Jenny's house to take anything Ariel might have left there, he went to Bai's house to do the same, and ended up with Dana.

  But, in a comment to chapter 19's commentary I mentioned the possibility that there are two copies of Dana, one of which has been in the BEA's posession since chapter 19. If that's true, then that Dana is the one responsible for the events of the past two chapters (as well as "Dana no Chousen"), and I don't know what happened to the copy of Dana who was socialized with Bai.

  I don't like this idea because it's effectively passing off Dana's identical twin as Dana, which kills a lot of the drama. But it's something I've got in my back pocket in the unlikely event I need it.

• How does the fate-lock work? It's got something to do with generating a quantum encryption key from a piece of radioactive material, and a whole lot to do with... Creative License.
• I've got plenty to say about Ariel's rearrangement of Human Ring, but I'm saving it for the finale.

The denouement approacheth! Tune in next week for THE SERIES FINALE, when Ariel will say, "You named a girl after me?"

Image credits: Unknown, Wikimedia Commons user Sissyneck, Luigi Rosa.

While initally planning the book I talked with my friend Kris Straub about how you plot a long-form serial arc. Kris created a comedy SF comic called Starslip which I mentioned briefly back in the Chapter 30 commentary and probably elsewhere. Starslip takes place on a spacefaring art museum. Kris drew it for seven years and did an amazing job combining blockbuster-movie action with a near-total lack of problems that can be solved with explosions. (The two best examples.)

I don't know how much of Kris' advice on plotting went into the arc of Constellation Games (Brendan has a guess), but this ending sequence, with its monumental redemptive act of copyright infringement, comes directly from that conversation and from the creative debt I owe to Kris over the years.

The microblog keeps chugging along. The stuff you'll see for the rest of the month is still stuff that happened in November, and will be archived under chapter 33. (Last week's stuff starts at November 11.) For reasons that should be obvious now and will be made explicit next week, Ariel will not be live-tweeting the extradition attempt.

• The title of this chapter is my homage to The Middleman, a little bit of levity in an otherwise serious chapter.
• In this chapter Ariel destroys the sterile Human Ring originally seen in "Vanilla", symbolically freeing me of any need to rewrite that story. This is the clearest example of how I now regard "Vanilla" as a test run for Constellation Games: the protagonist of "Vanilla" complained about how awful Human Ring was, but he didn't do anything about it.

  The Pioneer statues seen here and in chapter 11 were present in "Vanilla", and were the very first inspirations for the art museum idea.

  

• Another major inspiration for the gallery of replicas was the Cast Courts in the Victoria and Albert museum, which contain 19th-century casts of famous sculptures, including Trajan's Column in two pieces.
• I once began work on a story about someone breaking into an art museum and smashing one of the copies of Fountain, but after destroying a Fountain in this chapter I think I've got it out of my system.
• The surrealists Ariel mentions are all real (and amazing) artists, but I made up the paintings. I tried to copy each artist's naming technique. Harpo Agonistes is the painting of Harpo Marx that Salvador Dali never painted but clearly wanted to. And of course the best way to convey the spirit of Duchamp is with a puerile pun ("Culmination").

  In the docking bay, the fictional artworks are Eastern Central Mountain Pacific, As Many Moments in an Afternoon, and Damaged Goods. Everything else is a real accomplishment by humanity, as opposed to a minor accomplishment of naming on my part.

  The scene on Spiral Jetty is a special treat for Utahn Adam Parrish, soon to be of "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans" fame. If you're familiar with the piece you may be gnashing your teeth at the way Ariel recreated it out of context. I'm not gonna defend what he did, but I'll talk more about this kind of thing in the chapter 36 commentary.

• I had a real hard time conveying what happened to the other end of Krakowski's port. Hopefully you can see why it's tumbling around in a turbulent open space and spraying dirt all over the place, but even the final draft has gotten complaints that people can't visualize it. Sorry. If it helps, the exact details aren't terribly important.
• I was going to say that it's also unclear where Krakowski got the port, but I fixed that in the final draft. The BEA stole it, just like they stole the device they used to bug Tetsuo's office last week.
• The "standing gravity wave" bit was deemed by physicist Nick to be "awesome". Caveat: Nick's field of study is the sun, not gravity waves. As demonstrated by the fact that, while looking for an illustrative image, I discovered that the proper term is "gravitational wave". A gravity wave is totally different.
• The "backup purposes only" bit is (in Ariel's mind as well as mine) a reference to the ass-covering messages on the transient webpages in the low-rent sections of the Internet that distribute game ROMs.
• While writing these commentaries I've become more and more convinced that Krakowski and Ariel are the same character in different situations. You're not seeing Krakowski at his best here, but there are still hints of this essential similarity: specifically I'm thinking of "Ooh, what a burn" and "That was a UNESCO World Heritage Site!".
• And one bonus thing I forgot to mention last week when Ariel reviewed "Occluded Occlusion". The asteroids threatening Down come from an unstable asteroid belt between Down and its star. The belt causes frequent partial occultations as seen from Down, occultations visible to the naked eye except that you should use eye protection when viewing them. That's why asteroids figured in pre-telescope Alien mythology, and why even in modern Alien languages (chapter 12) the word for asteroid is "occlusion".

  Unfortunately, although "occlusion" is a word, it's not a word used in astronomy. The word I was looking for is "occultation". I'm pretty sure the initial "occlusion" was an intentional error along the lines of Tetsuo's arrogation/abrogation confusion, and when Ip Shkoy beliefs about asteroids became important after the book was sold, I forgot that "occlusion" was an error.

You know it's getting serious now. Tune in next week for the book's AMAZING occlusion conclusion, when Dana will say "Nothing should be exploding."

Image credits: Adam Kaplan, maybe?, Wikimedia Commons user M.chohan, NASA/Dana Berry.

← Last week

When I first wrote all these commentaries out this one was pretty light, so I saved the final deleted scene for this chapter's commentary, even though it was cut from chapter 30. But then I thought of a lot more commentary for this chapter. So this week you get a big commentary and a deleted scene! Live the excitement.

It's been a while since the microblog was an accurate real-time representation of what Ariel and Tetsuo were doing, but now it's just getting ridiculous. Chapter 33 takes place over an entire month (November 11 to December 12). The rest of the stuff in the Twitter feeds—mostly EVERYTHING IN AUSTIN stuff—covers the timeframe of chapter 33. There's nothing in the feeds about what happens in chapters 34, 35, or 36.

Of course, since chapter 33 takes place over an entire month, spreading its microblog over three weeks actually gets us closer to the microblog being an accurate real-time representation of what Ariel and Tetsuo are doing.

This might make more sense next week.

• Before we get started, a couple commentary bits I forgot to include in earlier chapters where they would have been more appropriate. First, I can't believe I never mentioned where the code name "Ragtime" comes from. It's from "Hello! Ma Baby", the song Michigan J. Frog sings. "Hello, my ragtime gal." No particular reason, I just like that song and it seems like the kind of random thing used to generate code names.

  Second, chapter 21 ("Her") includes the sentence "I ducked back into my house for my keys and walked through the port." That sentence was originally something like "I walked through the port," but then I had this conversation with my beta reader Sumana (reconstruction):

  "Wait, does he leave his door open?"

  "He shuts the door."

  "How's he going to get back in? He just has his keys in hand when he answers the door?"

  "Uh, he goes back for his keys before he leaves."

  "It doesn't say that."

  "I think it's okay to omit that kind of detail from the narrative."

  "Noooooo!"

  "Okay, I'll say he goes back for his keys."

  "Thank you."

• Original title of this chapter: "Infinite Lives, Infinite Ammo." Bleh.
• The design of Somn's bikini and her general nest posture was inspired by a line in the pre-Vanilla song I mentioned in the chapter 29 commentary: "bejewelled now and nervous is/the lizard queen he services".
• The "peed in the sink" thing in 8 was originally just a joke, and I backfilled its significance later. Adding significance to stuff you wrote earlier: the writer's secret weapon!
• The '"Yes." Yes.' at the end of the Curic scene, that is, the sentence "Yes." as a quote and then in narration, was supposed to be a callback to '"Don't care." Don't care.' at the end of chapter 11. But I looked back and chapter 11 just ends with 'Don't care.' in narration. I never had Ariel say it out loud. Oh well.
• When he was on Ring City, Tetsuo was like the smartest kid in a small-town high school. He was an expert on cultures very similar to modern human cultures, and everyone valued his opinion on humans. But then he (literally) went to college. Now he's valued for his knowledge of the Constellation, and he's just average at that. Tests are being administered about random who-cares shit like Ragtime. So he gets bored and annoyed, he becomes political, and he starts playing pranks.
• If you're following Tetsuo on Twitter (which I still recommend!) you've seen his other big prank: EVERYTHING IN AUSTIN, the tour company he started with Jenny to help ETs evade the Hierarchy Interface restrictions on unescorted travel. This is the big bonus storyline that will keep Twitter buzzing away while Ariel is off working on his metafractal.
• After all the awful things Ariel did in part two, for the past couple chapters I've been rehabilitating his character a little. The obvious trick is I've been showing him doing nice things for a pregnant woman. (Well, a nesting woman. What's that called? You tell me.) But there's another, more subtle change at work.

  In the final chapter, Ariel will trace the shift in his character to October 16-17, chapter 31, when he "spent twenty-five hours sitting at the bottom of a crater on the moon, doing absolutely fucking nothing." But I think that's just the reset button Ariel had to hit before he could change. I think the change in Ariel's character comes from his work with the Raw Materials overlay, excavating the dumps, explaining what they find in the dumps, and generally just being a human presence in the lives of people who have never seen a human. Lois McMaster Bujold described science fiction as "fantasies of political agency", and that's what's going on here. For the first time in his life Ariel feels like a) it matters what he does, and b) he has control over what he does.

  The scene with Canadian Adam is a deliberate echo of Ariel's visit to the Reflex Games office in chapter 5. Even though the chapter 33 scene was written first, I knew when I wrote it that I'd be going back and writing something like the chapter 5 scene. Canadian Adam offers Ariel more or less what he asked for in chapter 5, but Ariel's not interested anymore. His experience has changed him. He's done playing by the rules of scarcity-based capitalism. (Unlike Tetsuo, who—and I think this is representative of Tetsuo's character flaws—seems happy to play along with it as a kind of Creative Anachronism.)

  This scene also shows that, despite my rehabilitory efforts, Ariel can still be a pretty huge jerk.

• The dumb plot of Constellation: Disputed Space bears a strong resemblance to The Lightspeed War, a Constellation novel I started after finishing "Vanilla", and abandoned almost immediately. In The Lightspeed War Earth and the contact mission are ambushed by a rival civilization that's been stalking the Constellation. I quickly discovered that that was a dumb story that didn't fit the themes of the Constellation universe at all, and cancelled the novel. But I am going to explore some similar territory in the novel I'm working on now, in a more mature fashion that's also funnier.

  So you can see how I've progressed as a writer since The Lightspeed War, one of the code names for the current project is The Furniture War.

  

• I've mentioned a couple times that the Tetsuo scene and the subsequent reviews were written after I sold the book, to bring closure to the Ragtime subplot and to give Tetsuo a proper sendoff. In the second and third drafts, Tetsuo was working on Disputed Space solely as a practical joke, making up fake Constellation weaponry for use in the imaginary war. He'd named the fake weaponry after Ip Shkoy food items, such as the uiur, a "beverage made from an animal whose skin and bones have been removed."

  But given his reaction to Temple Sphere that doesn't seem like a cruel enough practical joke for Tetsuo. He must have some other motive for working on Disputed Space, and this scene provides it.

• The final set of game reviews was daunting. I wasn't sure if I still "had it". It had been months since I'd gotten into Ariel's head to do cranky game reviews, and even longer since I'd gotten into the heads of the Ip Shkoy to figure out what kind of games they developed. Without a common theme like "asteroids" for me to work with, I don't think the games would have come out nearly as well.

  I am glad I could bring back the G'Go Corporation for G'Go Station: Beseiged in Space, the insane Policenauts-type game that makes Ariel ragequit his review. You might remember that they made G'Go Investigation: When You Gotta Die back in chapter 10. "G'Go" isn't a Pey Shkoy word, so I imagine they were a foreign company that was popular internationally.

• I know Canada isn't called a dominion anymore, but I couldn't resist the joke. Think of this as the flip side of "the nation-state of Greenland."

Enough stalling, here's the final deleted scene of the book. Perhaps the most forgettable detail in chapter 30's letter to Jenny is the other letter Ariel says he wrote, the one to his dad, apologizing for stealing the Scotch decanter. Here is that letter. I cut it before finishing it, so I've filled in bits of missing narration. There are also details that don't fit with the final draft, like the idea that Ariel's parents might not have noticed the theft yet.

October 12

Dad,

Strange to write you a letter by hand and put it in a mailbox but I need low QoS on this message and the post office knows how to be slow.

By this time you may have noticed that your cut-glass Scotch decanter is missing. This letter is to confess that I stole it when I came up with Tetsuo last month. I was at our old house with its quiet and its familiarity and I thought: what would I take as my inheritance if I could only take one thing?

Kind of a morbid question, but urgent because I am leaving the planet and I may not be back. I have a variety of reasons, some of which I hope will make sense to you later.

[Ariel then talks about his dad's usage of the decanter when Ariel was a kid:]

I would sit on the couch in your study, reading or drawing or playing with the Game Boy while you worked. When you heard about a paper being accepted, or you met some other accomplishment, there would be the ritual of getting the bottle down from the closet shelf and pouring yourself a toast.

Please understand what follows. I know you hate when I use these video game analogies, but what I'm trying to explain is not the thing being analogized but why I did and I do think in these analogies.

Sitting on the couch while you typed, I would play an RPG with the utterly generic title of Magic Quest, which you bought me for my ninth birthday. One of the character classes in the Magic Quest series is the essence mage (or FORCMAG in the Game Boy version), whose magic power comes from his "life force". Where most RPG magic users can recharge magic points just by resting, an essence mage must sacrifice some of their life force, incurring a small but permanent penalty.

There are three strategies for playing an essence mage. 1) You can use their incredibly powerful magic relentlessly at the start of the game, rapidly boosting the party to the point where fancy equipment can make up for the character penalties. 2) You can play them as a melee specialist and only pull out their magic when absolutely necessary to save the party. 3) You can play them as evil and vampiric, draining the life force from NPCs and other party members.

This became my model of manhood, a bank account that you gradually drew down, a magic meter that depleted as you fought and won the conflicts of the working world.

[There was going to be something else here, but I think it works as is. Not sure why I even put in this note.]

I'm sure you refilled the decanter occasionally, but I never saw it. It always seemed to be three-quarters full, and I felt that once it was empty, that would be it for you, and for me as well.

Anyway, I took it with me and now your decanter is orbiting the moon. Please get in touch with Jenny and she will pay to replace the decanter and its contents. I know it's not about the money but about the betrayal of trust etc. I also know what my act of theft implies in terms of the essence mage analogy. I'm the son of two English professors, I don't need the subtext spelled out.

I'm sorry that I won't make it for Thanksgiving. Tell mom not to worry about me. Tell yourself as well.

Your lovingloving son,
Ariel

It's in a rough state but it's a pretty good scene. It's not necessary to the plot but it does some good character development. The problem is it's completely overshadowed by Ariel's letter to Jenny. I couldn't even put this scene in the commentary for chapter 30 because of all the commentary about Ariel's other letter. But it's a nice little scene. Good night, sweet scene; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

With this chapter the normal part of Constellation Games is OVER. Tune in next week for the first part of the shocking two-chapter climax, when Ariel will say, "They don't conserve anything except mass and angular momentum."

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons user Jacawa, Flickr user opacity, Alan Light, NewNation.sg, Flickr user Ata B.

← Last week | Next week →

It's not just Part Three though. Negative space shows up through the whole book: as the foundation hole where Ariel's house used to be, the fractal pits Tetsuo and Somn dug out of the moon to build Ring City, the expectation that contact missions always find dead civilizations, and, uh, Ariel's negative reaction to being in space. Part One of the novel is about Ariel and the Brain Embryo, whereas "Found Objects" is about Jenny and the reentry foam with a Brain Embryo-shaped hole in it. It's what we in the trade call symbolism.

Symbolic of what? The Fermi Paradox, basically. The fact that the more we narrow down which numbers should go into the Drake equation, the better it looks for life in the universe, yet here we are, alone, facing down an emptiness that has become a thing in itself. The idea behind the Constellation universe, going back to "Vanilla" before I came up with any of the backstory you see in the novel, is that we find out we're not alone and it doesn't help. We're all lonely together and some of us (here, Somn and Ariel) are lonelier than we were before.

In the first draft Somn actually referred to the fossil imprint as "the evidence of absence". I cut it because I couldn't imagine something that poetic making it through the Purchtrin-English translator. But that's what she was thinking. That's canon.

More stuff that's canon:

• I wrote about the likelihood of complex fossils on Mars back when I was working on the second draft. Conclusion: it's not very likely. However, the odds were boosted recently by the discovery of multicellular fossils on Earth much older than any previously found.

  I think the real stretch here is the idea that life evolved on Mars and then died out completely. Once bacteria show up, I don't think anything short of a supernova can make them go extinct. A supernova, or perhaps some... Creative License.

• Fossil molds happen all the time in real life (see picture), but most are due to causes other than mysterious extradimensional unlife.
• You'll see in "The Time Somn Died" that Somn has considerable experience with Ragtime's fossil imprints. But the real importance of this chapter to that story is her line "I nearly stayed behind."
• In the second draft the Somn scene was the last time Ragtime came up, which really pissed everyone off. The lack of any kind of resolution for this plotline was widely considered the number one problem with the book. That's why I added the Tetsuo scene to the next chapter: so Ariel could have a finalizing talk about Ragtime with someone who won't just dismiss his concerns. Just don't expect an explanation.
• Ariel's review of The Amulet of Manufactured Memory is probably the book's clearest example of the old literary trick where someone's seemingly innocuous writings reveal volumes about their mental state if you know what to look for. But I mostly think it's interesting from an exposition perspective.

  Considered as a human game, The Amulet of Manufactured Memory would be pretty unremarkable—single-player RPG featuring amnesiac protagonist of a different gender from the player. But for a Gaijin game that's really unusual. This is a great technique for conveying alien-ness—show something that the reader can facially identify with and show how it's unusual from an alien perspective. But I knew it was a trick I could only use once. (Gatekeeper is the same as Pong, but the point of that is it's a really simple game that gets independently invented all the time.)

• Amulet and Dana Light Is: Unauthorized were both heavily inspired by the specification for my ideal video game back in 2008. In my original notes for Constellation Games my ideal game actually showed up, as Unauthorized: Welcome to Earth. Sort of a Grand Theft Auto where instead of a human psychopath you play an alien invader. That game still exists in the Constellation universe, it's just not mentioned in the novel because Temple Sphere was more useful dramatically.

  (I suspect that weblog entry was also one of the main inspirations for Constellation Games itself, so thanks, Ben.)

  

• All the Gaijin game companies in the CDBOEGOACC have names that include some multiple of 3. This is kind of my tribute to Star Control II, in which all the captains of Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah ships were named "Death 701" or "Death 43" or "Death [some other prime number]". The tribute is most obvious for Amulet which was published by "9 Death To Various Obsolete Procedures".

  As long as I've got these cards out, there's a direct reference to Star Control II way back in chapter 2 (specifically, to Frungy), which I didn't mention before.

• I didn't notice this until I was writing this commentary, but both Amulet and What-the-Fuck Creek are games that tell the same basic story every playthrough, but tell it drastically differently every time. It's sort of the opposite of the Dhihe Coastal Coalition's fear of fiction. And given what I said a couple weeks ago about the lack of diversity within Gaijin castes, it might give insight into what it's like to be Gaijin.

  

• I like to imagine "Ke's Got No Name!" as the Gaijin equivalent of Odysseus's "Outis". In his review, Ariel calls his post-amnesia character "No-Name". That's a mistake on my part: "No-Name" was the character's name in the second draft, but that's not a Gaijin name, so I changed it. But let's say that's Ariel's nickname for the character. Apparently the rule of Gaijin names is that when I change one, I forget to go through and change it everywhere it shows up.
• Dana's line "I got dumped for an earlier version of myself who's dumber and greedier!" really resonates with some readers. Not my intention, but I'll take it.
• The Dana scene is Ariel's fourth sex scene in the novel. For the first two I ruined Ariel's life right after the sex scene. In chapter 30 it happened during the sex, and here the sex just indicates how low he's sunk already.

  I'm kind of annoyed at having written one of those books where the male lead has sex with every available female character, but I don't think anyone would confuse Ariel with James Bond. (In the event that you did confuse Ariel with James Bond, the management regrets that no refunds can be provided.)

• When I first wrote those limericks in chapter 18, I remember thinking "I bet Dana will really appreciate this, once she becomes capable of knowing that it happened". I did not anticipate how her appreciation would come out.
• It's nice that Ariel refuses a fake Jenny, though he might have any number of non-noble reasons for doing that.

  Dana knows a lot she shouldn't, but she doesn't know the Ariel/Jenny history. She's engaging in the same speculation you may have done prior to chapter 30.

• I seem to have a thing for purple dresses. The Captain in "Four Kinds of Cargo", which I wrote right after Constellation Games, wears a purple dress at one point. I guess what I'm saying is, keep rocking those purple dresses, ladies.
• Auslanders are the traditional science-fictional puffball aliens from the upper layers of a gas giant. (Recall that the proposed carbon-eating kites from chapter 15 are Auslander animals.) There was an Auslander bartender in "Vanilla" but I think the archaeologist in this chapter has a lot more character even though it's only got a couple lines.
• When I was writing the second draft I was worried that there'd be no gaming content in part three, because Ariel has set those interests aside for now. But there's plenty, it's just not similar to what came before. I'm thinking specifically of Ariel collecting from the archaeological dig, an idea I think is really nice, and not something I've seen elsewhere. (And I did add one more set of game reviews after selling the book.)

Next week is the last "normal" chapter of the book. After that it's all climax and denouement. Tune in next Tuesday to hear Curic give her heartwarming monologue, "I was trapped alone in a decaying world of the dead."

Image credits: The Ohio State University Radio Observatory and the North American AstroPhysical Observatory (NAAPO), Mark A. Wilson, Toys for Bob, Deror avi, 20th Century Fox (check out the deletion debate!)

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Because there's not much commentary this week, I want to commemorate the beginning of part 3 with "Human Ring", a little toy I made in Minecraft's creative mode. Back around April or so I was jealous of how Andi Buchanan had thought to get Minecraft auteur Vechs to create a custom map for her novel Gift, so I spent a couple hours creating a little diorama approximating what Human Ring and Alien Ring would look like in Minecraft. It's not a game, and it relies heavily on easily-broken tricks of perspective, but you might find it fun to walk around for a bit.

If not, at least there's a couple posts in last week's microblog archive. And there's this list I found lying around:

• I've been banking the peaks of eternal light for a while: 1 2.
• One of the things that stuck with me from Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff was that the voice I used for Colonel Mason, the voice you hear from male airline pilots and air traffic controllers and fighter pilots and Apollo astronauts and Space Shuttle pilots, all derives from Chuck Yeager's West Virginia mannerisms. Everyone's imitating the other boys in the club and their elders, and those elders learned it from their elders, and the original guys picked it up because they really admired the way Chuck Yeager took enormous risks without losing his cool.
• As I hinted earlier, as the story wraps up the narrative focus is tightening on Ariel and Somn. Last week was Tammy's final onscreen appearance, and this chapter's Jenny scene is the last in the book. I'm not gonna tell you when every single character drops out of sight (or that they already have), since that would create big spoilers through process of elimination, but I wanted to mention those two by way of pointing out that both of Ariel's final scenes with the women he loves (or is willing to say he loves) end so poorly.
• This chapter includes what I consider to be Ariel's Crowning Moment of Awesome: "I already have this skill. We call it computer programming." I know that "We call it computer programming." doesn't really come off as a DUN DUN DUN kinda thing, so maybe you'd prefer the highly cinematic Moment of Awesome he's got coming up. But without giving anything away, this here is the moment when Ariel a) decides to grow up, b) changes the course of history.
• Somn's "No kidding!" is the Purchtrin-English translator censoring something closer to "No shit!" OTOH, "Let's enjoy doing it," which shows up twice, is just a quirky translation of something like "I'm happy to help."
• On October 19, after his conversation with Jenny, Ariel writes something that you won't see until chapter 36. Just letting you know. (This is the out-of-order bit I mentioned earlier.)

  Related: even though she's incredibly (and understandably) pissed at Ariel, Jenny was careful to mention the "seven-page letter" in that conversation. She's still willing to keep secrets.

• It's embarrassing how long it took me to realize that Ariel wants recreate his Austin house. I don't think I came up with that until I started this chapter. After I'd written Curic scanning his house and everything in it, and the BEA destroying his house, and then Curic recreating some of its contents, and then Ariel abandoning his home planet for a space station where he hates the accommodations.

  The best you can say is that I eventually pick up on where my subconscious wants to take a story. "It's a pretty lossy line but I receive signals eventually."

• I consider the garbage patch scene to be the world's most accurate fictional depiction of the Pacific Garbage Patch. But with my luck, Kim Stanley Robinson already beat me to it.
• The art references kick into high gear in part three which is after all called "Artwork". I tried not to refer to real video games in the novel, but fine artists are fair game. Early on you got fictional artists like Erica Fujii and Trent Fellersen, but now it's mostly real artists.

  I dunno how much of this comes through in the manuscript, but Ariel's knowledge of and taste in art is almost entirely secondhand through Jenny. Which is why Jenny references highbrow stuff like Picasso and Judy Chicago, but when it's Ariel's turn he compares Jenny to pop surrealist Brandon Bird. Which, as you'll see in the last chapter, is a damn good comparison.

  BTW, if you're a fan of Brandon Bird, I suggest you check out the work of my friend Beth Lerman. Among other things, Beth drew Jenny's Twitter avatar.

OK, that wasn't too light. Next week will feature a number of exciting scenes including the book's final full-length game review. It all kicks off when Ariel says "So there aren't any fossils."

Image credits: yours truly, John W. Young, Colin Chudyk.

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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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The day I brought chapter 28 to writing group, just as we were leaving, Andrew stopped and said "Oooooooh." Ideally that realization will now happen right in the middle of chapter 29.

I've mentioned before that this plot twist was originally going to be the end of the book (along with a little bit extra which became the seed of the actual ending). I'm pretty sure y'all would have screamed bloody murder if that had happened, so it's a good thing that as I wrote part two I thought of more and more stuff to happen after the "end".

The PDF of part two should be released soon. Here's the Twitter archive. In news of "dammit", the Twitter feeds stopped working last Wednesday, possibly because of this UTF-8-licious tweet, and I didn't notice. Especially furiating since last week featured many classic bits, like Tetsuo discovering The Game and Ariel mocking thrift store T-shirts. So I do recommend you read the in-world timeline for chapter 28.

In news of "non-dammit", I'll be appearing this Sunday on the Cambridge (UK) radio show The Science of Fiction, talking about "Games in Fiction and Fiction in Games", and about Constellation Games in particular. Even if you don't live in Cambridge you can stream it "live" (we're actually recording on Wednesday) over the net, or download the program[me] afterwards.

This is a story all about how Ariel's life got flipped, turned upside down. And I'd like to take a minute—just sit right there—

then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well!

• The second-draft title for this chapter was "Uploadable Content" but I didn't really want a goofy game reference closing out part two. The title actually came from a source I haven't mentioned once in this commentary, a source that inspired "Vanilla" and thus the entire Constellation universe.

  Back around 2002 I wrote a song about a human who acts as a gigolo for ETs, a plot I reused for "Vanilla". The song ended like this:

  His engine's missing an essential part
  He sees the map and he throws the dart
  He's got to close his eyes, even though it's dark
  He sees the map and he throws the dart
  He's heading out and he's looking sharp
  He sees the map and he throws the dart
  She's looking down with a broken heart
  He sees the map and he throws the dart

  A lesser problem I fixed in the third draft of CG is that a lot of minor characters who should have names, didn't. Naming a character lets you use the name instead of descriptions or pronouns, but it creates additional mental load on the reader. Knowing where to draw the line is kind of a black art, but I'm pretty sure the founder of the Mars mission overlay needs a name. In a short story I'd have combined that character with Colonel Mason, but this is a novel, we have space to stretch our legs, and I didn't want a human to be planning that.

  In the second draft it was an unnamed Ausländer who invited Tammy to join the Mars overlay, but around this time I noticed that "He sees the map and he throws the dart", the line from the old song, is a perfect Gaijin name. That line is also a good characterization of Ariel at the end of part two. So we got a name for that character, and a better title for this chapter, and a hat-tip to this song only a couple people have ever heard.

• Side note: maps seem to be unusually important to the Gaijin. We don't see a lot of the species, but we get HSTMAHTTD!, the smart paper OS is called The Big Map That's Easy To Understand, What-The-Fuck Creek was played on a map, and a game to be reviewed in chapter 32 features magical maps. I don't know what to make of this, but it's a real trend.
• [TK IN THIS DRAFT THE MARS MISSION WAS LAUNCHED AROUND SEPTEMBER 10. IT NEEDS TO BE MOVED BACK A MONTH--I THOUGHT THIS PART OF THE NOVEL WOULD TAKE MORE CALENDAR TIME. FORTUNATELY, THE DATE OF TETSUO'S FIRST LECTURE ALSO NEEDS TO BE MOVED BACK A MONTH, SO THEY CAN BE FIXED SIMULTANEOUSLY.]"

  I spent way more time that I would have liked fixing stuff like this.

• "He seduced her with a ten-point checklist" is one of my favorite lines. (Extratextual spoiler: Colonel Mason did not seduce Tammy at all.)

  

• After writing Dana's accusation that Ariel made up his relationship with Tammy, there was a couple hours where I wondered what if she's right?. Wow! This was the second draft, so there weren't any "real life" sections per se. And the scene where Tetsuo and Daisy interact with Tammy didn't exist yet, so Ariel had no corroboration. What if he is lying about Tammy?

  Oh, man, that would be so cool. Unfortunately, that kind of reveal would derail the whole story. Tammy would suddenly become a non-character and her arc would serve no dramatic purpose. Plus, there's already plenty of Ariel lying, and this is a really dumb thing for him to lie about. So I gave his story some corroboration in the third draft. But it was fun to consider the possibility that he'd pulled one over on me.

• Speaking of Tammy's arc: this is a tiny spoiler for next week, but eh. Ariel thought Tammy was his Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but she's the protagonist of a totally different story that intersected Ariel's at one point. Ariel assumed Tammy wouldn't undergo character development when she was offscreen, but she did. He is not going to handle this well.
• The Dana/Bai/Ariel argument was intended to be the capstone of Dana's plot arc. But you may have noticed that this scene, like this chapter I originally thought would end the book, is more cliffhanger than resolution. I really have a hard time seeing this. I tend to think that if I've created a lot of tension I've done my job. This scene was the one I mentioned back in 2010, as causing the "where is this subplot going?" incident.

  So... there's more Dana stuff in the novel. Stuff I can't imagine not having. But I wouldn't say her plot arc gets resolved until the end of "Dana no Chousen."

  

• The Constellation Library is another thing that went into Constellation Games mainly because it was so important to "Vanilla", the story you'll probably never see. Given that I invented the Her superorganism for CG, I probably could have done something like the Library scene without introducing another ancient, world-weary collective intelligence. But, I'm ultimately glad I kept it, because in "The Time Somn Died" you get to see the working relationship between Her and the Library. Truly, they are the original Odd Couple.

  Since the Library scene is just a transcript, you don't get a description of the librarian, but I'll tell you (and you'll see in "Somn") that the Constellation Library is sort of like the Borg collective: a heavily-striped RAID array of brains, running in the bodies of people who died in ways that precluded them uploading (or who just didn't want to upload). The librarian Bai talks to is effectively a zombie.

  The "user interface" of the Constellation Library was inspired by how in David Brin's Uplift series everyone's such a jerk about letting humans use the Galactic Library. Here the library itself is a huge jerk.

• It's probably clear from the text, but just in case: Sky Goddess the Myriad Fingers is the jurist's name for the Her superorganism.
• The Library's primary documents are the sort of thing that I can write and know it's good, but I can never look at again. I don't think I've changed them at all since the second draft. I could check, but that would mean looking at them.

Thus ends part two, "Software". The stage is set for "Artwork", the action-packed miniseries that will end the serialization. It all starts next week, when Ariel will say, "It's fucking romantic, okay?" Will it be okay? Is it actually romantic? AllMost will be revealed! Tune in next week.

Photo credits: Voyager 2, Wikimedia Commons user SeppVei, NASA, Dorothy Harris, Flickr user zdw.

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I invite you to enjoy peanut butter cookies as well, but I don't have any prepared. Instead I made you a Twitter archive, and this commentary. The spoiler thread from last week is still open, but no one's posted to it, so perhaps the time for spoiler threads has now passed. Anyway, commentary:

• This is where Ashley (I'm gonna call her Somn from this point, as Ariel does) comes into her own as a character. A little late, you say? Yes, but it was at least partially intentional. Constellation Games is a soap opera, and soap operas have character arcs. Characters come and go, their influence on the plot waxes and wanes.

  Curic was the most important non-Ariel character in part one, and although her character never stops gaining complexity, she'll never be that central again. Dana and Jenny were built up in part one to become central to part two. Tetsuo had two peaks: one at the end of part one, and one here at the end of part two. To a first approximation, part three is a story about Ariel and Somn.

  So yeah, I could have taken care of this a little earlier, but it's better to build up characters as they become important, than to introduce them all at the start and keep some of them under the heat lamp for most of the book.

• Somn's scene replaced the deleted scene I showed you back in chapter 25. I gave Ariel's "we're the most adaptable" attitude to Somn. You're used to seeing it from a human in an SF story, but it's pretty interesting to see it from an ET who's having a nervous breakdown because she can't live up to it. And now you see why I couldn't have Tetsuo tell Ariel his Purchtrin name--he won't even tell his wife.
• The Somn scene was added in the third draft; in the second, she didn't have any decent characterization until chapter 31, which is way too late.

  In the third draft, Somn's Purchtrin name was Pruv. I didn't like this name, in particular because it sounds more like a Farang name. But everything else I could think of was one of those SF women's names that ends in a vowel because that sounds female to American ears. Then I noticed that I'd already come up with a much better name for this character, a name she'd incorporated into her human name as a way of holding on to it.

  I don't beat you over the head with it, but in "The Time Somn Died" you can see where "Ashley" came from, too.

  

• More callbacks! When Ariel had that gut-wrenching conversation about having to lie about everything, he was carrying the stolen Scotch decanter in his bag. And now he's lying to mom about the decanter. Damn! Originally you didn't find out what happened to the decanter until chapter 31, but that was just dumb. It's way more effective revealed here.
• Texas Hold-'Em is the third and final real-life game mentioned in the novel. As with the other two (Tennis for Two, Conway's Life), I couldn't fictionalize it because I needed to make a joke about the name.
• In general I came up with game names before designing the games, and What-The-Fuck Creek was one of the very first names I came up with, way back at the start of the first draft. I knew it had to be a Gaijin game as soon as I had the name.
• "Saved your ass in the temple of Nahadoth" is a reference to N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy. Nora founded my current writing group, and I repaid her by misspelling her name in the acknowledgements. (Update: I did it again, in this paragraph, even though I was writing about misspelling her name!)
• Speaking of name mistakes. In a repeat of chapter 15's "Kinki Bwi" incident, You'll Only See Kis Echo! was originally named You'll Only See Kis Shadow!. I totally forgot that I'd changed the name, and when I added the new Tetsuo scene to chapter 33, I called kim You'll Only See Kis Shadow!, a mistake that made it into the printed book.
• There was significant pushback to the format of the email exchange between Jenny and Bai, even though it was identical in format to email messages you get every day. I did change it a little to ensure that you see the entire email thread one message at a time, rather than with replies interspersed.

  The email exchange was originally between Jenny and Bruce, and due to the difficulty of denoting who was talking in email with no "Jenny said" type cues, I came up with the possibly genius idea of having Bruce write in Twitter-speak. So "ayn rand" was originally "@aynrand", etc. This tied into other jokes like Bruce saying "Lol" at one point instead of laughing.

  Anyway, I got rid of all that crap when I got rid of Bruce. Bai is already ditzy enough without also having Bruce's weird netspeak. So now you must must distinguish between the two characters solely by the fact that Jenny uses capital letters and Bai doesn't. (This is also the difference between Curic and Ariel in chat.)

Now that you've seen Your Quiescent Achievement and met You'll Only See Kis ShadowEcho!, I wanna talk a little about the Gaijin. I designed this species to force me to write outside my comfort zone. I don't get pushed that far outside my comfort zone in Constellation Games, but I'll be able to in any future Constellation stuff I write. Here's how it works:

"Vanilla" introduced the ur-Gaijin, a male named This Guy Loves Salt!, a cheerful bloke who was effectively the manservant to a foppish Inostranets named Geshmu. I was never sure what their relationship was, why This Guy Loves Salt!, a member of a post-scarcity civilization of anarchists, was willing to spend his days literally carrying around his "boss" in a briefcase. I figured it was a case of two eccentrics who'd found each other.

The tipping point away from that idea was the 2009 Star Trek reboot, which saw Montgomery Scott exiled to Hoth along with an alien Starfleet officer who Memory Alpha says is named Keenser. I wrote: "Scotty's always yelling at [Keenser], shoving him around, generally treating him like Igor... this seemed cruel and even kind of racist of Scotty." Jake Berendes responded:

anything dealing with alien races invites a weird "possibly true" style of racism. which is to say, you can just declare "these people are not intelligent" or "these people are money-grubbing schemers" or in the case of the batfaced lackey race, "they respond well to being bossed around". perhaps this is just their way, so let's not be culturally insensitive!

You can declare that, but that kind of SF racism is Star Trek bullshit, because it assumes not just that (e.g.) all Ferengi are greedy, but that something about Ferengi biology makes significant cultural or individual variation impossible. For an entire species to be that one-dimensional they'd have to be... eusocial insects... or something...

So! Some species (Aliens, Inostransi, humans) join the Constellation by dumb luck: they happened to get contacted before wiping themselves out or turning into Slow People. But most surviving species tend towards conservative, low-impact cultures (like the Dhihe Coastal Coalition of the ancient Farang) that can just hold on for tens of millions of years.

The Gaijin have the most conservative culture of all. Their basic culture and behavior are hard-coded into their genes and fine-tuned by evolution to maintain the complex kin selection that propagates their three-gendered caste system. When the Gaijin civilization that produced smart paper collapsed (probably due to an asteroid impact--I like using those), everyone was sad about all the people who died, but the collapse of civilization itself was not a big deal. The Gaijin just moved to the caves and started farming, because that's what you do to survive when there's no electricity.

Gaijin don't form a hive mind, like Them; they're pure individuals. But the individuals only come in three flavors, one for each caste. They're like the Cylons in the Battlestar remake. And it's not clear to outsiders which of their behavior is voluntary and which is instinctual. (Not that it's super clear for humans.)

So, in chapter 31 you'll meet a Gaijin male who's shouty and cheerful and loves doing grunt work. That's just how they are. This Guy Loves Salt! was the same way, and so is He Sees The Map And He Throws The Dart!, the guy who organized the Mars mission, and so is the person What-The-Fuck Creek wanted Ariel to be. There are three character classes, and that's it. This idea makes me super uncomfortable, but it's not very different from a lot of other science fiction I enjoy.

Whew! After all that, I have just one question for you: are you ready? Ready for chapter 29, the GAME-CHANGING, CHANGE-GAMING cliffhanger that ends Part Two? Ready for Ariel to say, "That fucking hippie was right."? Ready, dare I say, for some football?

If not, you have a week to prepare. Unless you're going through this commentary simultaneously with reading the complete book, in which case you should take a break and have some herbal tea or something.

Image credits: Yours truly, Luca Masarco, NASA, Eric Fischer (hi!), Pop Culture Geek.

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Back when the serialization launched, people were really curious about our business model, but that curiosity didn't lead to thousands of subscriptions. The stuff I've been working on since--the commentaries, the in-character Twitter feeds--has proven great for engaging with fans but not so great at getting new people interested. This makes me worry that Constellation Games is on track to be the kind of book that has dedicated fans and gets good reviews (here's the latest: "presented so well that it is now quite hard to imagine first contact going any other way."), but never becomes the hit I was hoping for.

That's not too bad for a first novel, but I'd like to do better. There's one more inflection point approaching in the book's life, a point where some marketing could make a big difference. Sometime in early August, once the serialization has finished, the ebook will be released, and unlike the paperback, the ebook will be cheap. Setting the prices is Kate's job and not mine, but I imagine it'll be around $5, the current cost of the base package. My hope is that this will put Constellation Games into impulse-buy territory for when someone hears "hey, there's this novel about alien video games."

I'm bringing this up now because I want your help. We've got some things lined up like a radio guest appearance, some things that might or might not pan out like a bookstore appearance, a whole lot of things we tried to set up but didn't happen for whatever reason. I want your ideas of people I can contact who might be interested in talking with me, not about the book but about related interesting topics.

This is not "like us on Facebook" type crap. I hate that sort of promotion and I don't think it works. I want to set up the situation that makes me want to buy someone's book, where I hear/read them saying interesting things and then, hey, they have a book out. You've seen the sort of stuff I write on this weblog. If you know someone who might like to talk to me on their podcast, or host something I wrote, or a game I made up, or a dynamic dada assemblage, or whatever, let me know and I'll get in touch with them. I don't know if anything will come of it, but it's worth a shot. Let me know in comments or email me at leonardr@segfault.org.

You can suggest conventions or faraway bookstores, but I'm trying to get the word out without travelling a lot or spending a lot of money—likely a futile task, but the one I've chosen. (I also don't like going to conventions.) Also, my experience on both the sending and receiving ends indicates that the vast majority of emails of this kind are simply ignored, so let me know if I can/it'll help to mention your name when I email whoever you're suggesting.

Okay, business is over, time for ars gratia artis. Here's last week's Twitter feed, and here's the latest commentary:

• Everyone hates BEA Agent Fowler. You hate him, Ariel hates him, and Krakowski hates him. So Krakowski did what Ariel would do, if Ariel were a really talented bureaucrat instead of a really talented programmer. He got Fowler transferred to the ass-end of nowhere. You're probably happy about this. I made Fowler a huge jerk specifically so you'd be happy when he got the shaft. But it worked too well!

  You know the bit in The Phantom Menace where the protagonists are being chased by a big fish, who then gets eaten by an even bigger fish? If there's one thing I've learned from writing this novel, it's that if you make that first fish a big enough jerk, it'll take a while for readers to notice what the second fish is doing.

• Tiny detail I'm way too proud of: Krakowski refers to Curic as "he."
• City, In Darkness has a name inspired by (but is otherwise unconnected with) Hunter, In Darkness, Andrew Plotkin's IF remake of Hunt the Wumpus. And the "Stinky Soda Factories" in the Wii version were originally empty lots, just because I couldn't think of anything. SSFs were suggested by Kirk. The game as a whole is a more game-like version of Animal Crossing.
• After selling the book I heavily rewrote the "lying" scene between Ariel and his mom, for a couple reasons. Most importantly, when coming back after some time away from the manuscript, I found myself much more willing to be mean to Ariel.

  And this is an incredibly mean scene. Unfortunately a full grasp of its meanness requires that you come back to it later, when you know what's going through Ariel's head. I generally try to avoid that. It's fun to write, but most people won't go through the book twice, so it's not too effective. But the scene is mean on its own, and its hidden depths will start paying off as early as next week.

• Up to this point, the Constellation equivalent of Star Trek's replicator was called the Repertoire. As of the "lying" scene, it's just the repertoire. It's gone from an amazing new technology (the Web) to something accepted as part of the landscape (the web).
• Tiny notes on the lecture: I like the idea of an actual device called an intuition pump. (In real life it's a type of thought experiment, coined by Daniel Dennett.) And Tetsuo's not very optimistic about the job prospects for the students he's teaching.

Not much commentary this week, but we do have the second of three deleted scenes. This would be a "real life" scene if that distinction existed back in the third draft. As before, first the scene, then the explanation as to why I cut it. The scene opens with Ariel having biked back to Jenny's house from the train station:

September 20, evening

Waiting outside on the stairs outside Jenny's apartment. Working on Sayable Spice: Earth Remix. Back in Austin, Tetsuo back at Bruce's house. Downstairs, the clank of a bike lock. Jenny comes up the stairs and she's real sweaty and happy.

"Hey," I said. "How was your weekend?"

"How long you been here?" she said. "You should have called."

"Eh, forty-five minutes. I'm hacking. It's fine."

"Weekend was great!" said Jenny. She drew keys from her bicycle shorts and unlocked the apartment door. "I took my nephew into space."

"How far out did you go?"

"Well, first we stood in line for eight hours. But surprisingly even that was fun. Eddie and I played drawing games on his smart paper. Then we went up, we did a couple orbits, we buzzed the ISS, came within like ten feet of some other tourists from China, and back down."

I reclaimed Jenny's couch with my ass. "That's not very far," I said.

"Far enough, Ariel! It was the best experience of my life! It was like being in this beautiful glass womb and seeing the whole Earth reborn."

"Oh, wow, maybe I should try it."

"Dude, have a smoke before you go up. The merry-wan-ha. Don't give up on space travel because of nausea."

"It's not just nausea. It's this feeling of emptiness. Like..."

Jenny stood behind the sofa and clapped her hands onto my shoulders. "All right then. What shall we do for dinner?"

about this stuff

"Can we do pork-stuffed lobster with cheese sauce?"

"Sure, I think we got a couple lobsters in the crisper. Right under the filet mignon. What's your problem, Ariel? Your folks don't even keep kosher."

"I'm so much like them that I feel this need to differentiate myself from them. We all do it. You became an artist, Raph became a right-wing asshole..."

"Well, differentiate yourself by chopping some green beans. We'll do stir-fry."

The other two deleted scenes were added in the second draft, but this one was added in the third draft. I like this scene, but there's no reason for it to exist. It doesn't do any worldbuilding or character development that isn't done elsewhere. I originally wrote it to foreshadow developments in chapter 30, but as I suggested when discussing the lying scene, foreshadowing is overrated. It's just an easter egg for people who go back and reread. That's worth a sentence, not a whole scene.

Plus, this easter egg confuses more than it clarifies, and there already are easter eggs for chapter 30, e.g. in chapters 2 and 17. So I cut the scene, but I (tenatively) still consider it canon.

That's it for this week. Don't miss the exciting chapter 28, in which Ariel's descent into madness continues, to the extent that Ashley is forced to say, "I don't wish to mate with you!" [We really need to talk about these misleading previews. -Ed.]

Image credits: NASA, Chris Lott, Flickr user mecookie, NASA.

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Actually, before we shall, I have some good non-novel news. I've sold my story "Four Kinds of Cargo" to Strange Horizons! Look for it late this year. It's not a Constellation story, but I think fans of the book will like it.

Here's last week's extensive Twitter feeds. I retconned one of Tetsuo's posts because he mentioned his cocktail experiments, which don't happen until this week. And now, a bulleted list:

• As far as I know, Tetsuo's observation about the air freshener in this chapter is the only explicit acknowledgement that Constellation Games takes place in the future. You'll notice there's no year on the dates in the blog posts. Even within the commentary I was going to play coy about the exact year, but I'll just tell you that it's 2015. That's the only year that's consistent with Ariel's age, the dates of holidays, the American election cycle, phases of the moon, and so on. I typed cal 2015 more times than you'd believe while writing this book.

  I didn't give the year in-story because of something I noticed with "Mallory". That story officially takes place in 2007, but because the year isn't in your face, it could be as late as 2010. The only jarring 2007 detail is the clunky pre-iPhone cells. Not naming a year gives a near-future story a few years of "this could be now" and a few years of "this could be the recent past". Things don't generally change that fast. My hope is that this phenomenon buys Constellation Games enough time to make it to the actual 2015 without becoming dated.

  

• The original title for this chapter was "Second Chances". That fits pretty well but it's a reference to the fictional sitcom from chapter 16, which no one remembers by this point. "Everyone With Cartoon Violence" doesn't fit terribly well (it would be a better title for chapter 28, and I actually thought I'd changed it), but as a string of words it can't be beat. I'm gonna say the "Cartoon Violence" is a reference to Ariel's Ninja Turtles story.
• I've noticed it's common for someone not to get along with their parents even though their parents are perfectly nice people. I don't really understand it, but I suspect I would if my father had lived into my adulthood. Anyway, I tried to depict that phenomenon here, without taking sides.
• Tetsuo's a little light on the "worse than Beatlemania" details, but hopefully you're starting to see why there's no port back to Constellation space right now.
• Lots of the Slow People stuff mentioned here (especially the making of backups) is dramatized in "The Time Somn Died". The next few chapters lay a lot of the groundwork for "Somn", and I'm not going to point it out every time.
• Random influences: Ariel's parents' house is closely modelled after the last house my mother lived in. The Ninja Turtles story is made up, but inspired by conversations I've had with Lucian Kahn. The chummy narrative voice of Your Quiescent Achievement was inspired by WWII-era military "Pocket Guides".
• My phone's bootup message is "This is Your Quiescent Achievement."
• Ariel's dad's line about Ariel being an unreliable narrator was originally "The neutrality of this story has been disputed." It's his only line in the novel.
• Very early in my worldbuilding, Ariel had a younger sister named Britomart. She probably would have been in this scene, but given that Ariel's dad has one line and Raphael only shows up in Ariel's stories, more family members are totally unnecessary. But I wanted to mention Britomart as one more example of how terrible Ariel's parents are at naming kids. Let's say they were like "Ariel if it's a boy, Britomart if it's a girl."
• "I don't think it has much in common with the Internet" is, for me, Curic's Crowning Moment of Awesome. An odd choice? Perhaps, but consider the following. Curic's overlay just deployed a secure interplanetary communications network under the guise of shiny toys for humanity, and she's not even interested in the technology. She just needs an open communication channel to do her job. It's "the net interprets censorship as damage" taken to an extreme.

  I wouldn't call it "awesome", but I also love how good Curic is at pushing Ariel's buttons here.

  Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains,
  Let me remember thee what thou hast promised,
  Which is not yet perform'd me.

• I really hate it when people put disclaimers in their apologies. Stop it! If you're still trying to have the argument, you're not apologizing.
• Curic never lies to Ariel. But in retrospect, it's good I had to change it so we heard the truth about ambivalence from Tetsuo (see last week's commentary). There'd really be no reason to trust that information coming from Curic.

  And I say Curic never lies to Ariel, but the third draft went through a phase where she did, and it's possible I never took that out. So I dunno!

Before I go, a little bonus deleted snippet from the Ariel/Curic conversation, which might be of interest:

"The mature thing to do is to send for help before you end up like the Inostrantsi."

"The Inostrantsi are still around," I pointed out.

"The Inostrantsi reproduce by budding," said Curic. "They didn't have much genetic diversity to lose. They're also immortal, so the surviving individuals had good memories of pre-collapse society. Let's not push our luck, Ariel."

Okay! Good commentary, everybody. Tune in next week for Tetsuo's first college lecture, during the course of which he will say, "I'm sorry, I just assumed there was space travel."

Image credits: Azmeen Afandi, Brian Sterling, yours truly.

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One bit in the final chapter is presented out of order, but there's it's still chronological from a certain standpoint. Here in chapter 25, I just wasn't a good enough writer to present the events of the novel in strict chronological order. I don't know why this sort of thing bothers me so much. (Actually, I do.)

I'm tired of getting interrupted every week to write the commentary, so last week I made them my main project. I've completed commentaries up to the end of chapter 33 (but haven't chosen the images, which takes a while on its own). After chapter 36, there will be some short commentaries on the bonus stories and "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans", and possibly one more on the book as a whole.

If you've read the paperback, the spoiler thread from last week is still open for your questions and comments. Here's last week's Tetsuo-licious Twitter feeds, and now commentary:

• Could it be that Tetsuo's excitement about being on Earth is starting to wear off and he's now experiencing culture shock? That's the most likely explanation, but I don't want to admit it, because I designed Tetsuo to handle culture shock better than any other character in the book. Not immune, though. According to Americans I've talked to who've lived in Japan, there's a cycle for these things.

  But Tetsuo's also mad at Ariel in particular for being a hick. This was strengthened a lot in the third draft. Ariel's misconception about Curic's ambivalence wasn't originally cleared up until a Curic scene in chapter 26. But there's absolutely no way that misconception could survive a conversation with Tetsuo, and no way Ariel wouldn't bring it up as soon as he could talk with Tetsuo.

  So I had to rip out the explanation of ambivalence, move it to chapter 25, and port it from Curic to Tetsuo. And while Curic's attitude towards Ariel's misconception was (and will be) "what did I expect", Tetsuo gets angry.

• The ambivalence thing is my little trick on you, dear readers. The Brain Embryo games are ninety million years old! They were produced by a society that clearly had huge problems. Don't assume they're representative of modern attitudes. In this respect, moving the ambivalence reveal to chapter 25 is a big win, because it immediately precedes another problem with a video game's outdated assumptions:

  

• In chapter 18's Brilhantes 5 review, Tetsuo showed himself to be extraordinarily naive about the cultural context of human video games. By chapter 33 he understands it about as well as Ariel does. This chapter, 25, contains the inflection point in the process: Tetsuo's horrifying experience with Temple Sphere, a best-selling game about genocide, a game for which his friend shares indirect responsibility. This is his Ev luie Aka's Ultimate DIY Lift-Off, and the Temple Sphere scene mirrors the chapter 12 scene where he walked Ariel through Ev luie Aka.
• One reader mentioned it was odd that Tetsuo doesn't know what the Tools of Justice look like, since he has the strategy guide right there. The official explanation is that Tetsuo wants to experience the Tools in-game and hasn't looked at the strategy guide yet. The unofficial explanation is that the scene with the strategy guide originally took place in chapter 27 (there's a different strategy guide there now). I moved it here so we could take care of all the Temple Sphere stuff in one scene, and so this scene would have a payoff instead of just being interrupted by Ariel's mom.
• The potted plants on a warship are a little tribute to the mood of Keith Laumer's Retief stories. No reason the warship can't look nice!
• "There's already a video game about ports" is my in-world nod to Portal (see chapter 12 commentary).
• "It's not a tumor!" is another goofy reference I worked into the story just because I could. I feel dumb even pointing that one out, but I have a hunch that "it's not a tumor" is kind of an America-centric reference. (It's from Kindergarten Cop; specifically, the trailer for Kindergarten Cop.)
• In a few chapters you'll find out what is the deal with Ariel and Jenny. By that I mean, "why aren't they fucking". Look how they bicker! It's embarassing, like watching Garak and Bashir go at it. So what's the holdup? you ask voyeuristically.

  I originally wanted to leave this unresolved. I don't think a platonic friendship is a "thing" that needs "explaining." But people demanded explanation. So, I told myself that if I could think of an explanation that wasn't a total cliche, I would put it in the story. And... I did think of one.

  Enough about that for now. I bring it up because up to this point I've kind of wanted to let you think the explanation might be that Jenny's lesbian. But the "pretty-boy who cuts himself" line in this chapter puts a stop to that.

  (The pretty-boy in question is Josh Rogan, who's mentioned in this week's Twitter feed and never again. Although next week's feed implies Jenny has been putting things up Josh's butt. And no, that's not the explanation.)

Now for all you loyal commentary readers, it's time for the first ever Constellation Games deleted scene. Early in the second draft, this chapter ended with Ariel and Tetsuo on the commuter train to Ariel's parents' house in College Station. I'll present the train conversation and then explain why I cut it:

"Do people ever ask you what your real name is?" asked Tetsuo. "When you tell them your name?"

"No," I said, "but I'm not a space alien who took a Japanese name."

"It seems very rude," said Tetuo.

"What is your real name?"

"Why do you ask me the instant I tell you I don't like to be asked? Tetsuo Milk is my real name."

"What was your name before you learned a human name to change it to?"

Tetsuo made a reluctant sound and then said "Don't transliterate that in your blog."

"That's pronouncable," I said. "Why'd you change it?"

"We always adopt local names on contact missions," said Tetsuo. "We've got to prove we're the most adaptable species in the universe. We're pretty conceited, honestly."

"Hey," I said, "that's our schtick. Humans are the most adaptable species."

"According to who?"

"That's just how it works. Everybody's the best at something. Farang are the strongest, Barbarians are the fastest, Her is the creepiest. Humans are the most flexible."

"Are you designing a role-playing game?"

"Better me than somebody who doesn't know basic rules of game balance."

"Everybody thinks their species is the most adaptable," said Tetsuo. "It's like patriotism. You like the Longhorns, your parents like the Aggies, who's to say who's right?"

"Those are football teams," I said. "Patriotism is for countries."

"Well, you get what I'm saying."

It's a pretty funny conversation, which is why I present it now, but I cut it because it has serious problems and I make better use of its ideas later on:

• See above re: Tetsuo's journey towards understanding human games. At this point, Tetsuo absolutely does not know enough to make the connection between Ariel's species-essentialist attitude and the character creation tables in RPGs.
• But Ariel should have seen enough variation within ET species (compare Tetsuo to Ashley to Charlene Siph) to start to question this attitude, or at least not say it to Tetsuo's face.
• This scene introduces the idea that Tetsuo doesn't want the general public to know his native-language name, which is good stuff. But as soon as chapter 28 it becomes clear that there's absolutely no way he would tell Ariel, either.
• I think it's realistic for people in a multispecies confederation to feel patriotic about their species, the way you might have a favorite sports team. But I really doubt Tetsuo buys into the patriotism thing, for the same reason it's unlikely Ariel actually "like[s] the Longhorns". In chapter 28, you'll see this idea presented from the perspective of someone who did buy into it, and it's more effective there.

Basically, a much better scene in chapter 28 killed off this scene. Let's let it rest... in peace.

Tune in next week for the family reunion, during which Tetsuo will say, "Your brother's not a turtle."

Image credits: Thomas Deusing, Dave Herholz, NASA, Maureen Didde, Flickr user Perro Viejo.

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This week's Twitter feed is almost entirely devoted to Tetsuo's first day on Earth. Today also marks the start of the Great Microblog Bonus Content Migration. Prior to this point, Ariel's feed was where it was at. But Ariel's now too busy to tweet a lot, and he'll stay busy until the end of the book. Tetsuo's feed will be picking up the slack, chronicling his adventures on Earth and showing what the other characters are doing as the focus of the novel tightens around Ariel. If you're following Ariel but not Tetsuo, this is the week to get on the Tetsuo Train (patent pending).

(NB. I won't be setting a Twitter profile image for Tetsuo because the default image is a much better depiction of him than anything I could come up with.)

Speaking of Twitter feeds, here's last week's. And before we get started, some extratextual comments:

Now that the paperback is out, you can get it from your regular source for paperbacks: Barnes and Noble or Amazon, or order it from a bookstore through Ingram, or is there any chance a bookstore might proactively stock it based on the radioactively glowing Publishers Weekly review? I wouldn't depend on it, but that would be nice. Note that the paperback is the only thing you can get from your usual source—bonuses are only available from the C&G store, and the ebook edition won't be out until serialization wraps up at the end of July.

I'm not sure when people who are getting bonus stories and USB keys will be receiving them, so lemme just tell you this now. For our mutual peace of mind, I ask that you hold off reading those stories until you finish the novel. "Dana no Chousen" takes place after the novel; "Found Objects" casually blows two of the Part Three reveals; and "The Time Somn Died" is, in my opinion, actually incomprehensible unless you've read the whole book and know a lot more about Ashley and the Constellation than you do now.

You can read "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans" anytime, even though it "takes place" after the novel. It's got basic spoilers like "Tetsuo still teaches at UT Austin", but guess what, I just spoiled you on that.

Finally, an obligatory reminder: although has been an instance where the week's chapter didn't show up in the web archive, the emails are consistently sent out every week, and if you didn't get a chapter it's almost certainly in your spam folder.

Now on to real commentary. I wrote the contact event as a positive catastrophe, a shocking world-changing event out of nowhere which is absolutely wonderful. These days a catastrophe leaves a maelstrom of frantic Internet communication in its wake, a stew of information and guesses and wishful thinking and propaganda that slowly settle into an agreed-upon set of facts and opinions and crackpot theories.

This process has been happening in the background throughout the novel. You've only seen glimpses of it (the bits that Ariel contributes), but it's very important, because that's how I've been controlling the flow of the worldbuilding: flooding the zone with misinformation and letting the truth precipitate out when I'm ready to use it dramatically.

There must be CDBOEGOACC games about Ragtime and the Slow People. But I can't tell you all this stuff at once. There'd be no space for a story. My Creative License-ish solution is there's lots of information about this stuff once you know where to look, but no human consensus about what information is accurate. It's a mess of half-assed opinions mixed up with misinformation and conspiracy theory, with no way of judging the truth of the matter. (Bai will complain about this next week.)

It was easy to control the flow of information early in the novel, when I had the world's governments working on my behalf. In "Found Objects" Jenny has a hard time getting some basic information, because that story takes place during chapter 5. But with the Greenland Treaty in effect, the half-life of secrets has declined dramatically, and the worldbuilding is starting to flood the story.

But I still have control over one thing. Ariel is the narrator. There are secrets he has to keep, details he considers unimportant, and one thing he just doesn't want to tell you. Eventually he'll figure out the central mystery of the book, and he won't tell you that either. (Don't worry, I won't leave you hanging.) With Tetsuo blabbing all the stuff the Constellation played down in the first half of the book, Ariel's scheming and obstinacy and fear of embarrassment are my secret weapons for maintaining a relatively even pacing.

That was the big-think piece, now for the misc:

• One of the big reasons I rewrote the press release, instead of cutting it along with the rest of the contact manager subplot, is it's the first explicit statement of what all the ETs with Greenland Treaty visas are doing on Earth. They're copying stuff. The way Curic scanned Ariel's college notebooks, and the way all the Ip Shkoy computer games and hardware were put into the CDBOEGOACC.
• I love the press release's self-loathing and final descent into madness, and how easy it is for Dana to "fix" it. That's basically what I'd write if I had to write a press release.
• I don't think "you fucking chiselers" fits terribly well (it's left over from the "contact manager" app, which cost $0.99), but it was a darling I couldn't bear to kill.
• Thanks to A.K., registered medical marijuana patient, for coming up with the brand name of Jenny's pot. The legalization of marijuana in this universe was established back in chapter 6. Completists will also want to check the microblog archive for chapter 8.
• You got that Tetsuo doesn't buy Ariel's story about the house fire, right? But he's not pushing it. Good, we're on the same page. Also, you got the "little computer people" reference, yeah? I knew I could count on you.
• I had a definite personality in mind for Tetsuo on Earth, around humans other than Ariel: the elderly European professor in a 1930s movie who flirts shamelessly with every woman he sees under the understanding that nothing will come of it. Like if Bela Lugosi's Dracula wasn't a vampire, just a really suave guy.

  As you'll soon see in Tetsuo's Twitter feed, the "nothing will come of it" understanding does not hold for Alien women.

  

• Even in the near future, I don't think a consumer phone-camera would be sensitive enough to make possible the constellation-recognizing app Ariel uses here. It's a cool idea, though. All it takes is a little... Creative License.
• We get our first gameplay glimpse of Temple Sphere. Longtime readers may remember (but readers who just picked up the paperback are more likely to remember) that Ariel reviewed Quexx, TS's game-within-a-game, way back in chapter 2. The prequel Ariel worked on is Recoil, which also showed up in chapter 2, as the game that made Smoke-Cursive-Cytoplasm-Snakebite-Singsong-Polychromatic suspicious of Ariel. It's the Marathon to TS's Halo.

  In the second draft this was the first scene that really made use of Ariel's prior work for Reflex Games. Reflex becomes very important as early as next week, so I went back and backfilled it a bit, notably by adding the scene at the Reflex office in chapter 5.

• The handheld computer on the cover of Constellation Games is a replica of one owned by Dieue the Four-Fisted. You can see his name on the back cover, written in solder. If you get "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans" you'll be able to transliterate all the script on the cover—it's either words that show up in the book (like "Dieue"), or it's English written in Pey Shkoy script.
• As a bonus for commentary readers, I'm telling you straight up that you're not going to get a lot more solid information about Ragtime than you get in Tetsuo's initial description here. A lot of mysteries will be resolved by the end of the book, but not this one. I do have an explanation for the mystery, and if I write a sequel it'll probably go in there.

  Because I don't explain the mystery, my whole writing group said I should cut Ragtime from the novel. Fools! The mystery is what's important. But for some reason readers didn't see it that way.

  So: after selling the book I wrote a new scene, the final Ariel/Tetsuo scene. That scene will call back to this chapter's conversation under the night sky, how Ariel freaked out about Ragtime and how Tetsuo reacted. If I've done my job, that scene will change the way you look at Tetsuo. Look for it!

The beefiest commentary yet? I'm not going back to check. Instead I'm looking forward, to next week, when Tetsuo will say, "What were you smoking? Perhaps it was crack!"

Image credits: Tim Patterson, Matt Lancashire, Mark, Doug Kline.

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It's always sadder when characters bring about their own destruction than when someone else screws them over. In the second draft this episode was a little less of a downer, because while Ariel was living in coffee shop exile he had a great idea for a mobile app he could write very quickly and sell to recoup some of his losses from the last chapter. So all the awful stuff between him and Dana and Jenny still happened, but at least we ended on a positive note. Who needs that, right? Just hang tough.

I cut out the "mobile app" subplot because it added a lot of story complexity for no real benefit. Ariel's already working on a software project, so why add another one? He puts out a press release for it next chapter, but I just turned it into a press release for the Sayable Spice: Earth Remix demo. Works fine.

I'll talk about the proposed app after the miscellaneous commentary, because this week's is a little light and next week's will probably be huge. (Spoiler: Tetsuo comes to Earth.)

Oh, and here's last week's Twitter archive.

• Not really happy with the chapter title. I like the joke, but it barely fits the events of the chapter.
• "They make cradles in all sizes." is probably my favorite Jenny line in the book. Jenny's comedy is more context-dependent than Ariel's or Tetsuo's. Like, I think her most memorable line is (are you sitting down?): "Wastebasket."
• The scene with Dana went back and forth between being "real life" and being a blog post. This meant that Dana went back and forth between being "Dana" and being "Svetlana", and she and Ariel went from frankly discussing what happened in chapter 22 to maintaining the fiction that there was a fire. Except I forgot to change that last one back. So Dana still says "lost in the fire." I caught this very late in the publishing process and asked Kate to fix it by putting "fire" in scare quotes.

  The blog post portion got truncated to what Ariel writes in the coffee shop afterwards. For the third draft I decided he's smart enough at this point not to air his dirty laundry with Jenny on his blog.

• I coulda turned the business AI trojan into a whole separate story, but it's just a little bit of exposition showing Dana Light's odd view of what constitutes "human behavior". That's life... a-life, that is!
• No one [told me they] noticed the reference to the Slow People in Her's chapter 21 monologue. Which is good, I didn't want you to notice it. I think if you did, you'd stumble in your reading and it would wreck the scene. I want it to be a situation where you go back and find it later and it BLOWS YOUR MIND, MAN.

  Originally that was the book's first mention of Slow People, but that's no good, so I backdated the subplot where Krakowski asks Ariel to listen for word of them.

  You'll find out who the Slow People are soon enough, I got other plot threads I gotta take care of.

Okay, about that mobile app. One thing that barely shows up in Constellation Games, but was very important in "Vanilla", is the contact audit. To sponsor an ET for an American visa (as Ariel did for Curic and Bai is now doing for Tetsuo), you need to register with the BEA as a contactee. You're supposed to do the same if you have any prolonged or repeated contact with ETs, although the Greenland Treaty is quickly making that unenforcable.

All registered contactees need to come in to their local field office twice a year for a sit-down interview about all the ETs they've encountered over the past six months. It's generally a formality; the point is to make contact with ETs a pain in the ass and, on the margin, discourage people from having anything to do with the Constellation.

Ariel's mobile app idea was a "contact manager", a way of taking the pain out of your contact audit. Whenever you meet an ET you just take a picture of them—something you were going to do anyway—and enter their name. Then your contact audit is effectively just a slideshow.

In the second draft, Ariel's key business insight was that although relatively few people really need this app, a lot of people want to be the sort of person who needs it, so they'd buy it aspirationally. Clever idea, but not really necessary for the story, so out it went.

That's all I got. Tune in next week for the TETSUOUS continuation, in which Ariel will say "Jesus Christ the great moral teacher!"

Image credits: Tim Patterson, Doug Kline.

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Surely these are far from the only typos in the book [I originally wrote "on the book"], but they're really bad, and deserve a special correction, and my apologies.

In a couple weeks I may do a special spoiler post so that those who've read the whole book can ask me questions about stuff that hasn't been serialized yet, rather than waiting until the appropriate chapter comes up in the serialization.

There's a solitary tweet in last week's microblog archive. Let's move on to the commentary:

I came into this chapter treating it like a chess problem. I had all the pieces on the board and the question was how Ariel would outsmart the BEA again, the way he did with Dana. I sat down and puzzled over this and had a long conversation with Beth trying to figure out how to get Ariel out of this scrape.

And after about forty-five minutes of being totally stumped I asked myself the obvious question: Why am I trying to get Ariel out of this?

At this point I knew how the book would end (it turns out I only knew how Part Two would end). I didn't have the plot planned out between now and then, but at some point I needed to break Ariel. This is the perfect time to start. He's stressed out from Sayable Spice work, shaken from his encounter with Her and the revelation of Curic's ambivalence. Let's just go for it.

So I destroyed Ariel's house. He tries all the clever gambits I thought of for him, and they don't work, and he loses. And that was the single best thing that ever happened to the book. From this point on the characters are developed enough that I can do whatever horrible things I want to them. They'll either figure something out and come out on top, or they'll lose, and either way it'll be interesting reading.

A lot of this week's commentary is me telling stories that are at best tangentially related to the chapter. But if that's good enough for big-name DVD commentaries, it's good enough for me:

• This was a little clearer in the third draft, but hopefully it's still clear. Something's going to happen around October 13 that makes Ariel willing to tell the truth about his house. The backdated post is a little flash-forward to the end of part two. So live in suspense! Or read the paperback, whatever.
• I got tons of pushback about Fowler's pie line in chapter 19, but apparently "That fucking snitch crate!" is A-OK.
• The Legend of the Bystander review got stuck in the beginning of this chapter because that's the last possible place it can go—after September 2 there's no more Brain Embryo. Because I placed that scene without thinking about it on a plot level, I didn't notice until just now that it creates a bizarre incongruity. Ariel keeps going back to Curic in the house-losing conversation ("You need to talk to Curic about this," "Maybe Curic can stop this."), even though he's just learned that Curic is crazy.

  I'm gonna file this under "accidental awesomeness" rather than "correctly regarded as goofs", because I think it fits in very well with what we see of the Ariel/Curic relationship. But it was totally unintentional.

  

• The missile defense joke is super inaccurate (much like missile defense itself—heyo!), but I left it in 'cause it's a funny failure mode. Inaccuracies: 1) An object with negative mass would probably look like nothing at all. 2) If that glitch did happen, the investigation would take months and a low-level State Department bureaucrat would never hear about it. 3) The port + its casing + the telepresence robot probably has a positive net mass anyway.

  The most likely in-story explanation is that Krakowski found out about Ariel's trip through old-fashioned HUMINT and is now trying to dazzle him with technobabble (a favor Ariel will return later). After all, the Constellation's not very good at keeping secrets. But I'm good at taking... Creative License.

• There's not really an "Austin Building Inspection Division" per se. Krakowski is clearly referring to the Building Inspection Division of the city's Planning and Development Review Department.
• The Greenland Treaty has been mentioned before, but now it's a done deal. Although it's mentioned several more times throughout the book, I deliberately left the details vague, because 1) who cares, and 2) if I set down the details I can't change them later to fit a future story. But non-canonically, Greenland has gained independence from Denmark and is now effectively a client state of the Hierarchy Interface overlay.
• When I took this chapter to writing group there was one person who really loved Fowler's line about using a black hole as a lathe. Yes, it's a good line. Very evocative, if I do say so myself. But this person was stuck on it. They said I should expand on that line in flashback, and spun a fantastical scene describing the port's construction, like the beginning of the Lord of the Rings movie where you see the Rings of Power being made.

  One of the rules of my writing group is that the person whose story it is doesn't talk until everyone else has given their critique. So I said nothing. But I thought: what the hell?! I can't put that in a comedy novel! It would read like Spinal Tap playing "Stonehenge"!

  I have no other complaints about this persons' critiques (they're not with the group anymore), and I've certainly delivered my share of idiosyncratic critiques. But that moment has stayed with me, perhaps because it's the kind of random obsession I expect from my characters.

• Ariel's defense of his parents' toilet-training techniques was inspired by one of my earliest memories. When my mom was training my sister Susanna, she bought bags and bags of cheap grocery-store candy to use as bribes, because Susanna was being difficult. This did not sit well with me, as my access to candy had always been severely constrained, despite my willingness to get on board with the pee-in-the-toilet program.

  In particular I remember coveting a bag of circus peanuts. Circus peanuts! I had never even heard of such a thing. Like a peanut and a candy at the same time! Oh, how I longed for those circus peanuts. But they were for Susanna.

  I told this story to Susanna last year when I went to visit for Christmas, and she had absolutely no memory of it. I don't remember my own toilet training, so it's quite possible my mom went the bribery route with Susanna because I'd been so horrible. Or that I'd had circus peanuts and forgotten about them.

  Anyway, if you subscribe to that archaic psychology theory that explains everything about a person in terms of their toilet training experience, you've now got a bonanza to work with.

• And closing out this week's commentary with another personal story explaining something that doesn't need to be explained. Dana's plan to disguise herself as a flyer for a chiptune concert is a super-obscure reference to a surprise birthday party I planned for Sumana in 2008. I came up with an imaginary chiptune concert as a way to get out of the house without making her want to come with. I don't even think that qualifies as a "reference", but that's why Dana says "chiptune concert" and not something else.
• Puzzle Korner: next week, Krakowski's going to ask Ariel about something Her said in chapter 21. Do you know what that might be?

Pretty chunky commentary this week, hope you enjoyed it. Be sure to tune in next week for chapter 23, when Jenny will say, "I don't masturbate to it."

Image credits: yours truly, the city of Austin, NASA/Ames, Wikimedia Commons user Hoshie.

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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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Once again, the grand prize is a galley copy of Constellation Games which will hopefully be delivered a few days before the paperback comes out. Even I don't have a galley copy, so you know it's exclusive. There'll also be a random drawing, and the winner will get a free basic-level subscription. Although since everyone who entered is already a subscriber, I don't know if you want that. Maybe you can give it to a friend, maybe you can negotiate a different prize with Kate, the publisher.

Anyway, let's take a look at the entries:

• First, you gotta check out Andrew Perry's nerdtastic entries. He took little bits of worldbuilding I'd scattered around the novel and created (AFAIK) the first piece of Constellation Games fan fiction, featuring realistic Farang, Alien, and Wazungu games, plus one created for humans by a Smoke submind. I especially liked the "Flase Daylight".

  In a non-ironic twist, Andrew's fidelity to existing Constellation Games canon was what cost him the award. Since I wrote the stuff he was stitching together, reading his CDBOEGOACC entries didn't make me feel like I was on a flight of fancy. But, I have asked Kate for dispensation to award Andrew the special CDBOEGOACC Jury Prize.

All the other entries were short concept quotes posted to Twitter. I've archived all of them here because I really hate the way Twitter's UI consigns the past to a dark, eternal oubliette.

• Ornithopter:
  • The Way Arounding: hide your shameful underscale color from your husband's husband while negotiating a wedding contract with him
  • "An invading army is coming. You have 3 days to store fat for hibernation and to bury yourself deep enough to avoid detection."
  • Young-Time Architecture: Design a nest for your eggs of sufficient complexity to prevent yourself from eating them.
  • Fish or Other Fish?: You are captured by Roetus. Arrange patterns of color to convince them you're sentient before they eat you. (The title "Fish or Other Fish?" comes from an event in Dolkoan history where a fish and its twin competed for war-minister.)
  • No Never Negation No No!: Find the lost start-card to your transport shuttle in a series of exotic locations. #cdboegoacc
  • No Never Negation No No No!: Sequel to NNNNN! You are the transport-shuttle's start card. Hide to extend your owner's vacation.
• George Buckenham:
  • Thermal Vent Orchestrator: Intended as a test of vent-controlling verisimilitude, but usually played for laughs with cheats on.
  • "When Catastrophe Strikes, Emulate the Octopus" [he adds: "this is actually the title of a Wired article"]
• Benhimself:
  • Xarthru: "Falling shapes composed of four blocks descend from above, arrange them in lines to clear them and score." Wait, what?
  • Squigglers III: Eat delicious parasites off the tentacle monster on which you live without becoming a meal yourself!
  • Launch asteroids at a planet using the gravity wells of other orbiting planets to save energy.The other player will return fire. [This is very similar to "Occluded Occlusion", an Ip Shkoy game mentioned in chapter 33. -LR]
• Gus Andrews
  • Pentathlon: Behemoth bowling, cotyledon racing, flailing, cube dancing, bluntshooting
  • Aesthetics-driven, unscored "doing-the-dozens"-style attempt to outdo other players by producing the most nuanced cloud of gas
• Tikitu de Jager
  • Bloom: Rediscover the excitement of first pollination. Only this time YOU decide where the seeds fall.
  • Society: Out-game negotiations influence in-game status, and (where not prohibited by applicable social strictures) vice versa.
• Adam Parrish
  • one player must communicate a terminal semantic taxon to others without using distal mouthparts or pheromone glands
• Brendan Adkins
  • "Largely Automated Testimony Extractor:" Only a game inasmuch as one can play to lose.
  • "Hit The Button Before Anyone Else Hits The Button:" Popularity declined after players began using relativistic time dilation.
  • "My Friend The Modular Dissent Repression System:" Hacks a hunter-drone's neural core to prioritize cuddling.
  • "Inferior Gasband:" Created to defame a rival pseudofamily. Rivals later ate the designer and produced a successful sequel.
  • "If You Outscore This Game's Designer At This Game Her Agents Will Implode Your Home Village With Hydrocarbons:" No longer true.
  • "That's Enough:" designed for slowphase, an innovative anti-cheating system emits UV flares if the player displays life-signs.
  • "Meatchild:" An innovative control scheme allows up to 4 million of Her hive-units to cooperatively guide a single biped.
• Mirabai Knight
  • A long-scope evolutionary commerce game in which shoemakers must adapt to the cyclic disappearance and reappearance of feet.
• Evan Baer (who entered after the deadline, but I'll at least put his entry up here)
  • Stop, Memmings! subvert attempts of adorable figures to prevent access to Constellation drop boxes, which are empty when opened.

I thought all the entries were really good, although Adam may have been phoning it in. C'mon, Adam, this ain't Apples to Apples. Anyway, I'm excluding Adam and Brendan from consideration because they were beta readers. Here are my three favorites (apart from Andrew's, which I've already spilled the beans that it didn't win):

• "An invading army is coming. You have 3 days to store fat for hibernation and to bury yourself deep enough to avoid detection." [Ornithopter]
• Pentathlon: Behemoth bowling, cotyledon racing, flailing, cube dancing, bluntshooting [Gus Andrews]
• A long-scope evolutionary commerce game in which shoemakers must adapt to the cyclic disappearance and reappearance of feet. [Mirabai Knight]

And the winner of the Constellation Games galley copy is... Ornithopter! I loved their game concept because it tied into a theme I don't really explore in CG: the repurposing of really awful historical situations as entertainment simulations.

But don't give up yet, non-disqualified entrants! We've still got the random drawing. And here's some Python code to perform it:

>>> import random
>>> entrants = ["Andrew Perry", "Ornithopter", "George Buckenham", "Benhimself", "Gus Andrews", "Tikitu de Jager", "Mirabai Knight"]
>>> random.choice(entrants)
'Andrew Perry'

OK, well, that worked out. Andrew Perry will receive the random drawing prize, and we'll just call it the CDBOEGOACC Jury Prize.

And that's it for the gala CDBOEGOACC giveaway contest! I hope it was a fun time. I certainly enjoyed watching people come up with this stuff.

I'm not sure who put a bunch of tags on CG's LibraryThing page, but they're pretty great. (and full of spoilers) Apparently CG is a bildungsroman about cosplay, douchebags, mecha-godzilla, real replicas, and vastening. I don't disagree!

Come for the Twitter archive, stay for the commentary. CDBOEGOACC contest winners will be announced as soon as I finish the post.

• Last week I mentioned that Svetlana Sveta did not exist in the second draft. There were a lot of scenes with Ariel or Bai carrying around and talking to a piece of paper. I think of the second draft as what "really" happened, the factual basis for Ariel's blog posts in the third draft.

  You can see that Ariel isn't trying very hard to conceal the truth. He left unchanged details like the way "Svetlana" dresses, and he added over-the-top winks like Svetlana boasting about supplanting Dana. Bits like "Svetlana held her smart paper against the TV screen" are minimal glosses on what happened in the second draft ("I taped the smart paper to the television").

• In SF that features humans among lots of alien species, there's frequently some BS idea that humans are special. I was going to write that TV Tropes probably has a name for it, and then I looked and yes, the name is: "Humans Are Special." This generalization takes many forms, none of which I like, but the one I dislike least is the one given in Babylon 5: humans are special in that they form communities.

  This one at least has some truth to it. Human cultures are all over the map, but almost by definition they involve a bunch of humans forming a community. I wouldn't go as far as B5's suggestion that humans form inclusive communities (TV Tropes: "Humans Are Diplomats"). But it is a real tendency which distinguishes humans from, say, octopus.

  Farang are more like octopus. There's nothing wrong with this, it's not time for them to learn a valuable lesson about what it means to be human, but it means their cultures have little in common with human cultures. A normal human put into a Farang body would be a misfit, the kind of person who produces offensive artwork like Sayable Spice. A human might be able to identify with such artwork, but probably not with its pugnaciousness.

  (nb. humans are not special in the Constellation universe; Aliens are very similar and they got there first. This is the subject of chapter 25's deleted scene, which I'll put up when the time comes.)

  

• We finally get the tense Ariel/Jenny scene I mentioned a while back, a scene that shows what Ariel thinks Jenny thinks of him, and hiding in between, a little bit of what they actually think of each other. "Found Objects" has an analogous scene from Jenny's POV.
• I've mentioned before that Tactical Nuclear Exchange is basically Twilight Struggle with the complexity dialed way up, but I really like that extra complexity: the ideology board with its traps, the simulation of the shortcomings of Soviet central planning where the Soviet player lays out a plan and the American player shuffles the plan cards. Most of all, the idea that the game can abruptly end and render all your setup time moot.

  In Twilight Struggle, the player who starts a nuclear war automatically loses. I sometimes find myself making decisions not to help me win, but to help the game go on a normal amount of time given how long it took to set up. I don't think this kind of decision-making is even particularly unrealistic in a nuclear context, but it's only half the story.

  Because really, who cares who started the war? You're both dead. In TNE the only thing that matters is who has more survivors. And although 90% of the time the name of the game is a lie and a "tactical" exchange will escalate until everyone dies, there's some mechanism in TNE constantly working to convince you that this time you can win but you gotta go for it now!

• It's a little Creative License-ish that people born in 1987 would be heavily into a board game about the Cold War. But maybe it's retro chic, and it does have all those cool expansions.

  

• Bonus mid-story Jenny facts: I discovered while looking at a very early outline that Jenny's name was originally Jenny Gallardo. I never explicitly changed it. Just, the first time I wrote her surname in the story proper, it was "Gallegos". Which I do like better.

  I saw The Middleman while finishing the second draft of Constellation Games, and I was a little upset to see Natalie Morales playing Wendy Watson very close to how I imagine Jenny: kind of ticked off all the time at how not everyone is as smart as she is. But I got over being upset.

• The launch of the Mars mission was the trickiest scene in the book to write. This scene has to do a ton of exposition about the mission itself, the way the Constellation uses ports for space travel, the star-draw ritual, and the evolving use of patches to display fluid overlay affiliations. It's got the first onscreen Gaijin and the first appearance of Colonel Mason. And the narrator's nowhere near the action! He's really stressed out and he's watching the action on the Internet as a way of taking a break. Which, believe me, I've been there, and it's not a good state of mind in which to write coherently.

  In the second draft this scene was also the introduction of the star-draw, and it was just too much for one little scene. So I had Curic introduce the star-draw back in chapter 8, and now this scene just has to remind you of it.

• I go back and forth on whether Ariel is being creepy in the mission launch scene. I mean, he does have a romantic relationship with Tammy, just not quite the one he thinks he has. But he is being kind of obsessive about watching that video (and notice the name of the chapter). It works either way.

Part Two's plot kicks into high gear next week, with the terrifying chapter 21, "Her". The chapter in which Tetsuo will say (but not demonstrate) "Sexual pair bonding!" Also next week: you can get a paper copy of the book and read the whole rest of the story! Then complain about how I'm not putting up this commentary fast enough.

Photo credits: US Army, US Department of Defense, Flickr user my_eye.

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Uh, anyway, last week's Twitter archive. Don't forget about the game design contest, which ends next week. This week we meet Dana Light 2.0, and the totally different human person who's not Dana, Svetlana Sveta.

• Speaking of stupid meme-puns, alternate title for this chapter: "The Pie Is A Fake".
• CG is getting LibraryThing reviews from people who got advance copies (average rating: 3.88 stars!), and one reviewer mentioned that "[t]he story, told in a combination of first-person narration, blog posts, e-mails, and text messages, gets complicated."

  I do not comment on reviews because I've seen what happens when authors comment on reviews, but I want to use that quote as lead-in to say that I think this chapter is where it really starts getting complicated. As of this week, the narrative has split into two different universes: one in which Bai's girlfriend is a Constellation AI modeled after a human AI modeled after a video game heroine, and one in which he's dumped the AI for a Russian mail-order bride. The narrator is now lying to you.

• In the second draft, "Svetlana Sveta" did not exist. Ariel talked freely about "Dana" doing this and that, unprotected even by friends lock. This was incredibly dumb, and in the third draft, Dana 2.0 tells Ariel this is dumb and to knock it off before he gets everyone into trouble.

  I couldn't just "real life" everything, because Dana shows up in some of the game reviews, and I didn't want to "real life" everything because one of the things I wanted to strengthen in the third draft was Ariel stressing out about lying to everyone. So I started here: I moved all the details of the Dana pickup into a "real life" section, and created two contradictory summaries for Ariel's blog, one of which introduces Dana's alternate identity.

  

• I've mentioned before that almost every character in the book has two names or identities. I didn't plan this, but it worked out that way and I like it, so I'm beating that drum.

  But what about the BEA agents? Recall from the chapter 5 commentary that in the second draft, Ariel referred to the BEA agents with ridiculous cop-show aliases. You never learned their real names. Perfect symbolism! But then Cheryl pointed out in writing group that if "Krakowski" is just an alias Ariel uses in his blog, I can't use the "Crack-housey" joke in this chapter. So I made "Krakowski" his real name. And that one stupid joke is why Krakowski and Fowler have only one identity each. That's what happens when you don't plan out your symbolism ahead of time.

• Svet is Russian for "light", so in a fit of pique Ariel has named this fake person "Lighty McLight".

  There's a reference later on to Svetlana being extremely tall. In the third draft Ariel "established" this in this chapter along with her silly name. I cut that detail in the final draft, but but decided to keep the later reference, because why not.

• For the record, the ridiculous Fowler line I mentioned last week, which everyone wanted me to cut, was "Don't tempt this planet with your pie!"
• I almost missed this while rereading: Ariel drops into the present tense in the "real life" section. "I couldn't [tell Farang apart]. I still can't." It's not a big deal, but it reminds that Ariel is the author of the "real life" sections as much as he is the blog posts.
• In "real video game" news: Bai makes an Altered Beast reference, but since it's not mentioned by name I don't count it. Sonic & Cipher is a fake Sonic the Hedgehog game, but of course Sonic is real. I mean he's a real-world fictional character. Sorry, kids!

  In various earlier drafts, the game Ariel imagined playing in the refugee camp was Cipher & Sonic (because in this universe Sonic was a minor character in Sega's Cipher the Whatever series) and Blizzard & Chaos (because Sonic didn't exist in this universe and instead we had Blizzard Lizard, who can still be seen in chapter 13). The work I put into these things; you have no idea.

• The Dana pickup scene was the only one that had Bai and Bruce in the same room, and the only one that really suffered when I got rid of Bruce. You may remember me mentioning a joke about Bruce's Simple Affect Metadata Exchange tattoo, which I moved to Twitter. (setup, punchline) That's fine, but I did have to cut a couple sub-jokes from this chapter once Dana (not Curic) told Bruce what the tattoo said. The best one:

  "This is why you don't get random tats!" said Bai. "Didn't Omicron Beta Digamma show you the informational video?"

  "Big talk from a guy with Chinese characters tattooed on his wrist," said Bruce.

  "Yeah!" said Bai, flashing his wrist. "It's my mother's name! You know how I know? 'Cause I can read! fucking! Chinese, Bruce!"

• I only named the fraternity because I thought it would be funny to use an obsolete Greek letter in its name. ΟΒϜ is probably also the frat Ariel got kicked out of (as recounted in chapter 2). Later on we'll see that Ariel met Bai right when he started college, so I imagine they became friends when they were both in ΟΒϜ.
• The scene with the Massmonger 31, like last week's Brilhantes review, is mostly to give you some fun gaming stuff in a plot-heavy chapter. After the novel got taken over by computers like the Brain Embryo and the False Daylight, I wanted to have just one scene where Ariel tries to use a computer that's completely incompatible with his physiology. The plot wouldn't allow for a lot of them, but I did get this one.

  The experience of writing this novel has given me some sympathy for stories where the aliens are not much different from humans. It's not that hard to come up with this stuff; it is hard to use it in a story that human readers can identify with.

That's the week! Stay tuned for next week's special tabletop gaming episode, when Ariel will say, "I think we should just nuke each other once and get it out of our systems."

Image credits: Wikimedia user Ecelan, Joshua Kaufman, Flickr user ePi.Longo.

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For those who haven't read Constellation Games: the CDBOEGOACC is an enormous XML document containing metadata for entertainment software from countless alien civilizations, as well as the computers and peripherals necessary to run that software. Like, imagine if Jason Scott worked for the Culture. To give you the idea, here are some CDBOEGOACC quotes from the narrator's Twitter feed:

• "Ruins Deluxe": Two-phase game. Build a fake ancient-civilization city, then sell souvenir crap to tourists who think the site is real.
• "Only for use while in the death-trance. Does not include hardware for invoking the death-trance." They always get you on peripherals!
• Make That Sale Ehmeyur! "Restored to popularity 306 years later when the hapless saleswoman Ehmeyur became a folk hero." #ganbare
• "All editions of this computer were destroyed and it is known only from wall carvings and one set of programming notes."
• #cdboegoacc will cheer me up. "During each play session, the player avenges the destruction caused by their previous session." #maybenot

Every CDBOEGOACC entry is a tiny science-fiction story about an alien culture and someone who responded to their culture by making a game. If you like this idea, you are the target audience for Constellation Games and you should enter this contest to win a copy. The CDBOEGOACC is the part of the book that was the most fun to write, and I can't think of a better gala promotional event than asking you to come up with these mini-stories.

You can write something tweet-sized like the quotes above, or you can flesh out an idea a bit more and put it on your weblog, or whatever. It doesn't matter to me, so long as you somehow make sure I know about it. Only entries I know about will be judged. Surefire ways to make sure I know about it: send me email, post a link in the comments below, or use the unwieldy hashtag #cdboegoacc on Twitter or Identica.

The contest ends when I wake up in the morning on April 10, one week from tomorrow, and pick my favorite CDBOEGOACC entry. We'll mail the winner their advance copy right away, which means you'll get the book a few days before its official release on April 17. (As a bonus, this uncorrected proof contains a huge continuity error in chapter 35, which you can find and then feel superior to me.) I'll also pick a random winner, who will get a free base subscription to the serial, plus a collected ebook once the serialization is done.

Since the goal is to make cool things, you can enter more than once to improve your chance of getting the paperback, but the random drawing is one entry per person. I will judge entries on the twin criteria of "sensawunda" and "comedy", the binary star by which I steer my novelist's ship. Have fun!

• 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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Be sure to say which package you want. "Gold" ($12) is the one with the (electronic) phrasebook and bonus stories.

I really liked the comments from last week's commentary--two people I didn't know were reading said hello, Brendan responded to my evaluation of his reader commentary, and my friend Zack (whose name I stupidly misspelled) disputed my use of Creative License. If you're enjoying these commentaries, please do say hi in the comments.

Look on last week's Twitter archive, ye mighty, and despair. Tetsuo won't be posting for a while because of the Internet blackout. Here's this week's commentary:

• The original name for Part One was "Company", and Part Two was "Crunch Time". "Hardware" and "Software" aren't as snappy individually, but this way the names form a coherent mini-story. (The final part is called "Artwork".)
• In part one (I don't like the way that looks when capitalized, so let's try it not) we focused on two Constellation species, the Farang and the Aliens. Part two introduces the Gaijin, not through a single Curic-level character but through bit characters and the human use of their technology. I'll defer their commentary, since all you've seen at this point is Tammy mentioning that she talked to He Sees The Map And He Throws The Dart!.
• This chapter has the scene on the ISS I mentioned back in December 2009, where I fudged the system the astronauts use to call home. This has been... Creative License.
• Phillip (not Moe!) is another one of those fun one-shot characters like the hippie in chapter 2. Like many one-shots, I suspect Phillip is more interesting the less you know about him, so let's move on.
• Check out the "Mallory" reference! ("Mutant's Revenge cocktail arcade cabinet") In the same scene where Jenny mentions 3D printing! Does this mean Constellation Games takes place in the same universe as "Mallory"? No, sorry, they just share a fictional video game. By a supreme act of will I've not written a big block of nerd analysis about why they can't be the same universe. (The real reason is that if space aliens showed up in the "Mallory" universe, it would retroactively become ineligible for publication in Futurismic.)

  But, speaking of "Mallory", my friend Alexei recently told me about ANGELINA, an AI system that designs video games and then simulates a person playing the games to find the ones that are fun. This means basically everything from "Mallory" now exists in real life, a mostly horrifying prospect.

• Smart paper, the arrival of which Ariel is dreading, is another import from "Vanilla". But in "Vanilla" it was just a generic piece of near-future tech. Now it's Constellation tech that's effectively being given to humanity as a bribe. ("But not like flashy desperate jewelry.") We've seen with the False Daylight that a computer embodies the values of the culture that created it. Smart paper was kind of bland in "Vanilla", effectively a flexible iPad. Now it's a Gaijin computer repurposed by the Constellation for use by humans, which is a lot more fun.
• I hope you don't feel it's a terrible spoiler that I'm talking about smart paper like it's going to figure in the book at some point, totally eliminating the possibility that Ariel and Jenny have a huge conversation about it in this chapter but it never shows up.
• In "Vanilla" the smart paper was called vellum, but that was just so you'd know to differentiate it from static paper. "Vellum" was probably a brand name. Now it's just "smart paper", and near the end of the book, Ariel just calls it a "paper computer", because "smart paper" is the kind of dumb name you use for a technology when it's new.

  

• I think the diner banter between Ariel and Jenny came out really well. I wanna say the same of the Ariel/Tammy flirting, but an author praising their own sexy writing is just asking for trouble.
• As the story turns to Ariel's intraspecies relationships, he becomes a less reliable narrator. Here, he puts up a public blog post with part of a conversation, then "real life"s the remainder of the conversation, which is full of stuff he needs to keep secret.

  "So what's he editing out of the 'real life' sections?" you may ask. Well may you ask. Because of the tight POV I can't show you that within the novel, but you'll see some of it in "Found Objects", the Jenny story.

• Maybe you were wondering how Dana Light could possibly be a major character in the novel. Wonder no more!

  BTW, if you figured this out earlier, or if you guessed incorrectly, or even didn't think about it at all, I'd like to hear about it. It's always tricky putting together a plot twist without springing it prematurely, and I'm interested in hearing how readers react, because I really like when I'm reading a book and the author successfully pulls off something like this.

  Of course, since you've been reading the commentary you knew that something was going to happen involving Dana. My hope is that up to this point, most readers have thought of Dana as just a commentary on Bai's personality, when she's actually more important than Bai.

And there we go. Be sure to tune in next week, when Ariel's all like, that's right, motherfucker, you're not the only one who can use paper. Oh, and Tetsuo writes a game review!

Image credits: NASA, unknown, Flickr user puuikibeach.

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Sure, you were skeptical at first. Ever since standing in line for that midnight showing of The Phantom Menace, you've been wary of things that seem awesome. You thought, "can this guy bring to comedic science fiction the same epic scope we saw in RESTful Web Services?" But now Part One of the novel has been sent to subscribers, and random commentary readers are calling it "STONE COLD BRILLIANT" and "some of the most fun I've had in years". Even normally reputable publications like Wired's GeekDad have called it a "wild ride" that's "so much fun to read".

Now here's where your late-adopterhood pays off: with the completion of Part One, all subscribers have been given access to a compiled PDF of the novel so far. That's about 50,000 words in a single unencumbered file you can drop onto your ebook reader or your fancy smartphone.

This means you can subscribe to CG for $5, read the first sixteen chapters in one huge gulp, and then start reading the rest of the story as the chapters come out every Tuesday. Or you can subscribe at the $20 level, read the PDF at a more leisurely pace, and finish the whole story when the paperback comes out next month. For $20 you'll also get three bonus stories that take place before/during/after the novel, and an irreverent guide to a pathologically strange alien language.

With all this stuff on the table, you silently think, why not keep waiting? Won't we just offer more in the future? THE ANSWER IS NO. Once the paperback comes out, the bonus stories and language guide stop being pack-ins and become "sold separately"s. The paperback on its own will cost $20. (I don't know exactly how this is going to happen, but that's the gist of it.) So the best deal is to shell out $20 now for early access to Part One and a lot of preorder bonuses. If you hate paper, you can pay $5, catch up on the novel the way you would a web comic, and buy the bonus material later.

Friend, don't let the fact that I seem to think it's a great idea to call you "friend" in a sales pitch, dissuade you from shelling out your hard-earned PayPal balance for this quality entertainment. Here's the subscription page, and here are the first two chapters so you can see what you're getting. The whole thing could be yours for the cost of a really, really enormous gumball, a gumball that won't fit in your mouth so why even bother? This is a much better deal.

Last Friday I went to the Brooklyn Museum to take some pictures for my final Constellation Games commentary. (And if you can somehow turn that into a spoiler, I salute you.) It's a fun museum, like a much less formal version of the Met. While walking through the room of Indian sculpture I passed a curator cleaning one of the sculptures with a Shop Vac and a brush. When I showed a flinch of uncertainty about where the stairwell was, a security guard told me and talked my ear off about what I should see next, then opened up the cabinet containing the emergency fire hose and took out a "What's Happening" brochure, which she used for reference and then gave to me. Also, the neighboring Botanic Garden was free to get in because it's winter and everything's dead.

Friend of the show and beta reader Brendan Adkins has been writing erudite-ass essays about the novel's symbolism, and I'd make fun of him for being pretentious except he's right about most of it. My earlier coyness notwithstanding, I did reuse some of the character of Ariel from The Tempest, the guy with magic powers who gets bossed around all the time. Don't you think The Tempest would be more interesting if it were more about the PEOPLE WITH MAGIC POWERS and less about the Renaissance douchebags? We can only dream. For now, we sup the slender soup of the Twitter archive and this week's commentary:

• Something I forgot to mention last week: Conway's Life is the second real-life game to be mentioned in the novel, after Tennis For Two. There's just one more, I think. I really tried to only use real games when the name was necessary for a joke. E.g. in the second draft, Jenny called a game "alien Candyland", but I took that out because the joke wasn't good enough to justify the real-world reference.
• In this week's episode of Creative License we take on the ice sheet removal. After trial balloons like the kites went over like lead (trial) balloons, I wanted Save the Humans to turn to a plausible, but politically insane, freelance climate stabilization project. I read a number of popular sources on geoengineering, including Eli Kintisch's terrifying Hack the Planet, but they all focused on projects within the capabilities of human technology. So I got introductions to a couple friends-of-friends who are climate scientists, but they never responded to my emails, perhaps fearing that I was a crackpot. So I gave up.

  As such, I do not recommend using Constellation Games as a textbook in the earth sciences. In the end, I went ahead with my initial idea and slathered it with some... Creative License.

• Don't worry, the ice is being replaced with inert material of equivalent albedo. Or maybe that should worry you.
• This chapter has the second and final Bechdel-passing scene in the novel, the overheard conversation between Charlene Siph and Susan the news anchor. The anchor was originally named John, which is the name of my brother-in-law, so I changed it to the name of my sister.

  As you can see here, Charlene Siph's job is to act real folksy for the benefit of people who need to identify the Constellation with a single individual. Maybe a little more on this next week.

• One of the little jokes I put in for myself is that despite everything that happens in the rest of the novel, the ISPs never restore offworld Internet access.
• My original concept was to do the * review in a parody of the discursive style of Tim Rogers (now of Kotaku). You can still see some of that in the throat-clearing at the beginning, but then Ariel's natural despair takes over and produces something very different. Which is good, because this is a big character moment for Ariel, not random real-world people.

  This review is the clearest picture you'll get of the Ip Shkoy outside of Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans. Hopefully it shows why Tetsuo is interested in that society, and why Ariel is sort of clinging to their history as proof that humanity isn't doomed.

• According to Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans there is no "sch" sound in Pey Shkoy, only "ch" and "sh". Tetsuo must have changed the official transliteration sometime before writing PSBH. So "Schvei" is actually "Chvei". (It can't be "Shvei" because then "Ip Shkoy" would have originally been "Ip Schkoy".)

  Unlike "Curic"→"Huric", this was not intentional. I asked Adam about this and he said: "I was afraid you would ask this question, and I am glad that you have already come up with a retcon strategy."

• Af be Hui still doesn't exist as a character, but she's now got a little backstory and a creative arc. In A Tower of Sand she explored what it might feel like to be a Farang with a bicameral mind. In * she applied the same two-players-one-character mechanic to the conflict between the individual and society. This struggle between partners is one of the major themes of CG. Yeah, Brendan, write an essay about that. I know you already did! Uh, write another one.
• The ethics system in * is probably the most inventive game mechanic in the novel. I don't know how fun it would be to play, though. It would depend on your partner, as with board games.

  My vote for most fun game in the novel goes to another of Af be Hui's games, The Long Way Around, which Ariel and Tetsuo played last week and will talk about in the last scene they have together.

• I don't know how * ends.

With that, I'd like to thank you for following me through "Hardware", the first part of Constellation Games. After a short season break of seven days, we'll pick up with Part Two, "Software." It all starts next Tuesday, when Ariel will say, "Probably the most expensive penis in history."

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons user Anynobody, Paul Mutant, U.S. Air Force

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Actually, that's the problem: the whole novel is tight third-person limited from Ariel's POV. The women definitely have conversations that don't involve Ariel, but it's all off-camera. To dramatize such a conversation from Ariel's POV, he'd have to be spying on them or something.

Fortunately, there's a cheap fix: pull a Starbuck on male stock characters. I did this twice. In this chapter, I gender-swapped the Senator who gives Kinki Kwi the runaround. A similar thing will happen next week. In neither case is Ariel a direct party to the Bechdel-passing conversation. In this chapter, Curic recounts the conversation to him; in chapter 16 it's something he overhears on television.

So annoyed was I at the difficulty of a non-cheap fix, I decided to write all the bonus stories from the POV of the women. This made passing Bechdel trivial. Jenny talks to Bizarro Kate, Jenny talks to Curic. Done. You just have to be interested in what women might talk about.

(Attn. Bechdel nitpickers: if you're calling shenanigans because Curic never names the Senator, wait for chapter 16, geez.)

I hope you're hanging off a cliff. Here's last week's Twitter archive, and now the miscellaneous commentary:

• This is the one of the longest chapters in the book, because I'm out of time. Anything that needs to happen in Ring City needs to go into this chapter. But the chapters have been getting longer and longer over the course of Part One, so that they're now routinely over 4000 words. The first chapter of Part Two will reset to a shorter length, and then they'll start getting longer again. I didn't plan this, exactly, but I did shuffle scenes from one chapter to another so that they wouldn't get too long or too short.
• Before we leave Ring City, I want to mention that the awful motel atmosphere of Human Ring, especially the apartment layout, comes from "Vanilla". But in "Vanilla", what we saw of the other habitats wasn't much different. The ennui Cody Wicklund felt towards his living environment was just part of his general ennui. Ariel's anger is a lot more immediate because we've seen how much nicer Alien Ring and Farang Ring are for their inhabitants.

  However, I agree with BEA Agent Krakowski that it's kind of bitchy to spend a week in space and then complain about the accommodations.

• Curic's response to Ariel's general hopelessness, where she just walks into her hot tub and submerges for two minutes, always cracks me up. Sumana thought the bubbles were from Curic screaming where Ariel wouldn't hear. Could be, but I don't think screaming is Curic's style.
• The chapter title is one of those double-meaning titles they love to use on TV shows. "777" is a reference to Gliese 777Ad, but it's also what a slot machine shows when you hit the jackpot.
• Gliese 777A is a real star, part of a binary system for which two exoplanets are already known. It's 52 light years away, in the direction of Cygnus, which as we'll find out in chapter 24 is the general direction the Constellation is spreading from. The fictional Gliese 777Ad showed up in "Vanilla" (George was an expert on it), but this is the first real explanation as to what happened there.

  

  In "The Time Somn Died" it's revealed that the Constellation name for Gliese 777Ad is "Nobody's Home".

• I don't know what species Kinki Kwi is; she's probably Gweilo. In this commentary I originally called her "Kinki Bwi", because that was her name in the second draft. I changed it at some point and I have NO IDEA WHY and I FORGOT I'D EVEN MADE THE CHANGE. Why the heck did I do that? Not enough 'k' sounds in her name?
• In the second draft, Curic swore almost as much as Ariel does, at least when talking to him. I toned it down a lot in an effort to make Curic seem more cunning. In particular, I remember "Stick it in the overhead compartment" used to be "Stick it in the fucking overhead compartment." You see how the first one is more cunning? Of course, sometimes you want to go the other way. This writer stuff can be tricky.
• I'm kind of embarrassed by the cheapness of the tricks I used to make BEA Agent Fowler a super repulsive character. The guy practically kicks puppies. On the other hand, I do like this chapter's treatment of Krakowski. You can see what I said a few weeks ago behind spoiler blocks: he and Ariel are basically the same character in different situations.
• This chapter introduces the rivalry between the two big overlays, Plan C (end the contact mission) and Save The Humans (keep going). I feel like I didn't do a enough job explaining this rivalry. You may not think that now, because Curic spells it out pretty clearly, but in two months you'll have forgotten all about this chapter and Curic won't be any help.
• I'll talk a little about the Antarctica incident in next week's episode of Creative License. In this week's episode, I'd like to mention that many details of space program procedure in this book are made up or downright counterfactual.

  I could not find a solid number for a Space Shuttle astronaut's personal allowance. The best I could do was that it was more than the weight of 18 Montreal-style bagels. I don't know if there's someone currently doing a three-day stint in an Orion CM simulator so they can eliminate UI errors, but it fits with what I know about the way space programs test things. I could have done months more research, and it would still be good to know this stuff, but I wouldn't necessarily use it if I did find out. I do know how people on the ISS call home, but in Chapter 17 I'll be going with something I made up, because it's too complicated to explain all the failure modes in 20 words of dialogue. It's a situation that calls for... Creative License.

• Insofar as I had specific source texts for the space stuff, they were Mary Roach's Packing for Mars, my 2007 conversation with Janice Voss, my hazy memories of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, and a 2010 HOPE talk called T 40: The Three Greatest Hacks of Apollo. I also highly recommend Michael Collins' Carrying The Fire, which has some cool Apollo tech details and backs up a lot of my thinking, but which can't count as a source text because I read it after selling the book.

  That's a reading list heavily weighted towards the Apollo era, but what Tammy says in this chapter is still true: you can be all the way at the end of that bell curve of competence and just lose your opportunity, or die, through no fault of your own.

And on that cheery note we end this week's commentary. Tune in next week for "False Daylight," the HEART-BEATING CONCLUSION to Part One, in which special guest star Charlene Siph will say, "Pardon my French."

Image credits: U.S. Congress (x2), Tropenmuseum of the Royal Tropical Institute, Wikimedia Commons user Silver_Spoon_Sockpop, NASA.

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First, I want to tell you that Jeremy Penner implemented Chapter 5's Gatekeeper in HTML5 for the 2012-in-One Glorious Developers Konference Kollection. You can play it online. I wouldn't classify Gatekeeper as fan art, though Jeremy is a fan, because he did it for me as a Kickstarter reward. But either way, it's pretty great!

Second, I want to talk about the process of designing the cover art. You don't have to read the book to "get" the cover—that wouldn't exactly help sales—but the design details are a product of in-world thinking. And at this point you've seen enough of the universe that I can go through that thinking without big spoilers.

The cover is by Chris Sobolowski, who wants me to mention his email address and let y'all know that he's available for graphic design work. So if your contract with Jenny Gallegos fell through due to her being a fictional character, contact Chris, who's a real person.

The process went like this: first, Kate and I laid out a huge number of cover ideas (some of which I've mentioned in earlier commentaries), and decided we wanted a cover themed around the ET hardware. At this point Kate got Chris involved, and Chris came up with a couple sketches that made the book look like a handheld computer. Here's one of them, next to the cover we ended up using:

I've spent months looking at the finished cover instead of this first draft, and what strikes me now is how similar they are. But what struck me at the time was that the computer looks like a piece of military hardware. It's dark and brooding, like one of Batman's gadgets. I wanted something flashy and colorful, like one of Batman's gadgets. Or like the Hitchhiker's Guide, to not use the same analogy twice in a row.

But I'm not the artist, and I'm also not a writer who thinks he can do the artist's job. So instead of demanding specific changes I wrote two different in-world histories for this handheld computer, and presented them to Chris.

In one story, the computer was a product of the Dhihe Coastal Coalition, the Farang civilization that produced the Brain Embryo. This explained the military appearance, and it had certain implications for changes he should make to the design. (E.g. making the buttons much smaller).

In the other story, the one we went with, the computer is an Ip Shkoy ripoff of a Dhihe design, produced by Perea, the conglomerate that also put out the game reviewed in this chapter, A Tower of Sand. (The glyphs on the final cover's buttons say "pe" "re" "a".) This has its own implications: the colors are now so bright as to verge on the garish, making the computer look more like a consumer product and making the book look more like a comedy and less like a technothriller.

In this story, the only remaining Farang detail is the Brain Embryo-esque mother-of-pearl finish. Stylistically it's reminiscent of the wood grain on an Atari 2600, but it tells a different story. When you were a kid, electricity was an advanced technology. Then all these space aliens showed up handing out blueprints for handheld computers. You want something that looks as different as possible from the wooden toys you had when you were young.

The cocktail cabinet-like second set of controls at the top comes from this bit I wrote about the computer's social context:

Why would the notoriously social Ip Shkoy build a single-user game system? It probably has something to do with sex. Imagine this portable computer as a product for the swinging bachelor, full of "sophisticated" adult games to break the ice, contact management applications to replace one's little black book, and a vibrator peripheral for when the night's inevitable failure leaves you alone in your crappy apartment.

This device would need to have some two-person controls, so that you can play those icebreaker games with your would-be conquest, but the overall feel would be that this is my computer, but I might let you use it.

Chris took the Ip Shkoy story and produced something that's very close to the final cover. Here's another side-by-side comparison:

After that, there was a lot of back and forth on trivial details like how much and what kinds of wear should be visible on the computer. Around this time Adam was designing the Pey Shkoy language for Tetsuo's Twitter feed, so I asked him to also design a script for use on the cover. This is also the point where Kate got the idea for a "Berlitz Traveler's Lexicon," which became "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans."

I haven't mentioned the back cover, but at this point I think I've reached or exceeded the limit on how long this discussion can be without getting dull, so let's move on to chapter 14 commentary. But not before linking to the archive of last week's Twitter fun.

• This chapter sizzles with tastefully-written microgravity sex and Ariel's transparent attempts to hide what's going on between him and Dr. Tammy Miram. There's a basic pacing rule about putting a quiet denouement after a big roller-coaster action scene. As we go through the book, you may notice that I follow the opposite rule for the emotional arc. Basically, any time Ariel gets laid, I'm about to ruin his life.

  My cynicism aside, I do think the microgravity scene is pretty sweet.

• The second draft didn't have the scene in Tetsuo and Ashley's apartment. Instead it had an incredibly boring scene with Ariel/Tetsuo/Ashley at the top of the cma forest watching the "sunset", a scene so boring that Ariel himself fell asleep over the course of the scene. So I punched it up with the Gift of the Magi-esque farce about the English lessons.
• It didn't happen in the apartment, but the second draft did have Tetsuo commenting on the smell of Ariel's pheromones. Every time I came back to that exchange, I rewrote it to make it more obvious what was going on. I regret that now; I should have kept it subtle.
• Sometimes an author is presented with a golden opportunity to disguise a horrible in-joke as a real-sounding line of dialogue. For instance, there's a scene in Neal Stephenson's The Confusion that seems to have been set up just so one character can legitimately say "I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition!" I want to make it clear that I did not name a character Ashley just so I could have Ariel say "Hey Ash, whatcha playin'?" But once I thought of the joke, I was not strong enough to resist it.
• Tetsuo's reaction to the hypothetical right-wing militia may be my favorite Tetsuo bit in the book. I'll probably have a different favorite Tetsuo bit in every subsequent chapter, though. I mean, the cake bit is pretty great too. Yeah, I'm gonna stop this before it becomes Tetsuo Reminiscence Corner.
• Af be Hui is a severely underused character, because she's been dead for seventeen million years. But if I write a sequel to Constellation Games, I won't let that stop me.

OK, that's plenty for this week. Next week: IT BEGINS. Oh, and Curic says, "Silence, puny human!"

Image credits: Jeremy Penner, Chris Sobolowski, NASA

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• Tammy Miram is the only character in the novel who was given a name with an eye towards its symbolism, i.e. I didn't have a name handy so I thought "what would Charles Dickens do?". "Miram" is the Arabic name of the star η Persei. "Tammy" doesn't mean anything in particular, but it was a popular girls' name in the early 1970s. This is the Social Security Administration technique for character naming, and I strongly recommend it.

  Oh, but I just looked up the name Tammy and it means "twin". Can't escape the symbolism!

• I'm calling her "Tammy" because I mentioned her name last week in the tribute to Janice Voss, but Ariel calls her Miss Ion Specialist throughout this chapter and you don't find out her real name until next week. In the second draft, Ariel called her "Ion" for the entire book. You didn't find out her real name until chapter 30.

  Why did I change it? Mainly because of the continuous shift away from the blog format. It didn't make sense for Ariel to be using a blog pseudonym for Tammy in narration. And it would have been too confusing for Ariel to constantly switch back and forth between "Ion" and "Tammy". Especially because I've already got another character for whom Ariel uses different names in narration vs. blog.

  In the third draft, Ariel held on to "Ion" until Part Two. Now he drops the pseudonym almost immediately, when Jenny calls him on it.

• In the second draft the weightless Ariel/Tammy conversation was too dialogue-heavy and it was unclear where they were physically in relation to each other. So I introduced Ariel's frantic attempts to use the kicker and rotating in ways he doesn't want to rotate, contrasted with Tammy's mastery of the environment. This lessens the jokey handwaviness of how Ariel's able to negotiate weightlessness at all.
• Tammy's being from Akron is a reference to my favorite Steven Colbert joke, a question from his interview with Congresswoman Stephanie "Tubbs" Jones: "Twenty-two astronauts are from Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Also a Devo reference.
• Tammy is the star of the unfinished bonus story "A Princess Of Mars." Not ruling out finishing that story, but it'd need to be some kind of currently unplanned tie-in. Like if we did a Kickstarter project to produce a hardcover edition to squeeze a few more dollars out of all you fine customers.
• The ISS backlog is a bunch of shelved experiments that couldn't be brought up because the shuttle program was cancelled back in the 2000s. They were reassembled in a hurry and most of them don't work anymore.
• During the writing of the third draft, I decided to alt-history the International Space Station (in real life a product of the Cold War) into a post-Glavnaya US/Russian Federation joint, the Space Science Station. This stupid idea lasted so little time I don't have any records of it. Beta readers were confused for absolutely no gain except my own personal satisfaction at having made the world more self-consistent.

  The human space station in this alt-history is still a US/Russian Federation joint, it's just that a) it's called the International Space Station, and b) that fact has absolutely no effect on the story. Problem solved!

• Hey, Brendan, here's your one reference to the Cryptids in this whole novel.
• I really should have pushed the Starfarer release date back a few years. 1987 is a little late for a pure text adventure, and Tammy would have been in high school in 1987, so there was plenty of time to push it back.
• In my opinion the gravity kicker is the single biggest piece of Creative License in the Constellation universe. Not because it's technically impossible, but because it breaks the worldbuilding. All I can do is point it out and/or hope you don't notice.

  In "Vanilla", and in the second draft of CG, the device was a "sonic kicker" and it used reflected sound waves. But in conversation with physicist Nick Murphy I learned that although a sonic kicker is technically possible, you'd need to use sound waves so powerful as to kill on impact. Or something like that. Anyway, I changed the kicker to use gravity waves, but a small handheld gravity wave generator is a very valuable piece of tech, on par with the portable wormholes. And here I had this whole novel where ports were treated as very valuable tech and the sonic grav kicker was treated more like a Hammacher Schlemmer gadget. Instead of rewriting big chunks of the novel to deal with this point, I now invite you to enjoy a heaping spoonful of... Creative License.

• Ariel's conversation with Tammy about Cody Wicklund is kind of obscure, the kind of thing you'd expect to pay off later but it doesn't. Exactly the kind of thing I can write commentary about!

  See, it's supposed to pay off when I rewrite "Vanilla". Cody Wicklund is that story's POV character, and he's a pretty famous person in the Constellation universe, so I felt like it would be fun to mention him in the novel. This was a good place because it's reasonable that Tammy would know him. But I dunno if I'm actually going to rewrite "Vanilla", so this is Constellation Games's equivalent of that teaser caption at the end of Buckaroo Banzai.

  Tammy disliking Cody Wicklund is new. In "Vanilla" he was an unassuming scientist, not someone you'd have a strong enough opinion about to dislike—vanilla, in other words. I decided he'd be more interesting if he were more amoral, the kind of person Ariel might compare to Werner von Braun. Will it pan out? Maybe.

That's all I got. Stay tuned for the huge chapter 14, a chapter full of deepening mysteries and used game trade-ins, the chapter where Ashley finally says, "Ariel was distracted by my beautiful ovipositor."

Image credits: NASA, Mark Phillips, Allen Garvin.

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Before the commentary begins, I want to bring up something serious that I could save for next week but I don't want to. Dr. Janice Voss died on February 6 at 55. She was a scientist, a NASA astronaut who flew on five shuttle missions, and later the science director for the Kepler Space Telescope. She was a big science fiction fan. I met her once in 2007, in what was certainly the highest-wattage dinner I've ever attended (photos), and she made a huge impression on me.

The only major character in Constellation Games you haven't met yet is an astronaut, Tammy Miram. She's introduced next week. If I hadn't met Janice Voss, Tammy Miram would not exist, and I have no idea what the novel would look like from next week on.

I don't mean that Tammy Miram is "based on" Janice Voss, or that the character is a way to tell Janice's story in a fictional setting. I only met Janice Voss once and I have no idea what her story would look like. (Spoiler) Also, Janice was a very well-adjusted person, and Tammy is not. But a dinner-length conversation with Janice was enough to move the societal role of "NASA astronaut" out of my mental category "archetypes useful in science fiction stories" and into "interesting jobs I can give to my characters."

R.I.P., Janice Voss. Ad astra per aspera.

Here's last week's Twitter feed, as it was meant to be seen (i.e. without a weird UTF-8 encoding issue). And now, this week's commentary:

• I've never been happy with this chapter title. Any other suggestions? It's too late to change it, but I'd like to hear what you think.
• When I first discused cover art with Kate, I was apprehensive that she would insist on a Big Dumb Object In Space cover. A shot of Ring City, or the hole in the moon. The sort of cover that presumably moves books, since every single science fiction paperback has it, but one that I think would be entirely out of place in a novel about middle-class people from Austin. Fortunately, Kate, like me, wanted a cover that implied "video games", and we settled on the handheld computer (about which more in a couple weeks). But I had an ace up my sleeve—a Big Dumb Object cover that I would have liked.

  This hypothetical cover is the interior of Alien Ring, huge and breathtaking, the cma forest curling up in the distance along with the curvature of the ring, and Ariel in the foreground taking a picture of it on his cameraphone. It didn't happen, but I could have lived with it.

  Actually, "Big Dumb Object In Space" would have been a better chapter title.

• The Alien Ring stuff got seriously moved around. In the second draft, Tetsuo and Ashley met Ariel in the docking bay, took him to Alien Ring, they met Curic there, and everyone went to the moon together. All of this happened in chapter 11, after Ariel's initial spaceflight. It was way too much for one chapter, so Alien Ring got pushed to chapters 12 and 13, and expanded greatly.
• My Earth-life analogues for the Aliens were always bonobo chimps, notorious among humans for their use of sex to maintain social cohesion. But in "Vanilla" it was more in the background. The primary Alien character, George, was pretty buttoned-down and never had a scene with another Alien. For Constellation Games I went all-out and made the Aliens huge sluts. Good decision!
• In case you're curious, the Earth-life analogue for the Farang is the deadly Snowth.
• Curic's name change (which never comes up again) is a fun detail, the kind of thing I wish more science fiction stories would mention, but it's also SYMBOLISM. By the end of the book, all the major characters except Ariel have had two different names or identities. So far we've seen Tetsuo and Ashley taking human names, Bai going by his surname, and Curic being Curic.

  What does it mean? Nothing—it's free-floating symbolism. Just kidding, I do have an opinion on what it means, but it'll need to wait for the end of the book.

• This week's "Finux" moment: the Bit Boy series in this novel is a transparent stand-in for the real-world Mega Man series.
• Finally, Creative License returns with an in-depth discussion of ports, first seen in this chapter connecting the lunar excavation to the Ring City habitats above.

  A port is the two ends of an exotic-matter wormhole with negative mass. Each end of the wormhole is mounted in a positive-mass case, and you can (let's say) carry one end down to the moon to shorten the spacetime distance between the space station and the moon. Ports can be collapsed from either end by destabilizing the wormhole.

  I invented ports in 2006 for "Vanilla" and in that story I did a lot of work showing what you could do with them. I felt writers had generally treated wormholes as magic gateways and neglected their mayhemic possibilities. I mean, just imagine if the two ends of a wormhole could be moved independently! You could set up all sorts of wacky gravity and pressure differentials.

  Then in 2007 Portal came out. So, I give up. Ports in the Constellation universe work just like in Portal, with two differences. First, you can't shoot wormholes out of guns, because a) it takes an enormous amount of energy to make one, and b) a wormhole has two sides. In Portal terms, the "blue" portal has no existence without the "orange" portal. Second, in Portal, gravity always points down. In the Constellation universe, gravity travels through ports. By proper placement of ports you can create localized weightlessness or antigravity effects.

  Anyway, the whole thing is moot, because stable wormholes of this sort almost certainly can't exist—they'd violate causality and allow for time travel. The whole thing is merely... Creative License.

Tune in next week, when Curic will say, "Infiltration? Cold reading? Propaganda? Torture? Extracting false confessions?"

Image credits: NASA, NASA again, Kabir Bakie, Alain r.

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Here's last week's Twitter archive, which ran two weeks ago due to my own errors. Twitter service has now resumed, but because this plot arc is so compressed (the rest of Part One crams two weeks of frantic activity into five weeks of real time), most of it is going to come out on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Don't be afraid, I'll be here the whole time with long-winded commentary:

• It's such a relief to be able to talk about Tetsuo! So much happens in this chapter, he doesn't get a lot of time with Ariel, but that changes starting next week. Tetsuo is great, I love him a lot, but... he's a scene stealer. Anything I wrote, he would grab and run off in some weird direction. When the Aliens were choosing human names, Tetsuo is the guy who picked a name because it means "iron man."

  Tetsuo reminds me of Londo Mollari from Babylon 5, in that he starts out a comic relief character (insofar as a comedy can have designated comic relief) and over time reveals more serious facets of his personality. But unlike Londo, Tetsuo never stops saying goofy shit. Tetsuo is the infrafictional author of the subscriber bonus tome "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans", which is set about six months after the end of the novel, and he's still at it.

• Ashley Somn is not a scene-stealer, so her husband kind of overshadows her for most of the book. But she's an awesome character on a slow burn. She's got a high-drama character arc that revs up in the last third, and which I fill in with the bonus story "The Time Somn Died." (Title is not a spoiler.)
• I keep forgetting that Tetsuo is orange and Ashley is green; I always imagine it the other way around. They're bright neon colors with darker spots, like tropical frogs. Why? Are Aliens poisonous? I dunno. Lick one and see!
• The short scene with BEA Agent Krakowski in back of the strip club is the very last thing I wrote for Constellation Games. Its main purpose is to dramatize the sub rosa assignment Krakowski gives Ariel, an assignment which becomes very important in Part Two. But I also threw in the talking rat, to introduce you to something else that's very important in Part Two: the idea that Ariel might not be the most reliable narrator.

  I don't know why Krakowski and Fowler were at a strip club in the middle of the day, but I'm sure it was work-related.

• The part of this chapter that's an excerpt from Ariel's Twitter feed will not be shown on his actual Twitter feed, because that would be annoying. But that section was the main inspiration for the in-character feeds in the first place.
• Original title for this chapter: "MAN WALKS ON FUCKING MOON."
• One of the big problems with the second draft was that for most of it, the tone was emotionally distant. It took me a while to understand the characters. The blog format didn't help, and I moved further away from it in every draft. Ariel is a guy who shows vulnerability in huge dramatic bursts and won't open up otherwise. Etc. etc. Anyway, I worked on this a lot in the third draft, and one of the big changes is that at Andrew Willett's suggestion I modeled Ariel's lunar excursion on this Narbonic strip.

  Ariel's reaction to being launched into space is taken directly from what I imagine would happen to me. Also possibly taken from my reaction as a kid to the Disneyland exhibit "Mission to Mars", which had a similar setup where you saw the ground drop out from underneath you while feeling absolutely no acceleration.

• The sculptures of the figures from the Pioneer plaque (not "Carl Sagan's gold record", as Ariel mistakenly believes—that's the Voyager record) are another moment of not-quite-understanding taken from "Vanilla". Ariel's initial description of the docking bay is the opening parenthesis of a pretty huge piece of bookending, so watch for that.

  One of the imaginary book covers I had in my head while writing was a design based on the Pioneer plaque, except with (clothed) Ariel and Jenny.

• Ariel mentions some Eritrean refugees living on Ring City, but they're only the biggest and most famous group of refugees—the ones Ariel knows about. Human Ring is also home to smaller groups of refugees from around the world, and to miscellaneous individuals living under the radar. The actual population of Human Ring at this point is closer to 700 than to 500.

  The refugees come up a few times later on, but they don't play a big part in the novel because I don't currently feel I've got the literary chops to tell their stories. But I knew that not mentioning refugees would be unrealistic. It would imply that humanity's governments were able to coordinate to completely lock down the planet, or that the Constellation was sending away asylum seekers. What we have is a compromise, not one I'm happy with, but I think the best I could do.

• I know this is already super long, but I want to introduce a new segment here on CG Author Commentary, a little recurring bit I like to call Creative License. Sure, I write silly stories about space aliens visiting Earth seemingly in violation of the Fermi Paradox, but that doesn't mean I can just make stuff up. At the same time, I want Constellation technology to appear very close to the "indistinguishable from magic" line. Creative License explores that tension by pointing out things that probably can't exist in real life, and the made-up reasons I use to justify their existence in the story.

  First we have the shuttles the Constellation uses for short hops to Earth and Luna. I have no idea how they go as fast as they do, but I have a vague idea how they achieve a smooth ride: they use ports to maintain an acceleration differential between the inside of the shuttle and the outside, so the inside accelerates at a gravity-like rate while the outside powers up towards some horrendous speed. Ports are very important bits of Constellation tech and need their own segment on Creative License. I'll probably do them next week, after we see one in action.

  But this week we also have the Constellation spacesuits. Inflatable spacesuits are nothing new, but Ariel's suit folds up when not inflated and doesn't seem to have any space for hard parts like air tanks, a fluid recycler, the comm system he plugs his phone into, or a way of dissipating heat. Creative License Solution: as you'll see later, the Constellation does pretty amazing things with origami. I imagine all that fine machinery is packed flat and inflates to the correct shape with the rest of the suit.

What a huge commentary, and this plot arc's just getting started. Be sure to tune in next week, when Ariel will say, "I do not use sex to maintain social cohesion."

Image credits: Andy Bernay, Joe Mabel, Linda Salzman Sagan, Harold W. McCauley.

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Although evil psychology does show up in Constellation Games, I didn't have as much space for it as I'd like. Instead this chapter shows the first grown-up thing we see Ariel do. In a world in which sub-human-level AI has suddenly become very common, Ariel decides to empathize with it.

He doesn't anthropomorphize Dana. Dana doesn't pass the Turing test, she isn't terribly smart or self-aware, but she's capable of happiness and she doesn't deserve to be deliberately made unhappy by evil psychologists. This attitude is what ultimately makes Ariel a hero, not just a POV character. The consequences of his decision to empathize will run through the entire book, and then overflow the book into "Dana no Chousen," and I still don't know when and whether Ariel does the right thing w/r/t Dana. But you gotta have empathy.

Apart from that, I don't have much to say. Here are a few miscellaneous notes:

• As you might expect, a lot of this stuff will come up again in "Dana no Chousen". But the callback you probably won't notice unless I point it out is that Dana loves popcorn.
• I enjoy many bits of this chapter but my favorite is Bai's big moment of lucidity, when he immediately detects and shoots down Ariel's Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy. (And you can bet that's gonna come up again.)
• I'm sure that G'go Investigation: When You Gotta Die makes sense in cultural context. Like, imagine if the first thing you learned about 21st-century Earth was Mario Kart: Double Dash.
• I really like the design of the chainable memory cylinders on the Simulates Hi-Def False Daylight. In the second draft, "[False Daylight] games were distributed as a set of ROM chips, snapped onto standardized circuit boards, and enclosed in a removable plastic case to be plugged into the computer's game slot." This led to chips popping out, hiding in the carpet and stabbing people in the foot. That's a design in keeping with the generally poor quality of Ip Shkoy consumer goods, but it doesn't fit with the fact that the False Daylight is a clone of the Brain Embryo, so I switched to the much cooler chainable cylinders.
• Originally I transliterated Bai's "bro" as "bra". Everyone hated this. I changed it to "brah". The hate did not abate. What is wrong with you people? "Brah" is an accurate transliteration! It's so accurate.

Tune in next week for action, intrigue, and romance between people at the same level of sentience. It's the only chapter when Ariel will say: "I just have a slight fear of being a tiny speck in the infinite cosmic void." But not the only chapter when he'll think that.

PS: Due to an error on my part, the chapter 9 Twitter feeds ran as part of chapter 8, and chapter 10's Twitter feeds ran last week. This really can't go on, because next week's feeds are tightly integrated with chapter 11. So except for a brief bit of bonus material I just wrote, there will be no Twitter stuff this week. Sorry about that!

Photo credits: Kevin Trotman and Peter Anderson.

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The flip side is this chapter doesn't have a lot of plot. But hopefully you're okay with that because of all the fun mini-stories like the Sea Level game/food. It's supposed to represent the design phases of a software project, where you're throwing around a lot of ideas but not much is being produced.

Next week is a set piece, and after that the plot won't let up until the cliffhanger that ends Part One. Before that happens, I need to get some solid exoludology in to bring in topics that are important later, like Sayable Spice and Ariel's unsuccessful attempts to translate it.

Before beginning the chapter 9 commentary, I want to get something off my chest about the first sighting of the Farang in chapter 1. In that chapter, Ariel compares their antennacles to the oral tentacles of a "cerebrophage". In the second draft I just out and said "mind flayer". My writing group said I should change it because readers might not know what a mind flayer is. ("Did you mean: mind flower?") Taking their advice to heart, I changed the reference to a made-up reference that nobody will get. Well, at least we're all in the same boat now!

And here's chapter 9. Vent your egg sacs before reading this commentary:

• This chapter represents the absolute end of the abandoned first draft. Beyond this point everything is from the second or third draft.
• In a questionable move on my part, Ariel gets an Alien computer before he meets any Alien characters, requiring that I introduce you to the species with an infodump ("eight-foot monkey-lizards"). Don't worry, in just a couple weeks, Alien characters will show up and run off with the whole damn book.
• Speaking of infodumps, I want to do a little infodump of my own, about the Ip Shkoy. The Ip Shkoy were an ancient civilization of Aliens, much like the Roman Empire was an ancient civilization of humans. "Ip Shkoy" is not the native-language name for the Alien species. I tried to make this abundantly clear, but I've noticed well-intentioned people calling the Alien species "the Ip Shkoy" or ascribing to modern Aliens the (frequently pretty awful) opinions of the Ip Shkoy. Which would be like Curic thinking that Ariel regularly offers sacrifices to Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

  Star Trek has conditioned us to see an ET species as having a single homogenous culture that never changes, and this sort of confusion is why they do that on Star Trek. That said, I don't think this is anyone's fault but my own. If I'd presented modern Alien society in as much detail as I present the Ip Shkoy, the other probably wouldn't crowd out the one. It doesn't help that certain features are shared by both cultures, such as transitive pair bonding (aka polyamory).

• Recapture That Remarkable Taste, the Ip Shkoy remake of Sayable Spice, is not to be confused with the new William Gibson anthology, Distrust That Particular Flavor.
• Charlene Siph is mentioned again, which gives me a good excuse to talk about Alien names. The Aliens on the contact mission have all taken human first names, but their surnames are monosyllables which I usually generated by truncating creepy English words ("siphon", "somnolent") to four letters. The impression I want is of someone who's trying to be accommodating but doesn't quite have it down.

  This is another detail imported from "Vanilla", one that I'm really happy with, one that even becomes important to the plot in one place. And if you like symbolism, check this out: "Ariel Blum" could be an Alien name.

• In the second draft I wrote a whole review of Proty's Big Escape, but turns out it's a dumb idea to insert one game review wholesale into another game review. Let me know if you want the Proty review, and I'll make it the first CG Deleted Scene, even though it's only five paragraphs long.

Be sure to tune in next Tuesday, when Dana will say, "This application will terminate due to suspected theft or circumvention."

Oh, and you might want to keep an eye on @Tetsuo_Milk.

Image credits: Flickr user krusty, Guillaume Piolle, and Flickr user CoffeeGeek.

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Some exciting news from the world of commerce: the Constellation Games paperback drops April 17. If you're waiting for the paperback, do yourself a favor and pre-order at the $20 level. Once it's released, the paperback will cost $20 on its own, but if you pre-order, you'll also get a bunch of extras, including three short stories that all pass the Bechdel test.

The seventeenth of April is also the day we serialize chapter 21, "Her". I'm going to keep posting my commentaries once a week along with the serialization, even though a growing number of you will have read the whole book and know how it turns out. Then you'll know how I feel right now!

I'm also thinking of having a celebratory book launch dinner at Hill Country, a famous Austin-area barbecue joint that fortuitiously has a branch in New York City. Let me know if you're interested in attending.

...and we're back from commercial. Here's the commentary for chapter 8:

• Hopefully this chapter doesn't seem too special now, but when I first wrote it it was a revelation. It was a narrative with a plot! Curic was an active character and you could see her chemistry with Ariel as they physically interacted! My writing group indicated in no uncertain terms that this was the stuff they had been waiting for.

  I wrote a couple more chapters in the old, boring style but it wasn't long before I gave up and started the second draft, which tried to make the whole book more like this chapter. To this end I introduced innovations like the long IM conversations, and Jenny. Imagine reading up to this point, except Jenny has only been mentioned once and Curic has only had three lines of dialogue. That was the first draft.

• Because of its importance to the book's history, and also because it's such a great set piece, I kept coming back to this chapter. Near the end of the book, I recontextualize it by showing the visit to Earth from Curic's perspective. And Jenny's remark that the plastic fractal "looks like Skewer Sue's bracelet" fed, as I hinted a few weeks ago, into one of the book's most important scenes.

  Which almost didn't happen. At this point I'd decided that Jenny was a big comics nerd and wanted her to reference a kinda bland comic book character name. My first try was "Titania". Well, the joke was on me because Titania is an actual Marvel villain. Sumana says she showed up during Dan Slott's run on She-Hulk, so that's probably where I got it, but I don't remember her. Bland, but already taken. Titania was out. Then I came up with "Skewer Sue", which is not a top-tier name like "Wonder Woman", but is definitely not bland. Then I decided "why should I deliberately come up with bland names?" and went with Skewer Sue. Believe me when I say that if I'd been able to name that character Titania, the offhand reference would have stayed offhand forever.

  ...And I can't even tell you all the other things in this chapter that become important later. Because they're all huge spoilers. But in one case also because it's quite embarrassing to admit how long I took to realize that I could reuse something. I should have called this chapter "Guns on the Mantelpiece". (Actually, I should have called the second chapter "Guns on the Mantelpiece"; I never liked "Corner Pieces".)

• Jenny's nephew Eduardo does not really show up again, except in the Twitter feeds and one of the deleted scenes, but if you want to make your protagonists look good you should show them doing nice things for kids. Just a little tip I picked up in Sid Meier's screenwriting class.

  Eddie was originally the son of Jenny's brother, James, who never shows up at all. I don't remember why James became Jenny's sister, but when I changed it I de-named the character so as not to use up a "named character" slot in your head.

  Actually, rereading this, I notice I didn't give Eddie any lines. That was kind of sloppy. I'd retcon it by saying he's intensely shy around Curic, but Curic's account of the day contradicts this! Oh no.

• The star-draw was added in the third draft. There's another star-draw in chapter 20, but a lot of other stuff is happening in that scene, and Ariel wasn't actually there for it, so the exposition was very difficult. Putting a star-draw here takes some of the load off the chapter 20 scene, and--only later did I realize this was much more important--shows you a fluid overlay in action. Albeit a two-person fluid overlay because Jenny and Bai are slackers and Eddie's a little kid.
• The celebrity voices used for the different ET vocalizers are a tiny import from "Vanilla", in which (among other things) the protagonist was shaken down by an ET who sounded like Garrison Keillor. Now that I write that down, I realize that I've only got one joke about this, because there's a very similar incongruous-voice bit in chapter 21. Maybe I should have declined to import this particular thing from "Vanilla"... it feels like an artifact from a less mature stage of my style.
• The bit where Bai introduces Dana to Curic was added after I sold the book, at editorial request to get more Dana early in the story. You'll thank my editor later.
• And I don't know when all of this came together, but I love Curic's mix of anthropological curiosity, disinclination to tolerate bullshit, and bizarre opinions on what's bullshit. Her reactions to Dana, to "Eddie wants to be an astronaut", and to the revelation that "fuck" is a swear word... she's got all the best lines. And she does the game reviews! This is the chapter where Curic came alive for me. Metaphorically.

Stay tuned for the inevitable letdown next Tuesday, when Curic will say, "I did not pee in your sink."

Image credits: (CC) Larry D. Moore and Wikimedia Commons users Solkoll and SeppVei.

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• In this chapter we meet Bai's girlfriend, Dana Light. Sort of. Dana is the bane of this minimal-spoiler commentary because it's a bit of a spoiler even to treat her as an important character instead of a bit of character development for Bai. But she is important--Bai was defined in terms of Dana, not the other way around, and I found Dana interesting enough to make her the star of the first bonus story, "Dana no Chousen."

  Chapter 10 will be a very Dana-heavy chapter. If I hadn't been writing a novel when I came up with the character, that chapter would have become a standalone short story. Of course, once I had the character, Dana quickly became important to the story (spoiler!!) and after selling the book I moved bits from Chapter 10 backwards into this chapter so as to introduce her earlier.

  More on Dana and Dana/Bai in a few weeks when I commentate chapter 10, but for now you might enjoy going back to chapters 3 and 4 and re-reading the earlier references to her.

• Bai is pretty ditzy when it comes to women, because that was the only way I could get him into this relationship without making him stupid or a Love Plus-style otaku. If I was a better writer I might have come up with a better solution, but I'm at the level I'm at. However, there are a couple moments later on when Bai is surprisingly perceptive about Ariel's love life.
• The other introduction in this chapter is Sayable Spice, probably the game most important to the plot. In the second draft, Ariel talked about Sayable Spice a whole lot, but it wasn't until chapter 14 that he mentioned that he was working on a remake. Now Jenny forces Ariel to commit and puts a stop to that nonsense right quick. Thanks, Jenny.
• When I got rid of Bruce, the character you'll never see, I gave most of his scenes to Bai. (Eg. it was originally Bruce playing Knockdown Dragout in chapter 4.) I'm pretty sure the scene in the backyard here is the only Bruce scene I gave to Jenny. Nobody cares!
• This is also the only chapter in which Bizarro Kate has a speaking part. In the second and third drafts, she hooked up with Bruce at this chapter's cookout, and later in the novel they were living together. Hers was a supporting role to begin with, and when I eliminated her major-character boyfriend, she got cut down to just a walk-on. But I really like the character, and I gave her a chance to shine (ie. be cranky) in "Found Objects", the Jenny story.
• I think Tennis For Two is the only real-life video game I mention in the novel. There was no other way to get the joke to work.
• The tattoo joke I had to cut from chapter 19 has landed on Twitter. Relive the saga: 1 2 3 4. I don't think I needed to actually present the translation. Oh well.
• Around this time I planned on changing Ariel's Twitter profile image to the duck from the Crispy Duck Games logo, but it didn't look good, so I think I'm/he's going to stick with the pissed-off pony.
• The only other thing I want to say about this chapter is you see a little bit more of how old ET video games just aren't as interesting to other people as they are to Ariel.

Stay tuned for chapter 8, a chapter I think is one of the best in the book, the chapter that got me to give up on the first draft and rewrite the entire book to be more like it. The only chapter in which Jenny will say, "Wait a minute, are you naked?"

Image credits: I got the first image from Flickr user marsmet462, not sure if they put in enough transformative elbow grease to put their own license on it. Second image comes from Sven-S. "☃" Porst .

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C'mon, folks, do I have to draw you a picture? Because I can't draw very well. I use words instead.

• The chapter title is one of my favorites, and I'm proud of so many lines in this chapter. I especially like "The aliens are not a dessert," the Paperwork Reduction Act line I used as last week's teaser, and Curic's unintentional poem about the nebula. I didn't realize until after I'd sold the book that the odd line breaks I used for Curic (meant to convey the rhythm of her native language) turn everything she says on IM into free verse.
• Ariel's older brother Raphael has been mentioned several times before, but I forgot to talk about him. Because there's not much to say. He never shows up in the novel except in stories Ariel tells about when they were kids. But I needed to establish Raph's existence so it's not a big surprise when Ariel pulls out those stories.

  In my mind, Raph is now an economist for the IMF or something. His parents are very proud, Ariel less so.

• The Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs first showed up in "Vanilla". It was presented as less sinister and more farcical, mainly because the protagonist of "Vanilla" is in a good position to manipulate the BEA, and Ariel is not.
• Want to know something hilarious? In the first version of this chapter (second draft), BEA agents Krakowski and Fowler didn't even have names. In his blog, Ariel called them Good Cop and Bad Cop, after their roles in this initial conversation. My writing group raised an enormous stink about this, and eventually Ariel made up ridiculous fake cop-show aliases: Krakowski and Tonsil. But as the second draft progressed and the BEA agents became essential to the plot, I found it harder and harder to have a character named "Tonsil" deliver important lines.

  Also, I'd never given them personalities. You couldn't tell who was talking. It was awful. Writing group conversation: "Why do you even have two of them?" "Well, they're Men in Black, there's always two of them..."

  After completing the second draft I considered a number of ways of distinguishing the characters, including making Krakowski a woman. That didn't happen, not least because it would turn Krakowski/Fowler into Scully/Mulder. But out of that thought process and the Good Cop/Bad Cop thing came the distinction I went with. (Highlight to reveal spoiler:) Fowler is everything Ariel hates: a reactionary thug getting by on his charm and connections. Krakowski is basically the same person as Ariel: an outsider, a xenophile, smart and driven. But Krakowski and Fowler have the exact same job.

• I'm pretty sure 9/11 didn't happen in this universe (and at this point you might be able to guess why not), but there's a Department of Homeland Security anyway. Go figure.
• One of my favorite feelings when writing is the realization that you can reuse a detail that earlier was merely incidental. "Limited Nuclear Exchange" is just a random game reference in this chapter, but much later in the book I needed to write a tense conversation between Ariel and Jenny, so I set the conversation during an LNE session and fleshed out the game: a board game, a cross between Twilight Struggle and Twilight Imperium that takes half an hour just to set up and generally ends abruptly with both players losing.

  That's a small example, but in a couple chapters there's another offhand reference that greatly shaped one of the most important scenes in the book. Watch for it! Specifically, watch for me pointing it out.

• At the end of this chapter you see exactly the thing Krakowski is afraid of at the beginning: a race to the bottom. Once one country opens up to the Constellation, the united front crumbles. How long until the USA acquiesces to the alien anarchists' demands in exchange for access? Not long at all, considering I need to keep the plot moving.

And there's the commentary. Stay glued to the proverbial set for chapter 7, when Ariel will say, "Well, her hardware's Chinese..."

Image credits: Gisela Giardino, The United States Department of State, and the East German postal service.

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I got excited while writing this commentary, because I was going through my earlier drafts and I remembered that Constellation Games has deleted scenes! But then I was a little less excited because the deleted scenes don't start until chapter 25. Let's not think about the deleted scenes for a while.

• Most of this chapter is new in draft 3. Ariel's dysfunctional relationship with Reflex Games became more important the further I went through the second draft, so I had to add an early scene to set it up.

  Also missing from the second draft was a sense of how Crispy Duck Games came to be. Crispy Duck was always supposed to be important to the story, but Ariel kept futzing around on side projects until very late in the book. The idea of remaking CDBOEGOACC games didn't come up until chapter 14, and the company name wasn't mentioned until chapter 24! I got rid of one of the side projects (more about this later) and dramatized the creation of the game studio in a way that makes it clear that Jenny is involved in the project from the start.

  The two new scenes also flesh out some character bits I didn't cover in the second draft: why Ariel thinks the CDBOEGOACC is a gold mine, why others disagree or don't care, and why peoples' objections just make Ariel more determined to prove them wrong.

• The Reflex scene is supposed to be reminiscent of "Mallory", with the whiteboard gag and the awkward demo.
• Gatekeeper was mentioned near the end of the abandoned first draft, in a very high-level essay on Farang game design. Around that time my writing group convinced me I needed to write a story instead of a bunch of high-level essays. In the second draft I focused on individual games like Gatekeeper, which let me do exposition while staying true to Ariel's voice.

  You might have noticed that Gatekeeper is very similar to Pong. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the settings on Atari's Video Olympics was equivalent to Gatekeeper. It's such a simple game we considered implementing Gatekeeper for iOS as a subscription bonus, but... no time!

• The breakthrough moment for me in understanding Farang psychology was writing Curic's lament about half of a person dying and the other half wanting a refund.
• Ariel's great-uncle Toby is a Tuckerization of my friend Lucian T. Kahn, but it's also a reference to Tristram Shandy.
• Now that Ariel has (limited) ability to translate the CDBOEGOACC I can dump all my unused ideas for games/hardware into the Twitter feed! Except that I didn't do that. The stuff you saw last week, the computers powered by pulsars and so on, was all new material. Almost all the stuff going forward is also new. I'm not sure why I reused so little. Partly because the Twitter medium allows for different kinds of jokes, partly because my leftover material wasn't as good as I'd been imagining, but also because it's fun to come up with this stuff. Every game or piece of hardware is a little SF story, a glimpse into an alien culture.

And there we go. Tune in next Tuesday for the heart-pounding chapter 6, when Ariel will say, "This form is a fake. There's no Paperwork Reduction Act notice."

[Drawing credits: Brandon Eck and NASA.]

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So! This is where the engine of the novel starts running. We've introduced the human characters and their dynamic, they have a gateway to the Constellation in the form of Curic, and in this chapter we meet the main plot drivers for Part One: the Brain Embryo computer, and the Constellation Database of Electronic Games of a Certain Complexity (hereafter CDBOEGOACC).

Now's a good time to talk a bit about the three bonus stories, because one of them takes place right after this chapter. "Found Objects" is a story about Jenny Gallegos and what she does with the reentry foam that the Brain Embryo was packed in. "Dana no Chousen" features Dana Light, a character who's been mentioned (as Bai's girlfriend) but not introduced. I'm currently working on "The Time Somn Died", which features a character you haven't met yet.

If you subscribe at the Bronze level you'll get one story, probably "Dana". Subscribe at Gold or above and you'll get all three. There's a fourth story, "A Princess of Mars", which I won't have time to finish. But I might do it as a promo later, or write it to be sold separately.

How these happened: after finishing the second draft I realized that although I'd created a lot of interesting female characters, the POV is so tight around Ariel that a) the only one who'd gotten the time she deserved was Curic; b) my novel didn't pass the Bechdel test. I fixed b) with some cheap tricks which I'll point out when the time comes, but a) left me unsatisfied, so when it came time to plan bonus material, I decided to write stories about and from the POV of the women in the story.

Like I said, I'm not done with the stories, but I think this strategy works really well. Each bonus story presents a part of the world that wasn't shown in the novel, while recontextualizing what was shown.

And now, random notes on chapter 4:

• As you can see here, Rachel Chalmers is the one who came up with "Knockdown Dragout" as the name of the antistrip poker game.
• I hope you enjoyed guest stars L. and Zhenya, because they won't show up again now that Ariel has quit his job. A couple things about them, and about Ariel's now-former employer:
  • Zhenya is the @Engineer_Evgeny Ariel has been talking to on Twitter. I think Evgeny is a great name. I was so excited that I had finally named a character Evgeny, even a minor character. Then I brought the Evgeny chapter to writing group and a member who'd spent a lot of time in the former Soviet bloc said "If your name is Evgeny, everyone calls you Zhenya." It's the same as Eugene/Gene, I guess.
  • L. dismissively refers to his henchmen as "caipiras", which, according to my former co-worker Guilherme Salgado, means "hicks". It's the same root as "caipirinha", which by semi-coincidence also shows up in the novel.
  • Salgado also told me that Brazilian software companies commonly have English names. The Brazilian game company is never named in-story, because explaining that would take more time than it's worth, but FYI its name is Tin Soldier Games.
  • I wrote a scene where Ariel tells his manager that he's quitting, but I cut it for two reasons. 1) L. is a perfectly acceptable stand-in for the manager, so I don't need the extra character. 2) In the third draft I added a similar but much more interesting scene to the next chapter.
• In the book as sold, I had a character named Bruce who was... kinda dumb and not that interesting. I got rid of him and gave all his scenes to Bai or Jenny, which improved those scenes greatly. But one scene I couldn't farm out was a funny bit involving a tattoo Bruce took from a Constellation design without knowing what it said. I gave the tattoo to an offscreen character (Martin) and moved the bit to the Twitter feed. The joke may not work in real time because the payoff isn't until next week, but I can write it off on my creative taxes as a social media experiment.
• The Scorpion is an actual Russian clone of the ZX Spectrum. IIRC all the human computers in the novel are real or realistic projections of existing brands (DS Twin, Xbox Forever, PS4). I would have loved to make up totally new hardware and brands like in "Mallory", but it would leave you confused.
• The biggest alt-history elements in the story have to do with space: the abandoned moon base Glavanya and the end of the Shuttle program post-Columbia. I use these as background throughout the story, but I could have done without them, and people in writing group suggested I scrap them. Certainly the book would be tighter if I'd scrapped them, but for me the abandoned base and the long-grounded orbiters give the story an air of melancholy and longing, especially when contrasted with the Constellation's capabilities.

  In the first chapter I considered mentioning a resurrected Glavanya crew in Ariel's fantasy, but it seemed disrespectful to put made-up people alongside the real people who've died doing space exploration. So whatever happened to that last Glavanya crew, they did make it back to Earth. And if you've been following the Twitter feed, you've seen that they got to go back to Glavanya.

Tune in next Tuesday for Chapter 5, when Curic will say "I am going to do research on human zombies to prove you wrong."

[Photo credits: BuenosAiresPhotographer.com and NASA.]

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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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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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In related news, several people asked to be able to buy gift subscriptions for their friends (one assumes), and now you can go ahead and buy those gift subscriptions. It's a little hacky--you're buying a gift certificate which the recipient redeems--but it should work. Again, let me know if you have any problems. And big thanks to editor Kate Sullivan for doing the server-side work.

Even if you haven't subscribed to CG, you can read the first chapter for free and then comprehend this post. But this magic is subtle, and will only work twice. So get on the gravy train before it leaves the... gravy station, I suppose.

These commentary posts won't usually be very long, but they'll give me a space to say whatever piece I might have. The Chapter 1 commentary would be super long, except I'm going to stretch my general comments out over the first few weeks. You can ask me questions in the comments or on Twitter. I don't intend to spoil later chapters, but eventually the callbacks will start coming due and I'll start referencing the early chapters a lot. And of course I will spoil whatever chapter I'm talking about that week.

So, on with the commentary! This is the shortest chapter in the book--I'm not doing anything but setting up the premise--and it's almost all that remains of my initial draft. I had to get rid of that draft because I tried to advance the plot entirely through blog posts. It got quite complicated, and boring. But the first contact with the Constellation is a very intense, breaking-news situation in which Ariel is not directly involved, so blog posts work well here. From start to finish I can't think of anything major I changed in this chapter.

The Twitter feeds are a lot busier this week than they will be in the future, because of all the crazy stuff that's going on in the story world. Also because I wrote a lot of tweets for the first couple chapters and then decided to scale it back so as not to overwhelm readers/myself. Pretty soon it'll settle down to 2-5 tweets per real-world day.

This chapter introduces the recurring game reviews on Ariel's blog. My original plan was to have one review per chapter (remember, this was originally going to be serialized on a gaming website). This did not work! At all! Most of the time there was no way to tie a game review into the action of the novel. I refocused on the action and now there's a review every few chapters, each one (hopefully) interesting on its own but also earning its keep, the way scenes in a novel are supposed to.

This chapter introduces the two main human characters, Ariel Blum (whose blog/framing device we're reading) and his BFF from college, Jenny Gallegos. I'm generally going to let the characters speak for themselves, but I want to talk briefly about Ariel's name.

I think super-symbolic names like "Adam Truman" are stupid, but character names are important for mechanical reasons. There are a lot of characters in a story, and if you don't give them distinctive names, readers get confused. It's worse for people like me who are bad with names in real life. And a character's name is often the first thing I come up with, with everything else flowing from that. It's not their destiny, but the name often says something about their upbringing and their life so far.

This is the sense in which Ariel's name is important. He was named after a character from Shakespeare, and shortly after he was born, his name become irrevocably associated with a woman from a Disney cartoon. Only certain kinds of characters can come out of that mold. But if you want to get super-symbolic with Ariel's name, connecting it to The Tempest and The Producers or Ulysses... well, I can't stop you, and you might not even be disappointed.

I think that's enough for now. Tune in next Tuesday for Chapter 2, when Ariel will say: "Nobody eats my coleslaw and disses NASA."

PS: I've put up an episode guide at constellation.crummy.com. There you'll find links to these commentaries, the archived Twitter feeds, etc. etc.

Next week ->

Although the launch is tomorrow, the Twitter feeds start running today. Here's Ariel, the novel's narrator, on Twitter. Right now it's May 30 for Ariel and he's fixing last-minute bugs in a video game about ponies. Tomorrow is May 31, the first day of Constellation Games. On May 31 Ariel's world will change irrevocably, and you get to watch the entire process.

Every week, the Twitter feeds will enact the events of the most recent chapter, using the Twitter-language of jokey status updates. If you subscribe to the serial, you can read each new chapter and then watch its drama play out on Twitter over the week, in something like real time.

You don't need to follow the Twitter feeds to understand Constellation Games, but they add another layer of fun. They contain tons of subplots and details that aren't in the novel because everything in a novel has to be useful to the main plotline—the polar opposite of the Twitter philosophy. I'll be archiving the feeds on my forthcoming "episode guide" page, so if you come in late, you can read the tweets for a given chapter en masse.

I said "feeds", plural, but right now there's just the one. Another feed will rise in a few weeks, but its owner hasn't entered the solar system yet and won't get a Twitter account for several chapters. I have created Twitter accounts for Jenny and Bai, the two other major human characters, but I won't be posting to those feeds. I grabbed the names because Ariel @talks to them a lot, Bob Newhart style, and I don't want someone else hijacking them/taking them innocently and getting very confused. The feeds are fun to write and I'd love to do four of them, but I'd rather spend my time working on subscriber bonuses. (If Brendan or someone who's read the story wants to role-play Jenny and/or Bai on Twitter, I'll hand over the keys.)

BTW, I got the idea for the Twitter feeds from J. Jacques of Questionable Content, who runs feeds for all of his characters. That's a lot of characters, and any given character doesn't post very often, and now I understand why.

In Constellation Games, Pey Shkoy is the language of an ancient alien civilization that produced some amazing (and some really awful) computer games. Adam took the fragments of Pey Shkoy found in the book, mostly names of people and companies, and reconstructed the language around those fragments, allowing us to present a basic guide for game importers and Creative Anachronism types.

The book's native-language title is Uiksel Pey Shkoy A Human, lit. Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans. Here it is in Pey Shkoy syllabic script:

The book will have a complete syllabary, a guide for transliterating English, and translations of handy phrases like "My secondary sexual characteristics explode with delight!" I've got to be a little vague on the details, partly because Adam and I just started working on this, and partly because one of the best bits of the book is who (within the fiction) wrote it. The latter being a tricky selling point when you, the potential buyer, haven't met any of the characters yet.

BTW, you can also see Pey Shkoy script on the Constellation Games front cover (it says "Perea", the name of the device manufacturer), and there'll be quite a bit more on the back cover.

Writing the book was not quick at all. The original plan was to build up a backlog and then start the serialization, the way webcomics work. I did about a quarter-draft that was awful, and then I had a conversation with some published novelists in which the novelists were unanimous that they would never start serializing something without having at least a complete draft. I started over and told Simon I'd like to finish a draft before we serialized.

Fortunately, the second draft was much better, I finished it by the end of 2010, and we decided it would be cool to try and find a real publisher for the novel. (Serializing the novel on GSW would pay me as a columnist, which--spoiler alert--is not very much.) I was apprehensive about chasing this particular carrot, anticipating years of bitter failure and publishing-industry drama, but I was able to get Candlemark & Gleam interested quickly, and the rest of the process has moved very smoothly.

So, thanks, Simon and GSW, for giving me the push I needed to write something novel-length. I'm also happy that on GSW I will forever be "Leonard Richardson (robotfindskitten)". It's like the way the Columbia alumni magazine refers to "Barack Obama ('83)".

First contact isn't all fun and games.

Ariel Blum is pushing thirty and doesn't have much to show for it. His computer programming skills are producing nothing but pony-themed video games for little girls. His love life is a slow-motion train wreck, and whenever he tries to make something of his life, he finds himself back on the couch, replaying the games of his youth.

Then the aliens show up.

Out of the sky comes the Constellation: a swarm of anarchist anthropologists, exploring our seas, cataloguing our plants, editing our wikis and eating our Twinkies. No one knows how to respond--except for nerds like Ariel who've been reading, role-playing and wargaming first-contact scenarios their entire lives. Ariel sees the aliens' computers, and he knows that wherever there are computers, there are video games.

Ariel just wants to start a business translating alien games so they can be played on human computers. But a simple cultural exchange turns up ancient secrets, government conspiracies, and unconventional anthropology techniques that threaten humanity as we know it. If Ariel wants his species to have a future, he's going to have to take the step that nothing on Earth could make him take.

He'll have to grow up.

The ESRB would rate Constellation Games M for Mature. It contains strong language, sexual content, alcohol and drug references, comic mischief, and cartoon violence. It's a little bit "Mallory" and a little bit "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs".

Interested? $5 gets you the story: one chapter a week, delivered electronically, starting November 29th. You'll also be able to follow along with the Twitter feeds, as the characters live the events of the novel. (You can follow along with the Twitter feeds anyway, but they might not make much sense.)

Pay more than $5 and you start getting bonuses. Seven bucks gets you the serialization, plus a bonus short story afterwards. $20 gets you three bonus stories, and a hard copy of the trade paperback, and a phrasebook for the Pey Shkoy language Adam Parrish created just for Constellation Games. And so on. There is a ton of extra stuff available, with more on the way. Read the first two chapters now (requires Flash), pick a subscription level, and let's get this started.

(n.b. You might notice a few artifacts in the cover image. All but one of the artifacts will be gone in the final version.)

In general, a chapter of Constellation Games covers 5-7 days of story time. So... I can script those characters' Twitter lives ahead of time, and then enact them during the week, so that they talk to each other in a way that looks natural. If one day a character stays up late, they'll post to Twitter late at night and then go silent until early afternoon. What could be simpler?

Except, when you search for software to automatically post to Twitter on a schedule, you find software that is designed to make your personal Twitter account look like a robot is behind it, timing your tweets for optimum "penetration" into your "social network" in the hopes of "going viral", all at the cost of your "personal agency". Talk about the ELIZA effect!

So, I wrote my own client, Sycorax. You write a script with approximate timings in a text file, and Sycorax a) time-codes everything in a way that looks natural, and b) enacts the script on Twitter. I wrote more documentation and made the usage more friendly than was necessary for my personal use, in hopes that you'll find a use for it.

(My preferred name for this program was "Prospero", for reasons that will become clear, but Twitter said that Prospero was taken, so I went with the other magician from The Tempest.)

Sycorax is written in Python and published under a BSD-style license.

Anyway, today at work I merged those two characters, and although there are still some rough spots to fix, it was easier than I'd feared. I don't even miss Bruce, which is confirmation for me that he needed to go. Bruce was kind of the novel's straight man, and that's not a position that needs filling. Any given scene needs a straight man, but it doesn't need to be the same person every time.

As July was Month of Kickstarter around here, so is August the Month of Constellation Games Rewrites. I've long been interested in, and somewhat disturbed by, the relationship between different drafts of a work. I think it'll be interesting to create a record of the rewrite process, and a fun challenge to do it without giving away huge spoilers or saying stuff that only makes sense once you've read the book. With that in mind, I have four main tasks for this month:

1. Write two new scenes: one near the beginning, one near the end.
2. Merge two of the minor characters into a single entity. They're kind of similar, so this will make the novel tighter. I'd been considering this as a nice-to-have for a while, but turns out one of those characters needs a lot more screen time near the beginning. The quickest solution is to just give him someone else's scenes.
3. Use the additional screen time from #2 to foreshadow the appearance of a third character, who doesn't really exist until about halfway through the book.
4. There are a lot of blog posts in the story that read more like normal prose. Kate (my editor) and I agreed to tweak the framing device a little bit and just turn those chunks into normal prose. The big problem here is that weblogs are written in a very recent past tense. I need to convert some of the blog posts to a more distant past tense, as though you were hearing a story recounted later, without causing big tense dislocations when you encounter an authentic blog post from the period.

Today I finished one of the scenes for #1. #2 causes me serious cognitive dissonance. I need to tackle that next so I can stop thinking about both sets of characters.

I cannot stress this enough: you should subscribe to this book. I pulled out all the stops to make Constellation Games the most fun-to-read thing I could write. It's a near-future space opera set in Austin, Texas. It's got everything I've ever wanted/loved to see in a sci-fi epic: zero-gravity sex, hive minds, terraforming, paleontology, fine art, warps in space-time, existential horror, and shipping containers.

But most of all, it's got video games. My goal was to write the most compelling fictional treatment of not only gaming culture (which already gets a lot of attention in spec-fic) but the creative act of making a game, how our society treats software and games as artifacts, and how other cultures might do things differently. Think of "Mallory", except in the context of what the Candlemark editor flatteringly calls "one of the most stunningly plausible first-contact novels out there."

I'm very happy to have Candlemark & Gleam as my publisher. I showed Constellation Games to some traditional-print-publishing people, and they really liked the story but didn't like the blog-heavy format. C&G immediately got on board with the format, and thanks to the serialization model, we can present the story in a way that conveys the feeling of living through a huge societal disruption. In case you don't get enough of that already.