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(SFF Bingo): Constellation Games, by Leonard Richardson
Yuletide is coming! And I picked this up based on a rec from the Yuletide promo post, so thanks, reccer. :)
The initial premise of "Constellation Games" is that an alien fleet--featuring many different intelligent species who have met each other and journeyed together over millions of years--has just arrived on Earth. And while governments are panicking over how to approach this governmentally, and astronauts are feeling like they've been made useless, Ariel Blum, a video game programmer from Austin, Texas, decides he would like to review the video games the aliens have published over those millions of years.
It's a simple conceit, but a charming one. Ariel is genre-savvy, and his occasional insights about needing to rely on his friends for a car because he doesn't have one resonated with me. The aliens are extremely thorough in their analysis of Earth, and when he tries to make their acquaintance, they're able to identify him by the cash-cow pony games he makes for tween girls, as well as by the Sonic fanfic he wrote in junior high. And while he can be plenty irreverent, his censoring the name of G-d is a nice characterization of his Jewish identity:
Ariel has a human friend named Bai, who is "dating" an AI on his phone named after the fictional video game character Dana Light. Once the Constellation's AI (which consists of nested subminds, the lowest-level very dumb and the highest-level very powerful) arrives, Ariel seems pretty blase about Dana--"hey, she can't be any worse than those yes/no customer assistance bots." This didn't ring true for me even with a decade of AI development since the book came out; there's nothing wrong with not having a human significant other, but Bai's demands that his friends take Dana seriously feel stupid, and I can't really tell what Ariel and Bai's friendship was originally built on, other than "video games."
During the last third or so of the book, the themes/conflict took a turn that didn't really land for me. There have been a couple hints dropped about "Slow People"; it transpires that that's the word for species/individuals that have uploaded themselves into a digital mindscape. So if the Constellation gives up on Earth, instead of the risk being that humans will go extinct through their own stupidity, it's that Slow People will discover us and everyone will happily be absorbed into the digital afterlife. For Ariel, this is a scary threat, enough to throw himself into making sure the Constellation stays. But when it comes to utopian afterlives, it feels like the main reason it's bad is because it has to be bad in order for there to be narrative tension. (There are some characters who push back against Ariel's belief, including one close to the end of the book and thus affecting the message the reader takes away--but Ariel is the primary narrator.)
Also, while I think all of the (many) Earth video games Ariel namedrops are fictional, towards the end he starts namedropping a bunch of RL artists, influenced by his friend Jenny. Jenny shows up from the beginning as "a close friend of Ariel's," who eventually joins his project to adapt Constellation video games for Earth as the artist. There doesn't need to be a reason why they aren't dating, sometimes men and women are friends and don't date, that's realistic! But towards the end there's a big, long flashback where Ariel monologues about his feelings for Jenny that boil down to "we're just too similar, weirded out by the existential horror of our own insignificance in the universe, it probably wouldn't work out...unless...?" and I felt that that whole direction was unnecessary. But again, I'm probably biased because I don't share his priors about human insignificance!
"Constellation Games" was amusing and clever, I'd just have preferred more of the early "wow, let's see what this video game tells us about this alien culture" to where the plot ultimately went.
Bingo: I'm probably using it for self-published/indie-published. Definitely counts as "No Ifs, Ands, Or Buts." Probably also Award Finalist but Non-Winner, mayyybe "Set In Space"? (There's a lot on a space station, but I don't think 50%.)
The initial premise of "Constellation Games" is that an alien fleet--featuring many different intelligent species who have met each other and journeyed together over millions of years--has just arrived on Earth. And while governments are panicking over how to approach this governmentally, and astronauts are feeling like they've been made useless, Ariel Blum, a video game programmer from Austin, Texas, decides he would like to review the video games the aliens have published over those millions of years.
It's a simple conceit, but a charming one. Ariel is genre-savvy, and his occasional insights about needing to rely on his friends for a car because he doesn't have one resonated with me. The aliens are extremely thorough in their analysis of Earth, and when he tries to make their acquaintance, they're able to identify him by the cash-cow pony games he makes for tween girls, as well as by the Sonic fanfic he wrote in junior high. And while he can be plenty irreverent, his censoring the name of G-d is a nice characterization of his Jewish identity:
In Caveman Chaos you communicate with your primitive isometric-view tribes the same way G-d does in real life—by pummeling the shit out of things!
And the portrayal of the "Constellation" as not just one species, but a dizzying variety of them, was also well done. There's one species called the "Aliens" (capital A), another called the "Goyim" (yes, really), a hivemind named "Her" built of tiny individual bug-units called "Them," and many more. There are the Fereng, who consist of two minds in one body that trade off with a shared memory, but not-quite-seamless overlap. This reminded me a lot of "Two Spacesuits," which is a recent short fiction piece that my friend J. (whose admirable reading habits are kind of what dragged me into r/fantasy in the first place) really enjoyed...and only after I finished the book did I realize it was the same author. Some of the Aliens try to learn English, but there's a steep learning curve: "It offpisses me." I think "Constellation Games" does a good job with the trope of "well of course we shouldn't expect extraterrestrials to have the same kind of life cycle/social stereotypes/anatomy as we do, they're extraterrestrials!" Creative worldbuilding is a feature in this case--it just gets weird when people try to back-project it onto Earth and say "therefore, these neologism human identities are valid."
The Constellation are post-scarcity anarchists--everything is about consent and cooperation. Some of them want to help the humans fix Earth's environmental hazards; others are ready to write the planet off and look for actual fossilized civilizations, the kind they prefer studying. Both the unrequested "help" and the threat the Constellation poses if they turn violent make human authorities edgy, and the government tries to restrict communication/travel to the space station. Ariel has a great quip about the ubiquitous Paperwork Reduction Act. And with a lot of Constellation help, humans eventually visit Mars...Wondering why the flag looks like that? Some poor NASA graphic designer was told to design a flag that was simultaneously the Chinese flag and the Stars and Stripes. ESA got word and wanted in, then the Russians and the Brazilians, and then the UN and countries that never even had an astronaut program. And then the Gaijin started putting even more stuff on the flag, basically out of spite. Now it's a Technicolor soup, a graffiti-covered wall with "Ordem E Progresso" tagged on the bottom, which is Portuguese for "Fuck you, Mars."
Ariel has a human friend named Bai, who is "dating" an AI on his phone named after the fictional video game character Dana Light. Once the Constellation's AI (which consists of nested subminds, the lowest-level very dumb and the highest-level very powerful) arrives, Ariel seems pretty blase about Dana--"hey, she can't be any worse than those yes/no customer assistance bots." This didn't ring true for me even with a decade of AI development since the book came out; there's nothing wrong with not having a human significant other, but Bai's demands that his friends take Dana seriously feel stupid, and I can't really tell what Ariel and Bai's friendship was originally built on, other than "video games."
During the last third or so of the book, the themes/conflict took a turn that didn't really land for me. There have been a couple hints dropped about "Slow People"; it transpires that that's the word for species/individuals that have uploaded themselves into a digital mindscape. So if the Constellation gives up on Earth, instead of the risk being that humans will go extinct through their own stupidity, it's that Slow People will discover us and everyone will happily be absorbed into the digital afterlife. For Ariel, this is a scary threat, enough to throw himself into making sure the Constellation stays. But when it comes to utopian afterlives, it feels like the main reason it's bad is because it has to be bad in order for there to be narrative tension. (There are some characters who push back against Ariel's belief, including one close to the end of the book and thus affecting the message the reader takes away--but Ariel is the primary narrator.)
Also, while I think all of the (many) Earth video games Ariel namedrops are fictional, towards the end he starts namedropping a bunch of RL artists, influenced by his friend Jenny. Jenny shows up from the beginning as "a close friend of Ariel's," who eventually joins his project to adapt Constellation video games for Earth as the artist. There doesn't need to be a reason why they aren't dating, sometimes men and women are friends and don't date, that's realistic! But towards the end there's a big, long flashback where Ariel monologues about his feelings for Jenny that boil down to "we're just too similar, weirded out by the existential horror of our own insignificance in the universe, it probably wouldn't work out...unless...?" and I felt that that whole direction was unnecessary. But again, I'm probably biased because I don't share his priors about human insignificance!
"Constellation Games" was amusing and clever, I'd just have preferred more of the early "wow, let's see what this video game tells us about this alien culture" to where the plot ultimately went.
Bingo: I'm probably using it for self-published/indie-published. Definitely counts as "No Ifs, Ands, Or Buts." Probably also Award Finalist but Non-Winner, mayyybe "Set In Space"? (There's a lot on a space station, but I don't think 50%.)