Clarkesworld, Issue 59, August 2011

A really interesting issue which even includes a translated story…

Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee (a Korean-American woman)

After Gord Sellar’s musical tale in the previous issue, we have another stylistic experiment in the pipeline, but this one actually works, and works very well. Yoon Ha Lee’s previous story in Clarkesworld sort of grew on me after a while, but this one I loved from the outset.

The plot is inspired by Sumerian mythology – the main character is identified as Inanna right at the outset, so this is hard to miss. Inanna’s descent to the underworld becomes a video game, with an inventory of items and a second-person narrative. I always think of text adventures when I see second-person viewpoints in prose (and I suspect many of my generation do), but very few works of non-interactive fiction exploit this association. I’m very pleased to see this one does.

Conservation of Shadows is a clear candidate for my Hugo nomination… I’ll try to put up my Battle of the Stories page soon IY”H (it still needs a button graphic), and then you’ll see the rankings so far.

The Fish of Lijiang by Chen Qiufan (a Chinese man), translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu

A translation! An actual translation! Rejoice! (Note the lack of an irony marker. We could certainly use more translations of world SF into English.)

This is a pushy, aggressive story. With Pantone colors. (Not kidding this time either.) It has the driving force of cyberpunk, with a brash, angry male protagonist. The plot uses experiential time to address issues of capitalism, the labor market, etc. It’s a very interesting read, though I wasn’t completely satisfied with the pacing, or how the main character needed everything to be spelled out for him. There was also a throwaway “I’m not a telepath” line that I resented. (I thought that was an American thing, having to reassure each other that they were not telepaths… pfff.)

One of the characters describes “robots playing Naxi folk music” as “a donkey braying with its balls cut off” and says that humans were much better. So here is some Naxi folk music, played by humans… All the online videos seem to be from the same tourist show. I picked a segment with an instrumental solo on a Jew’s harp-like instrument. (Incidentally, I can play the Jew’s harp, even though it has nothing to do with Jews.)

I had my thesis defense a few days ago (master’s in theoretical linguistics), I got an A, it went fine. I don’t know anything about the graduation ceremony… but this is one step up from when I originally enrolled in this program.

Crazy anecdote from several years ago: I went to the admittance exam, two rounds, everything went OK and I got a good score. Then I got a notice from the university administration that despite my score being over the threshold, I was not admitted. No further explanation. Huh? The next day I called the department – they told me I was in, I told them I apparently wasn’t! Confusion ensued. In the end it turned out that an administrator thought the university did not even have a theoretical linguistics program and sent out similar notes to several prospective students. Augh!

I hope they realized by now because I’d like to receive my diploma… sometime… It did take a bit longer than expected because in the meanwhile I finished a different master’s program, started a PhD and also had an unfortunate illness. *sigh* But it’s finally over, I graduated, happy joy! Now on to publish my thesis results.

***

I’m quite busy right now and I have a deadline at hand, but I also have content for the site, so I’ll try to do updates more often!

I did not forget about Amesirun either, but unfortunately it had to take a back seat to work right at the threshold of completion. The game is mostly finished, I just need to put it together, compile the executable and send it out to closed beta. (Thank you for everyone who volunteered! I even got someone to test the Mac version, which I did not even want to release because I could not test it myself.) Hopefully next week!

The previous month was quite hectic, but I’m back now Amesirun is nearing completion. I know, I know… better late than never!

The main script is finished, I’m working on the endings right now (you can look forward to some strange stuff!). Because of the delay I’ve decided to make the endings lengthier and much more complex, and to add extra art in the form of “sketches” from the player character’s memories.

I still need to make a bit of art and the main menu, hopefully soon, and then it’s closed beta and release time!

More teasers, click on the images to enlarge them…

I’ve been very busy with Pesach preparations, so I haven’t had time to post here… just two small pieces of news:

1. My friend Sarina has recently co-founded a band, Legionaire Now, and they have a fan interviews feature on their website. (Sign up for their newsletter to become eligible!) They picked me this week and I did my best to answer their questions. Read the interview here! It includes, among other things, autism, pizza and David Bowie

2. This also has to do with Sarina in a sense. I was just about to respond to her comment to my previous entry with “sure, my English might be ‘correct’ in the technical sense, but I always have this nagging feeling it’s not poetic enough”… I logged into my email… and I was very surprised to see an announcement from Astropoetica that they would like to run my poem I sent them (IIRC) sometime in December. It’s my first – and to date, the only -  English-language poem I submitted to any magazine, so this makes me really happy. The poem will probably be featured in the 2010 summer issue.

So I think I need to reevaluate my writing goals! In Hungarian I have been published in professional venues, and now that I’ve managed to sell multiple pieces to English-language semi-pro markets, I should really set my sights higher and submit to pro markets. My last excuse was “my English is not poetic enough”, which has just been thoroughly demolished. If it’s poetic enough to sell an actual poem, it’s definitely poetic enough for prose!

But, butbutbut, I have a brand new excuse at hand namely that I don’t have time to write. Unfortunately this is more or less true… I didn’t write any fiction or poetry in February, and in March I only had time to do scripting for Amesirun, my upcoming video game. (FYI – I moved the release date to April because of the holidays. Right now I think I could sleep for a week straight.)

I have to write more, and submit what I write. I also have two stories I want to revise, and a nonfiction piece on diversity in a recent spec fic video game (you’ll see which) that I need to finish ASAP.

I’ll also have to update this site more often, since it has started to get much more traffic lately than usual, mostly due to 1. Amesirun 2. my Linux posts. So, more Amesirun or more Linux?

I have to admit it… the unwillingness to have an advertisement as my topmost update made me post a new teaser for the game. ^^;

Here is a strange symbol! (I turned off floating images because the image size is quite big this time.)

If you click on it, you can see a cryptic inscription in the top right corner. If you remember the previous teaser, that one also had similar elements… if you wait patiently, I might tell you where they come from and what they mean.

I finally had some time to try out ArtRage 3… I bought the new version with the upgrade discount when it came out, but I was just too busy to install it. Most of the time I draw stuff on my tablet PC, but I run Linux on it and that means I have to mess around with Wine to get ArtRage running (it’s worth it if you ask me). 2.5 is very stable right now, which is why I didn’t feel pressed to install 3.0 right away, even though I bought it and it was a bit more expensive than expected! I mention this because I just tried it out on my Windows desktop (easier install) and used the new watercolor emulation to produce the vertical lines seen in the image. So that was a new feature, and one I’ll be using excessively from now on, especially if I can get 3.0 working under Wine!

In other news, the game is progressing nicely, more than half of the graphics and the script has been made (I think I should also post a story teaser…). This means 40k of script so far, so there will be about 80k of script altogether. You can look forward to lots of branches, points-based scoring and more endings than you’d expect I hope I’ll manage to finish producing the assets and testing everything before Pesach!

My unfinished video game – a visual novel / point&click adventure hybrid – has been languishing untouched lately. I was seriously ill for a long time and now that I’ve gotten better (since January) I’ve been working very hard to catch up with work. So this meant that the game had taken a backseat… I’ve been feeling really bad about it, to the point where this was actually keeping me from working on the game!

But, but, but I think I’ve found a solution Enter NaNoRenO. This is like NaNoWriMo, but instead of writing a novel in a month, you have to make a visual novel video game in a month. From scratch. (There is also a similar event for finishing previously started games, but I don’t think I would be able to finish my original game in a month, it’s much more complex than a visual novel.)

A visual novel is reasonably straightforward to make, and I managed to come up with an idea for a game that I can hopefully finish in March. I wrote a design document (not sharing it just yet ) and calculated the amount of assets that need to be made, and I think it’s doable… though not easy. (Yes, I could just make a super short visual novel with stock art, but where would the fun be in that?)

I’ve already started working on Amesirun (working title) and there’s a bunch of stuff I managed to finish in the past 3 days. I made the core programming (quite simple, though it is a nonlinear game), wrote the first scene (quite long), and mostly finished two backgrounds.

The whole game is inspired by some concept artwork I did for Emerald Spires (my main game) several months ago, a drawing of a character I really liked, but the whole thing did not fit with the more realistic approach of Emerald Spires. So I cropped the character, who will be used as the main – and only! – character once I finish drawing the different emotions.

Amesirun will be set in the same universe as Emerald Spires, FYI. You can think of it as a teaser

Speaking of teasers, I have two images for you, a background and a (the) character. The game is set in “conceptual space”, so they are quite odd and not what you’d expect from visual novels. But I wanted to get away from realism, which led me to become completely stuck with the character art on my main game. It’s such a relief to be able to draw random outlandish things.

I made the images with ArtRage with some postprocessing using other software. They use some public domain line art from expired patents, and NASA astrophotography for the color overlay. The rest is hand-drawn.

Enjoy: