brainwane | "Constellation Games", a scifi novel

....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.

Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson

Constellation Games is a novel by my spouse, Leonard Richardson, "about space aliens and video games and love and computer programming." You can read the first two chapters for free. It's available for purchase as a serial -- for USD$5, total, you'll get access to the 28 chapters posted so far, then a chapter in your email every week till it finishes in August, and then an all-in-one ebook at the end. If you pay a little more, you'll get a print paperback right now, bonus stories and a phrasebook in August, and so on. And for free, anyone can read the author's commentary, Twitter feed, &c.

This is a great book. There are chapter titles like "Their First Contact Was Better." There are instant messenger conversations and blog entries like:

ABlum: who can i thank for translating this?

________________________

Curic: I will send you an achievement graph.

________________________

ABlum: no your achievement graphs have 10 million nodes
i don't want to thank the whole damn constellation
just tell me the name of one person who i can buy a beer

________________________

Curic: If you looked at the graph you would see a distinctive bottleneck: the Small Batch Data Cleanup Overlay, who translated between old versions of SAME and various human languages at the request of the History of Life Overlay.

________________________

ABlum: ok who is in charge of the data cleanup overlay?

________________________

Curic: That's not a real question.

ANYHOW, I offer big thanks to a randomly selected member of the Small Batch Data Cleanup Overlay. That'd be Jeroen Vivekananda of Peregrini Ring, Ring City. I would buy you a beer, Jeroen, but your body heat would vaporize the beer before you could swallow it. So, instead, accept this mention on my blog.

Other people are comparing it to Douglas Adams, Kelly Link, Neal Stephenson, and Douglas Coupland. You should try it out. I encourage you to read those sample chapters and I hope you'll decide to subscribe.