368 pages
Published April 17, 2012 by Candlemark & Gleam.
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 …
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.
I just couldn't get into this, it's difficult to get comfortable with the characters, I didn't really find any of them very likeable, the constant strange reviews of non-existant games, and the very unnatural names of them just made it not very fun to read, so I'll cut my losses and go over to another one.
A hugely ambitious book with multiple distinct types of aliens, technologies well beyond our ability of extrapolating from the current state of knowledge, narrative chunks with alternating disparate styles, and (human) characters with a completely worked-out set of conflicting aims plus a propensity for hiding the truth. It's all quite a lot to consume in the form of a weekly serial, which is what I did, and I am planning to go back and read it again as a whole to try to understand just what was going on. The author's commentary (posted online, also weekly) was a big help, and the character Twitter streams I thought to be a cool concept too.
