Constellation Games is an alien first contact story told via the medium of video game reviews.

Before I get all caught up on narrative structures and literary merit, let me just say this was a completely enjoyable book. It's full of in-jokes about video games, game design, and the early internet, and if you're the kind of person who is in on those things, you'll get the jokes and feel gratified. It's also a really funny book, though it gets darker as it goes on. It's so funny and so enjoyable that I was ready to give it four (4) stars, based on enjoyment alone (to get five you also have to have literary merit), except then I got to the ending and was a bit let down by the lack of resolution.

Like, don't get me wrong, I've read a lot of postmodern novels and I'm pretty cool with books leaving you hanging a bit. But the way this book was, its frankly lightweight nature, made me expect a traditional ending. Which it didn't give me.

Here's what isn't wrong with this book.

The structure is fascinating, and towards the end of the book, I think the structure tells us quite a bit about the plot. The story is delivered entirely via artifacts/surveillance: blog posts, emails, and chat messages, all contributed by or collected from our main character, Ariel.

Ariel is a guy who runs a game review blog. Like a lot of blogs ostensibly focused on a particular topic, it meanders to his personal life sometimes. When an alien coalition of multiple species of peaceful anarchist aliens lands on the moon and starts a contact mission with earth, Ariel wants to play and review their video games. So, an alien anthropologist gets in touch with him, and sends him an emulator, and he starts playing and reviewing. As Ariel learns about the games, he also starts to understand the people who created and played them. Meanwhile, he has interpersonal problems with his friends and legal problems with shady federal agents.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot because one of the delightful things about this book is the constant re-framing. As Ariel starts to understand the aliens better, his problems get a lot more interesting. But they also become the kind of problems that you have to have built up to in order to understand them.

One of my gripes with the book is that the aliens, despite their weird bodies and sexual habits, are remarkably relatable to the human characters. Only toward the very end of the book do you get a little bit of re-framing when one of the alien characters explains how they experienced what Ariel had thought was a thoroughly positive interaction. That was good. I would have liked to see more of that!

Despite its flaws, Constellation Games is a well-realized world, with fully developed characters (bonus: all the female (human) characters are individuals), an intriguing plot, and lots of humor. I had a shitty week and reading Constellation Games was a wonderful solace against that.

I hope Leonard Richardson writes more fiction because I could use more feel-good space opera.