The Dog Ate My Serial: Series Three - Cracking the Corey Code
Comments have been made. Questions have been asked. The Democratic Process has raised its skinny fist and howled like a B-grade method actor. For those of you wondering just what the frock has been going on this series, you're about to find out. And for the rest of you - your smug is admirable, and your brain is the size of a planet. We salute you.
Here's a few introductory words of introduction from Corey:
The invitation [to do this series] happened to coincide with some thoughts I'd been having about the Oulipo and constraint-based writing. Writing interactive fiction is a kind of constraint-based writing, but I decided that, in addition to the results of the poll, I would set myself a different constraint for each episode, and furthermore, that each episode would also be a puzzle. In fact, the constraint and the puzzle are connected.
I have employed some of the standard Oulipo tricks—the lipogram, the acrostic, the anagram, etc.—but without making it obvious what I am doing. By figuring out the constraint, you should be able to figure out the clue, which is always the name of a city (it may take a little bit of online research, too). At the heart of the story is a mystery, which you will be able to solve if you accumulate enough clues along the way. And there are a few bonus puzzles hidden here and there.
Georges Perec says this about puzzles, in the introduction to Life: A User's Manual: "despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before..." In this sense, this serial fiction project is doubly interactive.
And here's a few more words, from an interview with Mitchell Caplan, the host of the show Click here on CHUO-FM89 in Ottawa.
And now for the keys to the kingdom.
There are three sections below: hints, constraints and answers. If you want to figure out what's going on all by yourself, turn back now! If you need just a little nudge, check out the hints. If knowing the constraint is going to help you figure it out, go there. And if you just want God's Honest Truth, go to the answers. All will be revealed.
This episode is a lipogram, written entirely without the letters D, L, O, and Z. A clue to the missing letters is suggested by the sentence “The quick tawny vixens are jumping the fabtastic canines,” a transmutation of the classic pangram sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
Taking a cue from the poll, this episode was modeled on a passage from Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary, in fact: a dialogue between Emma and her lover Léon in the Rouen cathedral). The quotation marks were emptied and refilled. Then every noun was anagrammed, so that “Sweetheart” became “Whee Taters,” “Travel Agent” became “Grave Talent,” and “The Price is Right” became “Hip Trig Heretics.” The title is an anagram of “Toothbrushes.”
This short episode is written in metered rhyme (although the meter is inconsistent). The title is a line from “The Princess Bride,” in which André the Giant (selected in the previous episode’s poll) played Fezzik the rhyming giant. (“No more rhyming! I mean it!”)
All the nouns, adjectives, verbs and many adverbs in this episode contain a set of doubled letters. Furthermore, care was taken to include at least one doubled set of every letter in the alphabet. (In the case of x, y, and q, some liberties had to be taken.)
Every sentence in this episode is negative. (Actually this is applied somewhat flexibly: the main verbs are generally negative, but not every clause.) There is a secondary constraint here having to do with George Eliot: the titles of her most famous books are hidden, more or less obviously, in Jane’s first soliloquy (Daniel Deronda, Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Silas Marner, in that order).
Episode 6: A Chthonic Retreat; or, Systems to Inform Clients
This episode is an acrostic; that is, the first letters of each word spell out a message. The title is itself an acrostic that spells out the word “acrostic.”
In this episode, every sentence in the first paragraph has exactly ten words, while every sentence in the second paragraph has exactly thirteen.
Episode 8: Athrob with Effort, A Stamina with Resolve
This episode uses only words that appear in the lyrics to the song “Hobart Paving” by Saint-Etienne (the survey had called for funky music). Sentences in quotation marks are taken word-for-word from the song.
Every sentence in this episode ends with an anagram of the letters a, d, e, m, and n. In addition, the title and the poem at the end of the episode consist exclusively of those letters.
Episode 10: In This Episode, Made in the USA, I Panic.
Every sentence contains the phrase “made in the USA” (sometimes punctuation is interposed between the words).
Episode 11: The Zony and the Bear, or: Equin Toss.
Every sentence in this episode is a question. Furthermore, in the final paragraph (and in the title), every sentence ends with an anagram of “questions.”
Every sentence in this episode contains the letter x exactly three times, which is meant to evoke the method for finding the final clue: X marks the spot.
Lodz. This name of this city in Poland is made up of the four missing letters. Although the text refers to Eastern Europe, the reader doesn’t know at this point to look for the name of a city, so it may not be possible to find this clue until others have been gathered.
Manila. This clue is blurted out by Jane in the episode, except it is anagrammed to “Animal.” The country of which it is the capital is also mentioned: the hip pip lines.
Brasilia. The capital of Brazil rhymes, roughly, with hemophilia and juvenilia. It is also famous for its Oscar Niemeyer-designed buildings, including “bone-white towers” and “two domes, with one inverted like a bowl.”
Willemstad. Willemstad, on the island of Curaçao, is the capital of the Netherlands Antilles (hence the title “Double Dutch”). The general location is given away at the end of the episode (“the Leeward Antilles”) and you’re expected to recognize the name of the city (once you have consulted a map, likely) by its doubled l’s.
London. This one does not strictly follow from the constraint, so it requires a simple manipulation suggested in the dialogue: “I can’t tell which part is the beginning and which is the end.” The phrase written on the polar bear, “no D, no L,” just needs to be reversed.
Note: This is also the episode where it becomes clear that the narrator (who so far has loosely fit into the film noir gumshoe hero type) is a woman named George.
Episode 6: A Chthonic Retreat; or, Systems to Inform Clients
Kabul. This clue is revealed in the message spelled out by the first letters of each word, which is (to save you the trouble): “Jane this is a secret message from your father the polar bear is buried in a very particular place an island where we used to escape a child a woman and a man to find it you need to snoop a list of world cities which have a very particular relationship to each other each time we chat another city will be subtly revealed this week our destination is the capital of Afghanistan yours daddy.” Within this message, by the way, is also embedded the name of the island where the polar bear is buried.
Luanda. Luanda, the capital of Angola, is located on the African Atlantic seacoast, just north of 10ºS and 13ºE. The ten-word sentences of the first paragraph, which ends with the word “South,” and the thirteen-word sentences of the second paragraph, which ends with the word “East,” are a clue to these coordinates (which are also referred to as “in Africa, south of a coastal capital”).
Note: When George and Jane enter the enhanced Google-Earth-like environment wearing their virtual-reality helmets, they encounter a petroglyph version of her keepsake photograph. This is their first indication that someone is actively leaving clues for them.
Episode 8: Athrob with Effort, A Stamina with Resolve
Hobart. Hobart is the capital of Tasmania. To figure out this clue, unless you are already intimately familiar with the music of British dance-pop group Saint-Etienne, you would need to do an internet search for any string of words from the episode; this should (if the string is long enough) turn up the lyrics to the song. “Hobart” is one of the only words from the song which is not used in the episode. As an additional clue, the title contains anagrams of Hobart (“athrob”) and Tasmania (“a stamina”).
Note: The title is actually an emended quotation from Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The line in question is referring to a train.
Medan. An anagram of the five letters that make up the poem and end each sentence. It is also hinted in the episode that the clue is “a city of the Malay Archipelago.”
Note: As per the outcome of question 3 from the last episode’s poll, this episode was based on H.G. Wells, specifically his novel The Sleeper Awakes, in which the hero awakes after a slumber of 203 years. Much of the syntax of the first paragraph is modeled on his text, and other bits as well, more loosely.
Episode 10: In This Episode, Made in the USA, I Panic.
Saipan. Saipan is the capital of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a Pacific archipelago, which is technically a part of the USA (and therefore may produce goods labeled “Made in the USA”), but which is considered to be outside the US customs zone (and therefore is not subject to laws concerning immigration or minimum wage). The location is heavily hinted at in the second paragraph. In addition, the name is embedded in two places: orthographically in the title, and phonetically in the first two syllables of the episode.
Episode 11: The Zony and the Bear, or: Equin Toss.
Quito. The clue is hinted at in the second-to-last sentence of the episode, which ends with “*****-ness.” Since each sentence in that paragraph ends with an anagram of “questions,” the asterisks must represent the letters q, u, i, t, and o. Also, it is mentioned earlier in the episode that the clue is a South American city.
Notes: A zony (or zebroid pony) is a cross between a zebra and a pony. I read about one that was called Zetland. A zorse, as mentioned in the poll for this episode, is a cross between a zebra and a horse, of course.
Kiev. The only word in the episode longer than four letters is “kieve,” which according to Webster’s Unabridged means a tub or vat (also “keeve”). If you shorten it to four letters by lopping off the last one, you get Kiev. Also, the initials of the four four-letter words in the title spell Kiev.
Solution: Little Andaman Island. That's where the polar bear is buried, and where George wakes up. How this solution is meant to be arrived at is described in the episode itself. Two straight lines are drawn around the globe, connecting all the cities from previous clues: Quito, Willemstad, London, Lodz, Kiev, Kabul, Medan, and Hobart are all on one great circle around the globe, while Brasilia, Luanda (more precisely, 10ºS 13ºE), Manila, and Saipan are on another. It’s actually pretty easy to do this on Google Earth using the “line” tool. The two lines intersect at two antipodal points: once in the Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of Peru, and once directly over a small island in the Indian Ocean, Little Andaman Island. More simply but less obviously, the name of the island is an anagram of Anna’s full name as revealed in episode 11.
Notes: Omar Khayyam, although known primarily as a poet, as a mathematician really was interested in circles, particularly in using the intersection of a circle and a hyperbola to solve cubic equations through geometry.
