Interstellar Pig

infobox Book |
name = Interstellar Pig
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = Cover of the 2004 Firebird (Penguin Group) paperback edition
author = William Sleator
illustrator =
cover_artist = Cliff Nielson
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Science fiction
publisher = Bantam
release_date = 1984
media_type = Print (Hardcover & paperback)
pages = 196 (Bantam Starfire edition, paperback)
isbn = ISBN 0-14-037595-3
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"Interstellar Pig", published in 1984 by Bantam Books, is a science fiction novel for young adults written by William Sleator. It was listed as an ALA Notable Book, a SLJ Best Book of the Year, and a Junior Literary Guild Selection.

Plot introduction

Sixteen-year-old Barney is resigned to another boring vacation at his parents' summer rental, reading science-fiction novels and keeping out of the sun. The summer starts to get interesting when Barney learns their rental once belonged to a Captain whose insane brother had been locked up for twenty years in the bedroom where Barney now slept. Then the neighbors move in, bringing with them the game they call "Interstellar Pig".

Plot summary

When Zena, Manny, and Joe move into the cinder-block cottage next door, Barney is intrigued by their glamorous, exotic lifestyle. His fascination grows when Zena introduces Barney to their favorite pastime: Interstellar Pig, a board game in which the key objective is to finish the game with the Piggy card in hand.

Zena quickly briefs him on the rules: each player picks their character from a box of cards depicting different aliens. Every alien race has their own strengths, weaknesses, and IRSC (Interstellar Relative Sapience Code, with lower numbers favorable). When the time runs out, every home planet will be obliterated "except" the one belonging to the holder of the Piggy. Barney is amazed when the neighbors keep choosing the same character cards: Joe repeatedly picks water-breathing Jrlb; Zena always chooses Zulma, an arachnoid nymph; and Manny always picks Moyna, an octopus-like gas bag.

While snooping through Zena's underwear drawer, Barney finds a manuscript written by Captain Lantham—the same Captain who had built the house that Barney and his parents were renting—telling of the event that caused his brother to go crazy. At sea, the Captain rescued a man floating in the ocean, described as having a "leathery, greenish, reptilian hide" due to sunburn and a "swollen contusion", "yellow and filmed with slime" on his forehead. [Sleator, William. "Interstellar Pig" (1984): 60] Insisting that the man is the Devil, the Captain's brother strangles him—and in punishment, is keelhauled. Although he survives, his mind is damaged due to the oxygen deprivation, and he spends the rest of his life locked in his room (which later became Barney's bedroom), scratching patterns into the wooden walls and clinging to the strange trinket he had taken from the murdered man's corpse.

That night Barney begins to see a pattern in the marks the Captain's brother had clawed in the walls of his bedroom: all the scratches centered around a particular rock on a nearby island. Remembering the trinket "to which [the brother] clung as he was pulled from the water, to which he "still clings", [Sleator, William. "Interstellar Pig" (1984): 60] Barney decides to go out to the boulder and see if the trinket had been hidden there. He finds a small, silver, round object:

There was a face carved in this side, nothing but a rigid, slightly smiling mouth under a single wide-open eye... Crude as it was, the thing seemed alive. And it was the brutal wrongness of it, the mouth smiling with such placid idiocy, noseless, under the solitary gaping eye, that made the face so repellent. The Piggy. [Sleator, William. "Interstellar Pig" (1984): 104]

Barney realizes that the game is real, the clock is running, and his neighbors—aliens in disguise—will do anything to get the Piggy. Each tries to bribe him with a unique incentive, similar to the Judgement of Paris, but Barney turns them down. Unfortunately by doing so, he's just entered the real game as a player representing the human race.

As Barney hurries to select his weapons and equipment before a horde of aliens descend on his cottage, he makes the startling discovery that he shares a psychic link to the Piggy. The Piggy tells him that it created the game so that it could be loved and appreciated, despite its tendency to detonate whole planets (and their surrounding solar systems) from time to time when it hiccups. Barney concludes that the object of the game is backwards, and it is only the possessor of the Piggy that will be blown up.

Minutes before his home is destroyed, Barney concocts a plan to pass the Piggy off to another player convincingly enough so that it won't arouse suspicion. Once the Piggy is in the hands of the carnivorous lichen colony, they board their spaceship home, drawing off the other alien players. Barney is left to think of an explanation for the wrecked house and clean up the debris.

Trivia

*William Sleator started "Interstellar Pig" as a "salty, nautical yarn" while staying in a cinder-block cottage one summer next door to a mysterious Captain's house. Both homes became key locations in the novel. [Sleator, William. "Interstellar Pig" (1984): About the Author]
*The original four drafts of the novel did not contain a board game at all, just Barney's neighbors searching for something unknown.

Related works

*The sequel to this book, "Parasite Pig", was published in 2002 (18 years later). The story picks up only a few days after the end of "Interstellar Pig".
*A fictional film adaptation was referred to in the end of "The Duplicate", another book by William Sleator.
*A fictional computer game is mentioned in chapter 2 of "The Boy Who Reversed Himself", also by William Sleator.

References