Interstellar Pig

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Interstellar Pig (ISBN 0-14-037595-3) is a book by William Sleator, published in 1984. It's about a boy named Barney on vacation in a cottage. He's staying in a room where an insane person lived for twenty years, but it has been a pretty boring week until the neighbors come in.

[edit] Plot Summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The neighbors in the cottage next door, Zena, Manny, and Joe, were very odd and seemingly obsessed with a board game called Interstellar Pig. This game seemed to be a kind of board game, and Barney plays two games of it in the course of the book. As Barney plays with his neighbors, they reveal the key strategy points involved in the game, starting with this: the overall object of the game is to have the Piggy card in your hand when time runs out, when every planet but the Piggy holder's will be obliterated.

Past the initial objective, his neighbors give Barney a quick, but informative lesson, on the general gameplay. First, each player on the board is a member of an alien race, and typically play alone (one exception is a colony of intelligent lichen). Second, each player has a limited amount of time to assemble weapons and equipment before the gameplay begins. Third, players can be eliminated in two ways: they can be incapacitated or trapped by other players, or they can be killed. Since the game is a competition for the same item, players are often ruthless in their attempts to acquire the Piggy. Fourth, players with a low intelligence quotient are generally favored over those with a high intelligence quotient (IQ), though this is contested later by Barney's strategy. Fifth, once the Piggy is acquired, protection of the card takes priority over every other consideration.

The plot thickens when Barney finds and captures the real Piggy, which had been "dropped" on Earth by an alien player years prior to the start of the book. In turn, he discovers that his neighbors are currently living the game; they are, in fact, aliens in disguise and they want the Piggy back - since the game clock is still running. Each tries, in turn, to to bribe him with a unique incentive, similar to the Judgment of Paris (mythology). Skeptical of their motives, he refuses. Only then do they reveal that by doing so, he's just entered the real game as a player representing the human race.

Barney then finds himself with less than 20 minutes to select his weapons and equipment, before a horde of aliens descend on his cottage to find the Piggy or die trying.

As Barney begins to fight off the aliens and attempts to keep it safe, he discovers that whomever is in possession of the actual Piggy shares a psychic link to it; the Piggy is alive and can communicate with its owner. During this time, Barney makes two startling discoveries: first, the Piggy itself created the game; and second, when the game clock runs out, it's the planet with possession that blows up (and the surrounding solar system) - not the rest. The Piggy created the game so that it could be loved and appreciated, even though it has a tendency to detonate whole planets from time to time when it hiccups.

Barney comes to the conclusion that the IQ points were also a set-up. While the game stresses that low-IQ is favorable, this is only because someone smart enough might be able to figure out that the objective of the game might lead to the destruction of the player's planet and civilization.

With only minutes to spare before his home is destroyed by the aliens, Barney concocts a plan to pass the Piggy off to another player convincingly enough so that it won't arouse suspicion, then dumps the Piggy back into the mix to avoid letting Earth get destroyed. Once the Piggy is in the hands of the lichen colony, they make a run for home and draw off the other alien players, leaving Barney to think of an explanation for the wrecked house and clean up the debris.