A little wiped out for full commentary, but might as well start providing feedback as I read.

idk if it was just a chat-thread easter egg or a deliberate invocation (considering the nature of The Laundry Files and its central coverup conspiracy), but I'm a little amused at the Charlie Stross name-drop. Though seeing a name so familiar so early on broke me out of the story a bit.

I do like the little touches, like the discussion of ages.

The translation is a bit of a mixed bag. I kinda want to say that all of the brackets which use long phrases to replace a single word are bad because they break the flow of the story, which they do, but there are occasions on which it feels enriching. "[Word used as threat, an insult, or definition of “carnivore”]" is my prime example there. But "[Word meaning either apology for perceived offense or declaration of a misunderstanding]" is both highly wordy and repeated often enough to become timesome. The "untranslateable"s largely do their job. Puttings "[Atmos]" in brackets isn't quite correct, because that's scene description rather than translation, and the unfamiliarity of the bare word being put into the product-of-translation context kept throwing me.

TACTICAL ASSASINATION OF FIRST CONTACT ADVISED

that_escalated_quickly.jpg

Wow. Uh. I … sorry, author, not sure I can buy this. The entire plan apparently hinges on the Greys, who have been "loud" enough that Earth was able to pick up on their comms chatter, to have not sent a single report to their superiors in two thousand years. Remember, they are explicitly stated in the story to be 1000 light-years away from the comms chatter they picked up on — and one of them further explicitly lampshades they are picking up signals on a thousand-year delay, so there's no weird FTL connection going on here — so by the time their signal gets back to Earth, it's another thousand years old, and then once the Earthlings hear it and hatch their plot, they have to cross that space to reach them. Though to be charitable, given that this a Humanity F*ck Yeah story, presumably there's some sort of handwavey super FTL cheese going on in which humans have out-technologied the aliens and can cancel those delays…? Even so, it's madness to think they can retroactively silence whatever reports these first-contact greys have already sent, including the one that is discussed in the transcripts; and that their absence wouldn't be missed or investigated; and that murdering aliens to keep from getting a reputation as murderers is the best way to join an interstellar community. … That last one might make sense in the context of this being stealth horror, and humans being the bad guys all along, but it doesn't fit their stated lofty goals.

So overall I feel like this was kinda let down by its ending. Points for "Lacuna" though, and for the little details along the way.

Tier: Needs Work (near the Almost There border)
e: Upgrading to "Almost There" now that I've gotten settled into my reading.

I have conflicting emotions about this story primarily because it is at the top of my slate and I can't help but be off-put by the mundane and predictable conclusion. Given the how the writing is oriented towards a more humanistic story of how people react to a proclamation of certain death and how they attempt to come to terms and understand it, I find it strange that the author felt it necessary to literally shove the note down the reader's as throat as literal cause of death rather than something more nuanced and what I had hoped the author was going for, like a gradual self-inflicted ruination in attempt to escape fate due to paranoia. In fact, that sort of nuanced conclusion is what I felt the story was building to, but then suddenly shifted gears to quickly wrap things up towards the very end, perhaps because of time constraints. I can't say. Nonetheless, it leaves me with an unsatisfying conclusion, which is shame, because much of the work towards the beginning that sets up the story's groundwork is clever, the protagonist is like-able, and mystery of what "THIS" could mean and how and why it caused the machine to fail carried my interest throughout the entire story, and I never felt that I was trudging along (at least until the last 15%), which is a high compliment.

Ironically, even though this is one of the longest stories in the write-off, it doesn't seem quite long enough, and it needs more space to fully flesh out the ramifications of its ideas, such as the cancer diagnosis, the heartbreak of the car crash (which is mostly glossed over), Jada as a character, etc. Perhaps the greatest problem of this story is that it leaves too much unsaid and doesn't tap into its true potential. It has a great sense of internal narrative, especially with the scenes with the suits and the explanation of how the company avoids liability. It doesn't bog itself down with the technicalities of how such a device works and it is infallible, rather it attempts to illustrate what sort of impact that would have on the world, which is infinitely more interesting.

Nonetheless, this is not to suggest that there is no fat to be trimmed in this story, only that its interesting segments are underutilized and downplayed. One thing I would hope upon a revision is that the author would take less pains to beat the reader over the head with the physical danger of the machine itself and establishing that it will not end up being the cause of his death. This whole debate, which I knew was going nowhere by the end of the first scene, takes around 1000 words, roughly a fifth of the entire story itself that could have been dedicated to doing other more interesting things. I understand in universe that it would befit the character to exhibit a high level of caution, but this can be accomplished in two scenes tops, and also, ignores other possible interpretations of what "THIS" means that no doubt would have occurred to the protagonist. It just frustrates me that some much time was spent securing this particular facet when there are a plethora of potential possibilities to use.

The personification of the box seems out of place within the context of the previous scenes, given that even under duress, the protagonist never addressed the box before, and I don't think that element particularly adds to the story. It just seems odd, and the emotions he's going through aren't exactly strongly identifiable or understandable. Jada even points this out. To be frank, I'm not sure exactly what the cancer diagnosis really adds to the story as a whole other than to progress the story to its inevitable conclusion. It's a bit too ham-fisted for me and detracts from what should be an important character death later in the story, which happens right around the same time, and the two events kind of mesh together where neither event seems to have a particular emotional impact.

Somewhat related, the George Tanner paragraphs are written in such a way that it makes it seem as if they audience should be familiar with George Tanner beforehand, which is was a cause for a confusion, especially because the explanation of how that story is relevant is tacked on in a single sentence at the end of the story. Perhaps establish the setting before delving into that story, or even better, use the suicide bit as a callback to the proctor that had the suicide prediction when Tyrone was being evaluated, keep the backstory the same, but save the audience the trouble of introducing a new character.

Still, despite my bitching, top marks for you. Good job. Do better.

Things to Consider:
- Expanding emotional core of the story and exploring more possibilities of the premise
- Developing later scenes further
- Tossing out and rewriting the conclusion to better suit the overall tone and logic of the piece
- Reducing the length of extraneous scenes
- Changing up the presentation order / content on the George Tanner scene

Historical Retrospective


Hm. That's good introductory paragraph, and a ballsy choice of style. As f the first two paragraphs, I'm not sure whether I admire it or hate it – there's a reason I ran screaming from academia – so let's see.

“Human elimination infrastructure”. Wonderful! Now that's how you use a dry style.

Things get worse after that. Several paragraphs of future-historical reportage that don't do any work beyond the worryingly twee “this is about drones!”

A bounce back to shades of Kafka/Gilliam/Ballard livens things up, but only briefly, then we're back to boring lessons about unreal history.

The world stage of 2061 doesn't seem to have changed much from the world stage of 2016. The drones are progressing, but nothing else is. No wonder they end up in charge.

Things start to pick up again near the end, as things get a tiny bit more out-there … then it ends.

The manner of it being cut-off itself fails for me. Not because, Oroboro rightly points out, dying men rarely trouble themselves to end their words with a dash, but because it comes off as a sort of undeserving nudge-nudge-wink-wink see what I did there? gesture that fails to cover up the overbearing message.

On balance, I thing I'll have to tag the style as a failure. This sort of thing works best, as I gestured at above, in the service of irony – using the pseudo-objective style to poke fun at the cultural biases of the writer. That shines through one or twice, but mostly it's as dry as any other academic text, and the whole thing comes off as a bit of a slog to read. If you're in the mood for edits, I'd suggest killing the twist at the end, and have instead the writer be a full and enthusiastic supporter of the system.

That would still be heavy-handed in its moralising, but at least a bit more elegant.

Some decent action, blood, an interesting take on the bounty hunter schtick. Nothing particularly exciting about it, but written solidly.

The opening scene doesn't quite mesh with the tone of the rest of the piece, and paints him as being rather callous and bloodthirsty. Fridge logic falls apart a bit when you've got a system of corruption in place that depends on not turning around a piece of paper and being discovered. What if someone had simply dropped it and had to pick it up?

The jargon seems accurate, but it's jargon. We spend so much time on the runway with nothing happening. The old guy dominates, and Patrick says nothing. The ending felt rushed, and nothing about it was explored. It might as well been the GM of your DnD session saying "Rocks fall, everyone dies"

I'm a bit confused, Writer.

On the one hand, the amount of technical knowledge of how commercial airliners function and the ins and outs of pilot interaction is quite impressive. On the other hand, it makes the story very, very dry - unless you have even a passing interest in aircraft, there's very little else to recommend this story to anyone.

Subject material aside, there are serious issues with the formatting of this story. Paragraphs are separated by spaces seemingly at random. When writing a story, you need to either indent every paragraph, or separate each paragraph by a line. Lines of dialogue need to be separated by a line as well.

Also, it looks as though you didn't have much time for editing, as there's a paragraph that just ends mid-sentence:

On his radar, he could follow the
They shot up and down, seemingly bouncing around in the air.

You may want to put more effort into bringing your characters to life - Patrick in particular doesn't seem to do much aside from obey orders and follow protocol.

This story was well-written and the character work is strong. 'Scout' as a name is clearly a thematic tie to To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways this story also approaches themes of racism (or more correctly... what's the word for bias against a religion?).

Unfortunately, I think your moral center is wobbly. It's primarily undercut by the weight of the worldbuilding... I don't see a way that you can convincingly sell such a big twist. Did they also use EMPs on their own people to guarantee the records were gone? Granted, we're seeing the perspective of a kid in middle America, but do the adults actually believe that you can eliminate a religion in this manner, without people practicing it underground, or without isolated survivors in parts of the world? How exactly do books about Islamic art or poetry exist without in some way alluding to what it is??

But in some ways, plot holes aren't necessarily of primary importance, as long as you can sell the rest of the story and suspend the reader's disbelief through strong writing. You get close to there, but I agree with !Hat that the early foreshadowing is a little oversold and the final mystery is revealed too early. There was kind of a more foundational failing that stuck with me though: The immediate jump to needing to destroy a religion instead of a nation, or a group, or an organization strikes me as so morally bankrupt that I just don't buy it as in any way feasible. It makes the whole story's framing sit uneasily. This is clearly a polemic against racism, but in doing so, it also feels like it implicitly accepts some racist formulations. I.E., it's a secret dystopia (in a quasi-1984 manner, with the pact - which was a nice rhetorical flourish even if it didn't make sense)... But it's one that also demonstrates to have 'worked,' in a really unsettling way. Choosing 'Islam' as your boogeyman flattens out both the racism and the religion in order to fit your point, and you never sell me on 'this was bad.' A reader could easily take away from this story that the western world was attacked and made a horrifying but necessary choice to defend themselves - a Hiroshima for 2020, perhaps. And building in ambiguity here doesn't complicate your points in a good way - it undermines the moral allegory that you're building.

I feel like I'm being very critical here, but this is a story that I enjoyed, and which is getting ranked fairly high on my list. It's just left me with distinctly complicated feelings. I think my issues could be addressed, and that I'm probably reading it in a different manner than you meant to write it - I wrote as much as I did to try and analyze why it didn't click with me personally, in the hopes that you will find some of it helpful if you wish to revise.

Finally: It's a nice, subtle touch that Scout is presumably of an Indian ethnicity. I'm not sure how that actually ties into the point you're trying to make, but it feels very purposeful.

Beastly

The introductory paragraph seems to be trying a wee bit too hard, but it concisely introduces both an outside issue and character reaction to it, so I can't honestly fault it.

And soon after, we get “Noted in the ship’s official logbook, no less.” – I like that. Wryly amusing, but not overbearing.

The prose of the attack is effective. It's also very effective at threading between concrete details and more abstract background narration, and putting each to good effect. It's gripping in its immediacy. My only complaint is “hot whirl of confusion” which sounds a little overdramatic. Yes, even for a ship being attacked.

“As astute as Paul’s observation was regarding the nature of their assailant, he had, unfortunately, arrived at his conclusion too early” This, too, struck me as a bit of a fumble.

Still things progress here to a effective bit of tension, followed by an unsurprising but still shocking finale.

A couple more times I feel like your excitement in the prose gets a bit carried away with itself. For example, this would work much better if it were kept short: “Fire ceased as the beast’s steel bow smashed through the little craft, reducing it to flotsam, leaving the pieces churning with the brine and blood in its wake.”

And then the end.

Oh, the end.

How disappointing. All of that excellent scene, and I was expecting something with a bit more depth than Look, it was the British murdering the Germans! as the shocking reveal. I was looking for something deeper and more insightful than a lecture that when nations go to war, both sides tend to commit atrocities.

And now, for all the technical competence displayed, I can't help but feel this story is all surface and no depth. Nobody can deny your chops, author, but (to please me, anyway) they should be put to better use.

Steve sighed. “Do you remember the Glenwood drive disaster three months ago?”

Gary scratched his head, then his face brightened. “Oh yes! That gruesome fire that razed a whole block in less than one hour, killing eight adults and six children?”

That is definitely not the sort of exposition I want to hear from a man whose face just brightened.

One thing I strongly suggest you consider as you edit this is how you're going to hook readers into the story. I'm two full scenes in and the only thing I've read which has stirred my interest even slightly is a brief mention of dead family (although Steve's so blase about their passing that I'm getting signals they're not particularly relevant either). Not every story has to promise something outrageous — you can tell millions of super compelling stories without world-saving quests or special-snowflake protagonists or pitched duels to the death — but, within the context of the world you present, what you show us has to be important. If you're spending two scenes showing us a dude meeting a moving van driver and signing for furniture, that encounter had better be a life-altering moment for one or both of them, and you should give enough hints as to how that we can look forward to reading the rest. Right now, two paragraphs in, I feel like the story is like watching freeway traffic when I should be watching NASCAR — where are the crashes? Where are the swerves and passes and the frantic scrambles in the pits? Where's the tension? It's a dude signing for furniture. Is the furniture going to end up haunted by the ghosts of the dead family or something? (Have Gary keep glancing nervously in the van, or give him a sleepless, shaken look. Have Steve staring forlornly at a faded family photo when Gary comes up to the porch to ring the bell. Whatever.) Give me something. Something!

… Er, sorry, rant off, continuing reading.

Scene 3 is much better. There's some weird cognitive dissonance here in the implied relationships and the shown behavior which begs for explanation. Now I want to find out what's going on with that. But, at the same time, it reinforces how flat the first two scenes are. Aside from the single paragraph of exposition about the cupboard's history, those scenes seem pure dead weight; little details like Steve having a wife aren't necessary because we meet Kim in scene 3, there's no real emotion, and half of your characterization time appears to have gone into a character we'll never see again (Gary).

This story is teaching me several new words. "Shambolic" I have never heard before (though, having looked it up, I question whether it's the right word to describe a sleepless night). "Moggy" is a Britishism that has previously escaped my American ears. (Though "Crikey" is very strongly Australian, so there's some cultural mismatch going on in the vocabulary here.)

“Kate, sweetie,” she asked, “where did you find that cat?”

Kate squinted at her mother. “Why do you ask?”

“Where the hell did you find that cat?” Kim almost yelled.

*looks up the number for Fictionland's Child Protective Services department*

Seriously, this story has some very strong characterization of Kate's parents as uncaring and resentful of their child (see also: third scene's "brat", dropping F-bombs in front of their kid, all her alone play time). Strong characterization is good! But in this case it's also uncomfortable, since Steve and Kim are the protagonists, and their behavior is making me empathize less with them, which robs the ending of its emotional punch.

I don't understand what's going on with the cabinet — all of the scenes except the last one have things which are dead or broken being restored within it, but Kate's interaction with the cabinet apparently just involves her being teleported twice, because the last we hear of her before her first appearance inside the cabinet is her quietly playing upstairs, and there's no clue to indicate how she vanished from her room or any reason she might be dead. What happens in the story should happen for a consistent reason, to give the reader a chance to see the story's patterns and pull meaning out of them. I suspect this might have been crippled by the deadline, since the rest of the cabinet stuff seems to be aligned in the same direction.

I really, really wonder if the final person in the cabinet was originally meant to be one of the family members that died in the last fire. Because that would really tie everything together, and make Steve's actions in the last scene make a lot more sense.

There's more I could say, but I hope that's useful for future editing.

Tier: Needs Work

You monster, you killed >>Orbiting_kettle! :raritydespair:

There needs to be more of a blending of the theoretical aspects that dominate the opening and the reporting of the future history. The dry descriptions of processes that led to the deaths of a great many people are quite well-done, and the tone of it is excellently on point. That said, the sections that are straight history tend to lack that, which, while not a deal-breaker, does make it feel somewhat unbalanced. Something like noting specific instances of "human infrastructure elimination" more commonly across the described wars (beyond just the one assassination of the Russian general, something along the lines of the radicals and their families who died over the course of the machine's evolution, and the subsequent political evolutions in the affected areas) would increase the story's impact.

While the passages of history can, I suppose, come off as dry to some readers, I personally had no problems with them. I have a well-developed inner amateur historian, and they appealed quite soundly to it, even if some description of events outside of a war would have been nice. The concept of decreasing human involvement in aerial warfare is something that has been talked about over the years (in both fiction and nonfiction), and this does a decent job of addressing what a possible future along those lines would look like.

Regarding the end, I must concur with both >>Oroboro's and >>Scramblers and Shadows's assessments. A more concrete conclusion to this "history paper" would have been better, especially given the amount of space to work with that has been left over. That said, I feel like an ending that focuses more on the author of the paper's cognitive dissonance ("This is the infallible machine that keeps the world secure and keeps me and my family safe from danger/This is the infallible machine that can kill both me and my whole family in the blink of an eye, and we would never know why") would succeed the most. I would not call what is currently here a bad ending, per se, but it is one that certainly needs some improvement.

Some technical quibbles:

1.) "CX-3 Vulture" - US military aircraft are officially designated under a system called the Tri-Service designation system, which was introduced in 1962 to unify the aircraft designations used by all branches of the military (which, to that time, had used separate systems). To take the MQ-1 Predator as an example, the M stands for multi-mission, and the Q denotes an unmanned aircraft. As it stands, your fictitious drone is not only an experimental cargo aircraft, it is also manned. Some tweaking would be in order.

2.) "third Iraq war" - I am going to assume that the first two Iraq wars referenced would be Operations DESERT STORM and IRAQI FREEDOM, respectively. That said, an Iraq war could also encompass the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980's, or the current conflict against ISIS/ISIL/INGSOC/NAMBLA/whatever else we call them today. Something a little more specific (such as the War of the Iraqi Dissolution, or the Saudi-Iraq War) would be useful.

3.) "Stanislav Sergej Kuznetsov" - In Russian naming systems, the middle name is a patronymic (meaning, in this case, your character is Stanislav, son of Sergej). However, such patronymics always use the suffixes -ovich, -evich and -ich, meaning your general's patronym ought to be Sergejevich.

Thank you, author, for writing this.

I'm at a little of a loss as to how to comment on this or give suggestions, given the nonstandard approach.

It does a good job of telling a story indirectly, though this larger story raises questions without answering them. Though description was, by nature, lacking, it painted an interesting picture and held my attention throughout.

The main character had some personality, but it was muted. Likewise with the persistent tugging at the heartstrings; it's hard to deeply care about creatures, when their own emotions are dull.

It seems like an experiment, and a generally successful one.

>>horizon
It was a meaningful death.

Genre: Historical Action

Thoughts: This was great, engaging, action-packed fiction... until it suddenly turned out to be equally good nonfiction. The characters are vibrant and human despite not saying much. The drama and tension of the situation is tight throughout.

I fell for the head-fake about who their attackers might be, and the twist hit me like a truck. But given the nature of the events, I think the article at the end is a necessary coda; it wouldn't carry the same emotional weight without that.

Tier: Top Contender

I enjoyed this one. It seemed crisp on the whole; straightforwards in concept and execution, and well handled in that manner. I do feel that it was a bit simplistic; there were no plot twists or anything, just a kinda set-up and delivery, but it's well enough done that i didn't feel that held the story back a whole lot. The background you've got here was interesting enough to keep me reading despite that.

It's perhaps nothing jaw-dropping? However, it's solid for what it is.

I felt this was a bit weighted with gimmicks. The nonchalance about killing made for a wonderful hook, but as the story continued, I felt it quickly wore out its welcome. I kept thinking things like "shouldn't there be a bit more tension in killing people?" And "did he really not see this coming?"

I dunno. It's not bad, per se. But although it started strong, it seemed to clunk pretty hard at the end, through an accumulation of small dissonances?

Well, YMMV. I guess it's mostly tonal stuff and a bit of oddness about the backstory that kept me from really feeling immersed in this one. It's definitely not too shabby overall.

I was more interested in where this was going than with Arthur C. Clarke's Rama stories.

Still, I felt a bit let-down with the ending. We're not really given any resolution; the opening scene sets us up pretty strongly for some sort of change, escape, but the ending just kinda... fades out, it feels like?

Looking at this from an outsider's perspective, I think you did fairly well with the pony. I would probably have been able to understand what was going on if I didn't know anything about Fim, so that's good.

I'm honestly a little unsure if I understood your intentions with how she talks to her neighbors, though. She says she spends more time with Vex, but honestly, the majority here is with Agave? And I really don't get why she's so nervous about opening Agave's door. Something about drinking? Is she an alcoholic? If so, how did she deal with that before? If she had coping mechanisms on Earth, I feel like those might be useful here, and if she didn't, I have no idea why she's unwilling to simply go back to drinking. A bit more elucidation on her own backstory might help with that.

And the ending again; besides not feeling like there was any resolution to her 'let's get out' thing, I also felt that there was a message of some sort you were trying to get across, with your slight re-direction of friendship or what. However, I couldn't guess at what it was.

This was interesting on the whole, and fairly enjoyable. It just never really stepped across the boundary from 'pleasant' to 'compelling' for me.

...I guess this isn't really fanfiction?

I dunno, it's been much too long since I read The Time Machine.

This comes off as extremely one-note to me. The world-building is interesting, and revealed in an effective manner, and it does a pretty good job of evoking desolation and depression. I'm not really seeing much in the way of things like 'plot' or 'character', though... so I dunno. It's interesting, I guess, as much as I dislike the flavor.

>>Bad Horse
Hey Bad Horse, how are you? That’s nice to see you here.
is that an omen of your future return among us? That would be AWESOME!

Echoing above this was a fairly nice story built around a more serious take on a fairy-tale kingdom. I actually got a bit of a Shrek vibe from the setting, what with the conflict between magical creatures and humans being a key conflict of the story. The background details are great and I liked how Charming and the Old King reverse as villain/hero as you learn more about them and their actions.

I feel my biggest criticisms come in plot and character. Plot is okay, its a reasonably interesting point of conflict but I felt the whole showdown was quite a weak moment overall. The stakes for the main characters are really low and they struggle to find anything to define themselves for or against. In part that's the whole rub, but I feel it worked against the piece overall. The story might have been served better with one of the Fiddlers working against the other two, giving a solid antagonist to bounce off of before the unification at the end, but that's just throwing ideas out there.

The characterization was the hardest part for me, which is a shame as its the bit I tend to focus on. While their characters were okay (Blue disappeared into the background a bit, I'll agree) the primary problem was a lack of hook. There's an old Hollywood truism that the hero has to save a cat within the first ten minutes and while I don't expect anything that literal, there needs to be some moment to connect to the characters' struggle to really drive things forward. The world was very interesting and kept me engaged through the beginning, but without a hook to draw me into the character conflict this interest waned by the end and left the resolution unsatisfying.

Overall, a strong entry but I don't think the central plot is framed as well as it could be to engage the audience.

So hands up if you expected the humans to turn up at the listening post by the end after dropping out of warp.

That aside this is an interesting observation story but falls into a lot of sci-fi tropes by the end and that ends up hurting it a lot. There's an author I read called David Weber, who writes long, sprawling sci-fi series, but one of his spin-off books is a very badly received story about herbivorous aliens deciding to go on an extermination campaign against Earth after one of their scout ships whiteness the Battle of Agincourt. (They got really freaked out that the outnumbered side lost, for justifiable reasons.) Ultimately I liked that story as the alien's responses told us a lot about how they worked as a species and how their ideology clashed with basic assumptions of humanity's way of living.

I bring this all up because Lacuna really lacked any of that. You learn almost nothing about the aliens, only that they think humans are violent compared to whatever enlightenment they've reached. There's implications that they're communist, but that's told not shown, and has no actual implications on their interactions because there aren't any. Strip away the observations and we're left with human history (which I already know) and some irrational genocide decision.

*Sigh*

Anyway, that's a bit of a rant. Positives, the style is unique and interesting and I quite like the choppy nature of the formatting to match a decoded document. I really felt like this one missed a lot of opportunities though.

So guys I'm sorry, but I have 80 papers to grade before Friday and I can't do it on my job time because my plate is already full. I've got no choice but to bail out reviews and slate for this prelim' round. I apologise. See you on Saturday for my retrospective (already written) and don't hold me a grudge for abandoning you :(

Surbanism - Since there were three stories with no comments, I thought I should put in at least one.

E - I liked it. Somewhat of a Logan's Run crossed with Over The Hedge with Wall-E. The story was interesting enough to draw me in and keep my suspension of disbelief up to the point where I didn't notice any glaring grammar or spelling mistakes (other than one). Odd, quirky, and really quite enjoyable. I'd put it in the top half.

>>Bad Horse

I imagine "well-known" is intended to be read with roughly fifty quotation marks around it.

>>horizon
Okay, okay, actual feedback. (Apologies on the delay, I've spent most of the last 16 hours AFK.)

We've got here a space-opera heist/starship battle remixed with some crazy cool uplift AI worldbuilding, and both halves engaged me. All the little details feel like they come together. In short, this fires on all cylinders; well done.

The one thing that's going to dent it in my scoring is the ending, or lack thereof: this is so tightly focused on Stark throughout that cutting away from him (even if they spend the scene talking about him) feels like this closes on a whimper. I think I'm getting hints that the final takeaway here is that Stark has learned nothing from his close brush with death; and now, having learned that the Unfriendlies aren't even a significant fighting force, doesn't even have an external cause to throw himself against, making this a pyrrhic victory. In a story so focused on digging into Stark's psyche, though, I think we need to hear that from him rather than psychoanalyzing him from a distance. So this probably wants one last scene that you might have just run out of time for. Regardless, this is going to set the standard for the top of my ballot that I'll be comparing other stories against.

In the interests of honing the story I'll offer some nitpickier feedback:

• I abstractly approve of the use of the new pronouns for the AIs, but it raises some questions. Both of Stark's friends/lovers are "ve", but Stark is a "he". If ve is a sort of "virtual xe", meaning their gender is FriendlyAI, then I don't understand why Stark is traditionally gendered (aside from the meta-reason of not beating the reader over the head with unfamiliar pronouns throughout). Stark's "he" (and the explicit description of Chirrup's body as "female") also makes me really want to read "ve" = "she", but then I don't understand why you're not just using she. Pronouns make statements, and you shouldn't use strange ones unless they make the statement you want to make, and I don't understand the statement.

• It's a major plot point that "metric ordnance" bends space in a way that attracts short-range jaunts, but we only learn this with Ticktock's explanation after the fact. On first reference, all we learn is:

Something immense and unexpected thumped him from the side. It took a millisecond or two to realise what it was: The Thug had metric ordnance.

…that it's "immense", and that it's named "metric". Since that second fact tells us nothing I suggest a more evocative name for a weapon whose job is (if I understand correctly) to destructively warp space. Gravity/grav? Dark-matter/dark? Zero-point? Another sentence or two about its effects would definitely foreshadow the twist better.

Only AIs had the key to to the stares.

[img]https://img1.etsystatic.com/064/0/6326504/il_570xN.785902791_2jk5.jpg[/img]

dammit roger give us an IMG tag D:

Again, though, well done.

Tier: Top Contender

Gonna agree:

With >>horizon on all points--very nicely done, but the last scene didn't work for me, either. If you really want to pop out of Stark's POV at the end, maybe have Ticktock musing it veself about the story's events as the two of them are cruising back to Vega.

For my nitpicks, I'll add another vote for more consistent pronouns, and the completist in me wants to actually see the MacGuffin they pick up at the end.

Mike

I enjoyed this a lot. I don't know that it really coalesces into a full story - the end left me confused, assuming you were making some kind of point or revelation that just sailed over my head. But the journey itself is strong. You kept me uncertain about where it was going and yet interested in finding out.

The only suggestions I would have are to tighten up the beginning and the end. I was left a little out of sorts in the beginning, without as clear a sense of what was going on. For some reason - and this might be in my head - early on I was expecting a reveal that the characters were some kind of squirrels or animals hijacking a little delivery drone. But then it does appear that they're just humans. If you can ground the detail up front a little stronger, it'll make slipping into the flow even easier.

On the other side, the story stops rather than ends. There's a final scene that's meant to have some kind of finality, but I don't really get what it's trying to say or why. And why years? It's an incredibly odd specificity. If he's talking about the individuals coming back, I would expect in a matter of days. If he's talking about 'humanity' coming back to a higher stage of development, a few years seems way too short. If I had to make a guess, given the discussion of the weapon, it feels like the traditional speculative fiction setting of humanity blowing themselves back into the stone age, only with a robotic infrastructure remaining intact and self-sustaining. But that's also a fairly mundane backdrop when you have an interestingly developed world, and I would hope for something a little more mysterious and interesting.

Still, this receives high marks from me, and I would like to read more.

Here too I don't have much to say beside that I loved the story and am a bit envious. Nicely crafted world, the amount of information you managed to cram into a couple of off-hand remarks is staggering and the whole story left me with a smile and a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.

Great job.

>>Baal Bunny
"...maybe have Ticktock musing it veself about the story's events as the two of them are cruising back to Vega...."
But the feeling of the conversation would be different, i.e. Bob talking to Fred about Fred is different than Bob talking to Fred about George. You're more open talking about somebody away from them.

E - I think the end scene was well constructed in order to gain greater insight into Ticktock and Stark, as well as a wider view of the created world. All in all, very enjoyable, with the immense accumulation of creativity and word-spinning that I've grown to love from this writeoff works. Great start, wonderful build, fascinating plot. I hate to say this, but another top tier read. (at this rate, I'll be lucky to place 22)

Huh, a Westworld fanfic?

In many ways, this is perfectly functional, and has some nice touches (the laugh, for one, and the face polymorphism that you set up early and then utilize in your twist). It's those that elevate a kind of weak plot concept, but you also are hurt by the fact that this is basically all exposition. And it's all exposition that on the surface says 'nothing's gone wrong,' which to a reader says 'everything's about to go pear-shaped.' And then it does. And the androids that the Director was worried about killing everyone end up killing everyone. That's where it really falls apart for me. Plus, I was expecting some element of the Chatty Kathy nature to come through in what happens, maybe treating the people like toddlers in some horrifying way, but it's fairly generic death.

This wouldn't be as objectionable except literally the only things that happen in the story (as opposed to just being discussed) are in the final paragraphs. If the twist was particularly original, it'd cover for that. But it's not, and there's no satisfying sense of action or character that would create an alternate reason for it to be compelling. I'm not sure exactly what to recommend. If you focused more on Tracy doing things, rather than talking about having done them, maybe that would help. Particularly as it'd allow you the room to have a slow burn of tension as the Cathy grows more ambiguously motivated. But then, that's sort of a different story, too.

I had my teeth all gritted:

For a bunch of dark and depressing stories this round 'cause of the prompt, but so far, things have been nicely varied. Take this one, for example. There's darkness, sure, but in the end, it gets the hopeless romantic in me all sighing and swooning.

I mean, if you wanted to, author, you could do more with Doli's memories of her grandfather, maybe get into some compare/contrast with how she saw his life play out and how she's seeing her life play out. But this is good stuff from beginning to end.

Mike

The Machine Of Literal Death, Possibly, Maybe


A solid intro that gets the conceit across through dialogue without being too heavy-handed.

The reuse of “grinding noise” stands out to me as a bit clumsy, though that's admittedly a nitpick. And immediately after, there's “shooting out an arm”, which is far too exciting a phrasing for a guy putting a hand on the wall.

Halfway through, and while I don't have any major faults, it's getting a ittle one-note. Tyrone heads off this way of dying, and this way, and this way. His characterisation amount to obsessive, and that's about it. The cast of characters who surround him are just shadows.

Then we leap forward in time, and I get a realisation:

She hugged him from behind, stroking his chin with the backs of her thinning fingers. "Look at it this way," she whispered. "You'll be the world's first person to foil the machine's prediction." Haha!

This isn't an idea-story. It's a black comedy. I don't know whether it's intentional (the title seems to imply that), but that's how it's turned out.

And with the that, the ending makes sense: The obvious irony of IT KILLED HIM AFTER ALL is undercut by the uncertainty, by the fact that he would've died anyway. Tyrone is ridiculous. His conflict is farcical. All the attempts he makes to control his destiny, fight it, or accept it, come to likewise trivial ends.

Does that excuse the creeping repetitiveness of the first section? Not entirely – I still think that could be be trimmed down. I still think a bit more characterisation would underscore the pathos of Tyrone's situation.

Mainly, though, I think you should accentuate the comedy aspect a bit more. Not too much – that would ruin it – but a couple more signifiers that that's the direction the story's taking would help.

Ship



This is an excellent opening. It drip-feeds us details about the world at just the right pace to keep me fascinated without overwhelming me. Its prose style is understated but powerful. And just as things risk getting dull, it begins to move forward. Not with an explosion, or anything needy like that – just a slow but urgent motion forward as the mysterious but apparently threatening “Caste” are sighted.

As the narrator enters the ship, though, I find my enthusiasm diminishing rapidly. I'm beginning to suspect this is another example of high technical capability pushed into the service of nothing.

Let me explain. By this point, I've got the situation: Comparatively primitive people living on top of some advanced technology they don't understand. A stock setting to classic SF. Now, there's nothing wrong with so long as you do something else. So far, I haven't seen anything else. The ship so far might be something out of any TV space opera; the tribal culture has no culture beyond some basic gestures at ritual. There's no more hint of anything odd going on. There's nothing behind the curtain. At least, that's how it looks at the moment.

Also, a minor annoyance, a nitpick for sure, but I have to mention it. The worthless side of show-don't-tell sometimes rears its gormless head: “My eyes widen” occurs so far three times in the narration, and it's really getting on my nerves. (Sorry. I'm perhaps being overly cruel. I still think there's a lot to admire about the style. It's just that the miseducation of writers to suppose that this sort of phrase is good prose really gets on my pecs.)

Eyes wide with the wonders I have seen, I retrace my steps much more quickly.

Damnit. Anyway, moving onwards.

Huh. Okay. That wasn't the end I was expecting. I liked that the Caste weren't planning an attack like the earlier text implied – it's a bit twee, but it just about works. It's more interesting than all the dull wondering about in the bowels of the ship, but it seems both unearned and too small. I'm a little unsure as to precisely what happened there, save for the ritual trade and amputation.

This is the odd bit, the interesting bit. This is the bit you should be concentrating on, not the pottering about in a generic SF spaceship. I think you'd do well to expand upon this section – or move some of its ideas earlier – and reduce the quest to get the spear.

Finally, let's talk about the character arc. It's about growing up. That's the ending note, and it didn't really work for me because, again, it lacks depth. I don't know what growing up means for this culture.

Gonna go off-slate to review the two stories that haven't gotten any feedback yet.

So this is a story about a programmer pushing forward with AI research despite a recent tragedy in which that AI caused androids to go rampant and massacre humans. It goes exactly how you'd expect, and I found that kinda disappointing. Maybe that wasn't helped by having just read Companions, which had such a lavish and empathetic view of AI … but actually, on some reflection, I think my biggest problem with the premise here was that it used textbook horror-movie logic rather than science-fiction logic. Dangerous thing is marked with giant flashing DANGER signs, humans blithely ignore signs, dangerous thing produces instant karma. That sort of morality play has always felt shallow to me; for example, to hammer the moral home here, the story has to be structured so that the logic falls apart at the slightest touch. The robots are said to have gone crazy because of split-second feedback loops, yet Chatty Kathy deliberately set up a lengthy plot to get the override codes — so her murdering is premeditated, and she is capable of rejecting the murder urge in order to increase opportunities for later killing. At that point she's a full moral agent, and this is less a programming fault and more like a case of demonic possession, and I'm left to wonder how the androids came to the conclusion not just that "ending humans' lives makes them happy", but specifically that "bloodily dismembering them as they scream and run makes them happy".

That's not a problem unique to this story, it's a genre issue. But I've got to score it with the standards that I have, and I'm a reader who generally looks for stories that withstand deep engagement (structurally and narratively and in the little worldbuilding details), so that's why I'm dissatisfied here. Maybe others can comment on how well this works as a horror story, from the perspective of being willing to gloss over that stuff and take it for what it is.

All that aside, there is a pervasive writing fault here worth addressing, and that's the way that the exposition is delivered. The largest symptom of this is the continuous "As You Know, Bob"ing:

“Like jumping into a fire!” he countered. “Do you have any idea what I’ve gone through over the last fifteen years to get Delos back into operation? The politicians I’ve contributed to? The outright bribes I’ve had to pay? The news agencies I’ve had to pump money into like water to make sure the stories we get are pointed the right way?”

“I should,” said Tracy. The corners of her lips had turned down in a sharp frown and most of her previous discomfort had turned into a quiet intensity. “I’ve been working here since college. You hired me.”

The director took a deep breath and bit back a sharp retort. After a second breath, he let it out in a deep sigh. “I know, I know. You’re brilliant in your field. There isn’t another employee in Delos who has made nearly as many breakthroughs in android design as yourself.”

“Like the polymorphic visage modification I created, so you only need to purchase one android face and reconfigure it to whatever you want, whenever you want,” said Tracy. “That saved several million dollars in staffing the Delos Project, as well as bringing in profits made by licensing the patents to other companies.”

So Tracy tells Charles that Charles hired her … and Charles tells Tracy what job she's been doing for 15 years … and Tracy tells the head of the Board of Directors about the finances of one of their biggest successes. They're saving each other from writer-induced amnesia.

I hate to praise that first quoted paragraph, because it's still pretty blatantly expository, but here it's a big step forward. It comes from someone who has a reason to know it, is delivered to someone who might actually not know it (although we learn a few seconds later that she does), and he brings it up for an in-universe reason, which is to illustrate to Tracy the scope of her decision's consequences.

In fact, the rest of the exposition could be made less cringy simply by thinking about who would realistically know each point of information and why they'd bring it up, and then having the exposition delivered to support the points they're trying to make, turning it into context for an argument rather than being the point of the conversation itself:

“Like jumping into a fire!” he countered, then leaned over his desk. “Tracy. You've been working here since I hired you out of college. You've seen firsthand what we’ve gone through over the last fifteen years to get Delos back into operation. The politicians I’ve contributed to. The outright bribes I’ve had to pay. The news agencies I’ve had to pump money into like water to make sure the stories we get are pointed the right way. I don't understand why you'd throw that all away now.”

“I'm not throwing anything away,” said Tracy. The corners of her lips had turned down in a sharp frown and most of her previous discomfort had turned into a quiet intensity. “And I don't see why you won't trust me on this. Name one other employee in Delos who has made half as many breakthroughs in android design. Like the polymorphic visage modification I created. How many millions of dollars did that save us?”

The director took a deep breath and bit back a sharp retort. After a second breath, he let it out in a deep sigh. “Two hundred and fifty. But you know the rules.”

(Not every piece of exposition can be smoothed over that way. You're having two characters talk who both know exactly what "polymorphic visage modification" is, so talking out loud about its definition is breaking character. The details of why the invention saved several million dollars, and the bit about "profits licensing the patents to other companies", is irrelevant to the debate they're having, and irrelevant to the greater context too IMHO; the fact that it was a big moneymaker is enough to inform their argument, so the rest might be worth simply trimming.)

But do you see why that conversation works more naturally? It feels much more like something we would actually overhear in real life. Tracy, getting pressed on her judgment, might make a point of citing her past accomplishments — even though both of them know that information — to draw attention to them and establish her credibility to him in the face of a challenge. Charles might bring up all the sacrifices she knows about for the same reason — to emphasize to her, in-story, how much effort he's feeling is threatened right now. That dialogue serves two purposes simultaneously: it tells us information we don't know and why that information is important to the character bringing it up.

tl;dr: The smoothest way to deliver exposition is to make it a side effect of text that serves another purpose.

A lot of the other narrative problems I could bring up here boil down to that issue of text being nothing but exposition. For instance, the first sentence here has a pretty grabby hook, but the next three paragraphs put the (charged and immediate) conversation completely on hold to info-dump at us about the office. All of that context is vital to the story, but it's tough to have the conversation implied by the starting quote grind to a halt in order to get that understanding. You might try parceling it up in smaller chunks so that you can work it in as "stage directions" accompanying the quotes, showing them moving around the office while they talk. You might be able to work it into dialogue as you go. You might not need it at all! But if you found a way to address that, the story would be much stronger if the first paragraph connected straight to your fifth.

Anyway, an edit cycle getting tough on that exposition would do a lot toward making this the strongest story it could be. I don't know how you're going to fix the (stuff talked about in spoiler-text) without a full rewrite, or whether you even want to.

Tier: Almost There

>>Baal Bunny >>georg
I'm with Georg on the fact that the Ticktock/Oblique scene is far superior as an external view on Stark, and gives us information we wouldn't see in a closer conversation. But I'll reiterate that spending the whole story with Stark and then closing his arc without him in the scene severely mutes the emotional impact of that revelation. The solution, I think, is an additional scene closing out the story, with Stark alone, showing where he's going from here and what he's (failed to) learn(-ed). n.b.: that solitude by itself speaks volumes.

>>georg
>>horizon

Thinking about it:

I find that what gets my inner structure nut all wound up is introducing a brand-new character at the end just so Ticktock will have a sounding board. If Ticktock had been talking to Chirrup, I wouldn't've batted an eye. But someone I've never heard of before? It gets me both itchy and scratchy... :)

Mike Again

I think you tipped your hand rather too hard, especially considering the title. This played out pretty much exactly as I thought it might after the first third.

Also, that fight... after you told me several times that it was entirely without tension, I pretty much realized it was entirely without tension, and ended up being fairly bored with it.

Honestly, the 'illegal' aspect of this gave my suspension of disbelief a pretty hard blow. Sure, it gives you a great reason to have masks and what, and children fighting... yeah, it seems like it might be illegal, (although I feel you could hand-wave it with 'in the future' or something,) but the fact that this is as organized as it is - even to the point of having sponsors and what - brings a dissonance that I couldn't really resolve. I guess I felt like... it can't be covert and still have all the nice stuff?

The 'guys are incompetent' stuff came across a bit strongly as well. I could mostly disregard it as the MC's perspective, being a pre-teen and all, but there are some pretty flexible guys out there. Hanging a whole plot-point (her losing the match) on it was a bit over-the-top, perhaps?

The idea here isn't bad. However, I think you played it rather too straight-forwardly, and showed what you were doing much too clearly. Add a twist, trim the fluff, and re-work the details, and I think I'd rather like it. Right now, it's somewhat lackluster overall, although definitely not horrible.

Hmmm...

This is quite solid.

I feel that the first part - with the typewriter - is rather more disconnected, though. I end up wondering where it stands in relation to the ending, because it seems like there's a jump backwards after the office scene, but it never really seems to fall in with the rest of the story?

More than that, the pace in the first scene is fast. That's good; it hooked me in and got me going. But when it skipped backwards, it slowed down immensely, and nearly lost me again. Cutting off nearly all the stuff you'd built up to there made it difficult to keep engaged. Well, I'm tired and have a headache right now, too, so that might have something to do with it.

I appreciated the symbolism you used here, and the fact that you didn't play too heavy-handed in either direction. Having a message is nice. However, pointing the direction and letting people draw their own conclusions works in this situation very well also. Perhaps it lacks a bit of closure... but perhaps that's somewhat the point, as well.

Good work. I liked this one.

As for an explanation, here is what I understood from the story.

Humans lived in an almost post-scarcity society, but became bored. They engineered the hell out of themselves (long lifespan, regeneration, probably extra strength) and went to live a pseudo-primitvist life. The bots sighed but kept the world working, the infrastructure intact and preserved old knowledge. And then, one day, three kids become curious again and mark a possible resurgence of a technological civilisation where they can rejoin with their artificial companions (and maybe a bunch of uploaded humans). Which makes the bots and the other intelligences quite happy.

>>Scramblers and Shadows

This is the odd bit, the interesting bit. This is the bit you should be concentrating on, not the pottering about in a generic SF spaceship. I think you'd do well to expand upon this section – or move some of its ideas earlier – and reduce the quest to get the spear.

Finally, let's talk about the character arc. It's about growing up. That's the ending note, and it didn't really work for me because, again, it lacks depth. I don't know what growing up means for this culture.

QFT.

Things I did like: The true nature of the Caste was a super-sharp subversion. This maintains a very faithful character voice and tight perspective. When it does allow itself the luxury of detail, like the yellow-white anthill fill, it summons some vivid pictures.

It is a much rarer problem for a story to under-exposit than to over-exposit, but this is showing definite symptoms. Such as: Is the "ship" the settlement is on mobile, or not? Talk of "windward" and "leeward" directions which are constant enough to change the microclimate definitely implies the former, but "Maincannon ... slumps down to meet the sandy wastes below", and whether that refers to a deck or a weapon, touching the sand implies this thing's significantly destroyed and listing (reinforced by the scene-setting when the Caste arrives). But that exposes another ambiguity: the massive innards are intact and powered, and there's something spewing water into Flightbay, so it's got to be working at a pretty high level. If it's not destroyed, the deck descending to the wastes would make sense if the ship's stuck into the sand at an angle like a sundial gnomon, but then A) "bridgetop" wouldn't be the highest point, and B) the inside decks he adventures through wouldn't be flat.

This stuff may sound like nitpicky complaints, but it comes from me struggling to get a basic picture of the world you're painting. I know you're trying to get us into the narrator's head by taking for granted everything he takes for granted, but it's not cheating to provide rich physical descriptions of familiar things he observes (and even if you feel like it is, you could always mask it with other observations, like describing an antenna with "Sometimes dunebirds nested in the cup of the giant dish that towered three body-lengths overhead, or perched on the man-sized rail that jutted out from its center toward the sky, but there were no birds today"). Another example: it's linguistically colorful to describe something as a "longspear", but when it's clearly A) not actually a spear (it has a trigger and fires energy beams), and B) not any high-tech weapon that maps to known Earth technology, I'm sort of inserting a spear-shaped question mark into my mental map. Similarly:

This one has a similar end to the longspear and little one, but the other end is like a bundle of kindling; long tubes tied together in a circle.

Does it not occur to the narrator to wonder what this apparently unfamiliar object might do, or attempt to relate it to similar objects whose purpose he knows? "It has a single trigger-nub like a longspear, but the central shaft doesn't have a bolt-thrower opening. Instead, each of the tubes look like bolt-throwers of their own" maybe? That would have severely solidified my understanding of "longspears" as well as the other ambiguously described weapons. The narrator trying to puzzle things out from his knowledge can be a powerful tool for exposition, since it lets you simultaneously describe his surroundings in detail (he's paying attention with fresh eyes) and showcase his assumptions.

There are, I should note, a few places where that deliberate ambiguity helps, such as "peel the skins off the blackstones," which definitely sounded warlike in a way that bolstered the ending.

Speaking of that ending, let me see if I've got this right. To become adults, they enter the ship and the elder gets their fingerprints registered in the ship computer, granting them crew access. Then they use that to go fetch and charge a single weapon, which they trade to the war-tribe, and then the elder has the Caste cut their hand off so that they are no longer able to access the ship. First of all, yikes. That's certainly inventive, but I am having serious trouble keeping my disbelief suspended. An entire civilization of one-handed people would face so many problems I have problems believing it's voluntary. (Let's even gloss over the fact that such an apparently low-tech society would be losing amputees to infection left, right and center, because that's a reality that SFF is generally quick to ignore.) If the Shippers are getting valuable trade goods in return for their gunsticks, they would be under immense, continuous pressure to trade more; how are their traditions surviving against the adults with dollar signs in their eyes? And if there are roving war-bands out there -- and there must be, since the Caste has warriors and they don't fight the Shippers -- then how do the one-armed, only-get-one-weapon-ever-which-they-immediately-trade adults keep the Shippers from getting massacred? This place is a graveyard waiting to happen.

Tier: Almost There

So I don't have a huge amount to say on this one. Bluebirds was a story I quite liked, intensely character focused and set out to achieve a very clear goal which it succeeded at. I feel that Doli, despite being the main character, doesn't really get much space to do much of anything—in some ways that's the point, but it restricts her character and leaves us struggling a bit to relate to her character growth. Other than that it was very good.

Yeah, this one didn't work for me in the end. I can kind of see the shape of the dilemma forming, but it doesn't really work out well and the wider 'experiment' doesn't really seem to be fully thought through, or if it is there's not enough on the page to infer it. The initial world-building was very strong but characters didn't really rise up to meet it (particularly Jane's who's central conflict wasn't even laid out until the final third) and only the pony really comes across with any great strength.

I think the idea behind this one might have been better served with a different tone, maybe focusing on the mystery of how they got there, or maybe horror around the experiment, but as is there's—somewhat ironically—not enough meat on the story's bones to really propel it forwards.

I may be a little at odds with the rest of the audience but I felt this one got let down by construction more than anything. Companions is a fairly standard sci-fi idea, taking a central premise (friendly AIs) and running with it to a whole host of fun conclusions. That part of the worldbuilding was interesting, dry, but perfectly in keeping with genre expectations. The plot was a bit rougher, there's some absolutely huge holes that would need to be filled (who created the unfriendlies? Why are they fighting? What is the thing they're chasing after? Why are they after it?) but serviceable as a vehicle for a character study.

Which leads to my biggest problem, that I didn't really twig this is a character study until the final third, maybe even the final scene fully. This lead to a weird cognitive dissonance for my when reading as the whole thing ended up as three different stories, the heist, the background details and Stark's childhood, none of which really interacted. They're connected to be sure, but they don't meaningfully impact the A plot, the heist so the whole thing takes a long time to tell a story that doesn't really resolve.

How to tie them together is a big question. I almost think if you want the character and the world then you should dump the heist and put a big character defining moment for Stark in its place. But it all depends on your goals for the story and where you wanted the audience sympathy to lie.

Overall, a very interesting world, but lacking the structure to hold it all together into a great story.

Done with my slate, thought I'd do a review on one of the less-reviewed stories.

Eh, solipsism... I dunno. I've seen this conceit a handful of times, and it's never been particularly enthralling to me. Maybe that's just me.

The opening here is strong, but man! We really do swerve into swearing when the pony's are gone, huh? :P The character voicing is interesting at the beginning, but wears on fast when it continues unchanged throughout the weirdness.

I'm going to guess that the drug actually gave him magic powers somehow, because otherwise this is just too much of a coincidence. The thing is, once he becomes all 'A God am I' I feel like this story basically loses all tension; I don't really care about his existential angst, because frankly, I don't like him much. Once it's basically assured that nothing challenging is going to happen to him, he stops being interesting, and even if he gets a happily-ever-after, I don't really feel like cheering for him?

Perhaps you were reaching for something philosophical here, and I missed it. If that's the case, a better reader might pick up on it. As it is, I feel like this story was 1/3 pretty strong, and 2/3 mostly pointless. You've definitely got some things going for you in voicing and description, but structurally, it doesn't really hang together for me.

This is my attempt to pin down who the names used in this story go with IRL. I think I've got most of them, but two are fairly elusive.

RogerWilco - Obviously our glorious leader, RogerDodger.
Notorious C.I.G. - Cold in Gardez, because of the initials.
Mumblegrunge - Zoey, AKA 'murmurpunk'
Trips Reruns - Dubs Rewatcher. He got his name from the 'tripcodes' on... ponychan, IIRC.
False_Fedora - Yeah, it's probably me. :P I deny having anything to do with fedoras, although since I call myself 'not really a brony' despite hanging out around here, this name is surprisingly apt.
Brutus, Forebear of Oxide - Cassius, Genesis of Rust. Because, yeah, obviously.
basildragon - Baxildragon, AKA Horizon. Just one letter different. (I can't help picture him as some sort of chiapet with this name, though... :P)
Enlightened Pastry - Lise Eclaire. Eclair/Eclaire; ones a pastry, the other means 'enlightened'. I made this joke in the chat myself, actually.
Rhetorical Interrogative - Trick Question seems most likely?
Pallada - Oblomov? It's a Russian ship. And that 'Stalin's grace'...
Pigasos - Monokeras? This apparently means 'pegasus' in some other language. Plus, that vocabulary question about fits.
Fog - Haze, probably just based on names?

But these two I have absolutely no idea about. They might just be there for filler? Anyone else?

Coldflower - Cassius guesses Icenrose here, which makes a lot of sense.
MargarinePsycho And Majin Syeekoh here, which... is similar word-wise, but seems a bit of a stretch to me.

HEY

That shifting tenses line was about my end-of-year fiction workshop piece. Not a commission. Totally inaccurate. >:V


(i love this story)

I had to read this one because name, but fortunately it was on my slate as well.

Character voicing was a strong point, for example the sarcastic "kidding" line. I also felt like the action struck a good balance.

It's a very interesting premise, but it's also a heavy lift that strained my suspension of disbelief. Just how public/above board is this? The whole government funding/them not being in jail bit implies that it is, but Charlie's reaction says otherwise. I'm left confused. If it is some insane government program, they're going about it incredibly sloppily.

I also had a little of a quibble with Jim's change of heart, mostly that I don't recall any foreshadowing, so it seemed a little deus ex. On rereading, Sam has some nice foreshadowing, though.

Overall, the writing was skillful and there was some interesting conflict, but I was never quite sold on the premise. Also, needs more labs.

This desperately needs a hook of some sort.

More than that, I feel like the initial attitude towards the cupboard is a bit... odd? As far as I can tell, up until the end, the only things it does are pretty benign. It fixes a plate and resurrects a cat. I think that sort of thing would be pretty cool to have around, honestly; I'd be breaking all sorts of stuff to figure out what I could get away with. However, the characters take this weird 'How awful!' stance to it, which doesn't really seem to fit with what circumstances they've been presented.

I dunno. I liked some of the phrases and what in here; "transform everyone into a drenched sponges" made me smile. However, plot-wise, this comes across as pretty weak, even though all of the elements for a good story are here?

Overall, there's some good stuff in this. But it's held back too much by its flaws for me to really enjoy it a lot.

Wow, yeah, I don't really have anything much to add to the previous thoughts. I also noticed I was having a hard time with your vagueness; first-person-present-tense added a dreamlikeness to the flowing descriptions, which was nice in some ways, but also alienating; it's a tough line to walk, and I think I fell just on the 'a bit too distant to really engage' side. By the end, I had a pretty good picture of what was going on, but I'd have liked something more than an slightly too-slow rolling reveal to keep me hooked in, given the level of strangeness on display here.

Still, the quality of the writing here is high, and I did enjoy the strangeness for its own sake. I agree with all the above points.

My palms are sweaty

knees weak, arms are heavy, vomit on my sweater already...

Gonna have to echo the 'shrek' vibe.

The opening threw me a bit, with the spider, but I was able to cue strongly enough on 'Muffet' that I re-oriented pretty quickly. I'm not sure how you could open that better; throw in some more obvious fairytale stuff sooner? A gingerbread cottage might go a long way.

The setting and characters here did grab me quite well. I'd have to say that the plot, however, seemed a bit... jerky? I think starting it sooner and examining what's really going on in Muffet's mind more extensively might help with that. As it is, it doesn't really start kicking until we see the recording, which is a good ways in, and then it wraps up really fast with Charming. I liked it, but couldn't help feel that it didn't get the same amount of love that the characters and setting did.

I do appreciate a fairytale ending. I'm not sure if that's a subversion or not, but I'm annoyed when people take bright, sparkly things for children and smear grimdarkness all over them.

Oh, and my Dad's version of the poem:

"Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider and sat down beside her... and she smashed it with her spoon."

:P

Solid story, though easy to telegraph.

I'll echo the others in being little taken aback by the CMMA concept, but the action in the fight scenes were conveyed clearly

I guessed Lina might be the Killing Machine early on, it actually took me quite a bit longer to figure out Izu's gender.

The bit with her dad was interesting; it seemed like you were hinting something deeper with that 'cold' thing he brushed off, but then it never went anywhere.

I'm not sure what benefit there is to knowing that the Golden Kid's name is kri kri; it just adds confusion with another name in the mix. Besides, how does she know his actual name, anyhow?

The pacing was good, and it held my interest, though much of that was to make sure it did actually go where I thought it was.

Well... hmmm.

I liked the concept going in here, despite feeling like I've seen it before. I was hoping for a twist of some sort, but I don't really know where/how that would come in? Your opening is good, the descriptions are good, the pacing is pretty good, but I'm just left kinda cold at the end. I'm honestly not sure what I actually wanted from this one, but I'm not sure I got it. This definitely had some up and downs and what.

Perhaps I couldn't help comparing it to Skywriter's "Torn Apart and Devoured by Lions" subconsciously. I'll score it fairly well, I think, for everything it does right. I just can't help but feel it's a bit too straightforwards to really make me feel like it's something special?

...I don't really have much to add here.

You seem to have a good grasp of aircraft?

Yeah, all I'd say is echoing what's come before. No hook, a bit wall-of-text, rather dry. It takes something like half the story before anything resembling plot appears, and we're really not given much in the way of 'resolution' after that.

I applaud your technical prowess. Unfortunately, I found this mostly boring.

My thoughts.

...okay, more seriously. Your hook is alright, although more in a world-building sense than a plot one.

A little more emphasis on how this changes the characters might be good to resolve that ending a bit tighter? As Ferd mentions, it just sorta... stops.

The worldbuilding was lots of fun, but there are some strange anachronisms and details that don't exactly make sense. I was willing to let it slide, for the most part, but looking back, some bits of the world don't exactly jibe. It's a bit of a mish-mash between really advanced and strangely two-days-into-tomorrow? A bit of ironing might fix this, but it might also make it difficult to maintain that flavor you've got.

I appreciated that the glass didn't just shatter, because srsly Hollywood.

Overall, pretty fun if a bit unsatisfying.

Tropes!

Tropes EVERYWHERE!

Perhaps I'm extra genre-savvy, having spent some time perusing HFY stuff. Hell, I've written one or two.

Still, I think your previous reviewers have covered a lot of this. That ending just doesn't make sense, even in a 'humans are driven to kill or something' way. The logs are mostly history, with no real indication of where the story's really going plot-wise, or what sort of point it's going to make.

And the opening nearly tossed me out. Hiding your words with piles of irrelevant terminal output is... well, a good way to lose someone's interest fast. I feel like I'm continually harping on this in my reviews, but hook! Hook your reader as fast and hard as your tone and plot will let you.

This was more boring than bad in some ways, which is a worse indictment in other ways, I guess... sorry I don't have anything more constructive to offer you.

Snrk.

Alright, this one was pretty good.

I wasn't sure what to think of it when I started in, what with the academic tone. However, it quickly grabbed me with the content, and the development was smooth, intelligent, and logical. Setting it clearly in the future in the beginning was a good call, and you maintained your ideas and concepts clearly throughout.

Then the ending cinched it.

Excellent work.

For those above, I'm quite certain that cutoff ending was intentional, as a way to signal that this thing has graduated from 'we control the skies' to straight-up Skynet. It's got a caustic bite, and I like that a lot.

Genre: Sci-fi

Thoughts: I'm grateful for all the other comments on this, because they help me clarify my internal conflict about this story.

On the one hand, this is a captivating mix of
action, characterization, and world-building. The sciency-stuff seems legit and stays interesting. It's got all the makings of a top-tier story.

But there's a but, and for me it's huge: the ending does not work for me at all.

What was the item? Why do we leave our hero right at the moment of his/vis/vatever's triumph? The ending scene by itself could have worked as one of the story's flashbacks/interstitials, which were also great; but as it is, we pull away and get a random aside rather than any kind of conclusion. And it's not one of those ambiguous kinds of stories where a non-ending suits the mood, tone, et cetera.

Author, this wounds me, but I can't put this in my top tier. I have absolute confidence that this could be tweaked into being one hell of a contender, though.

Tier: Almost There

Genre: Friendly neighborhood assassins GONE WILD!

Thoughts: I liked this a lot! The premise is unrealistic but it's presented with enough unobtrusive dark humor that I can roll with it. The beginning in particular was gold. I also liked how our hero presented himself as a morally relatable character amid a situation that would otherwise be hard for us to relate to.

Overall, the story felt remarkably complete, though I thought the ending could have been tighter. The final conversation overstays its welcome, and the circumstances leading up to it feel a bit convenient... but I'll give it a lot of credit for building up a tense situation that had my stomach in knots, wondering what was going to happen.

Tier: Top Contender

This one... was really, really good. I'm having a hard time finding anything worth criticizing here,honestly. The 've' bits threw me, I'd say; there are clearly gender-pronouns in how Stark refers to himself, but for some reason Ticktock doesn't get one? That was odd. The childhood bits were interesting, and revealed the character well, but I'm not really sure they meshed tightly enough with the story...? Not that I'd know how to do it much better.

Vega, that oblate pale-blue pinwheel of a star

This line was lovely.

Anyways, this was a lot of fun. Seems like the RNG kept the best stories for last on me.

The description was very detailed. I'd guess that you either have first hand knowledge of the subject, or have done some very thorough research.

Wordy; you tend to repeat yourself. For example, "In another hour they would intercept the next waypoint, but that wasn’t for another hour or so." could be rephrased "In another hour they would intercept the next waypoint, so they had plenty of time to....". Or "There were several logical deductions that Hutchings made nearly instantly in his mind"

Odd word choice and phrasing in places / needs an editing pass. For example: They’d performed greatly in the air. Or "If one pilot thought one thing, and the other pilot another, it would be the perfect breeding <ground> for mistakes"

Other places were better. I quite liked the bit, "What was normally a very smooth operation of the lever now felt like pulling a rod through concrete."

I don't recall any foreshadowing of the problem. If there was, it must've been too technical for me to catch. For a cascade of events, we don't get a very clear picture of what dominoes were falling and when. All I can guess at is generic engine fire explosion, but I have no idea why.

The characters could have been developed more, but the foundations were there. I enjoyed the banter you did have, particularly the takeoff announcement joke.

Overall, this story performs very strongly in one aspect, but doesn't end up being well rounded. If you could go through and prune the text and then give us a stronger sense of what's going on behind the scenes, I think it would develop better.

Hmm, hmm, it's alright in a slicey kinda way?

I mean, I enjoy a romance, and this isn't a bad one. The construction's definitely there, and the characters are interesting in their own ways.

I dunno. I guess I just want something a bit... more? This is definitely pleasant, but it didn't rock my socks off or leave me thinking or... really make much of an impression on me overall. I won't score it low, because I definitely enjoyed it, but it also didn't feel very interesting to me overall.

Good work, but I think I'd like something a bit more powerful?

Eeehhh...

Well, the twist did catch me by surprise. But that was mostly because I couldn't believe that, if they were really worried about androids, they didn't have some sort of mechanism in place to stop this.

Metal detectors, at least? Perhaps retina scans, if this is really supposed to be high-security?

I dunno. Most of what I'd talk about has been covered here. You're using trope-logic, and although it works on some level, it doesn't take more than a casual inspection to show it's kinda weak.

Not too bad. But a bit more attention to detail would definitely help

I'm not really sure what to make of this one, honestly.

Sure, it mostly worked. I mean, the twist surprised me, the action was fairly effective, this and that, all pretty good stuff.

However... I feel like that twist didn't really weigh a whole lot on my emotions? I mean, I already felt sympathy for your characters, and some horror at their attack. I don't think that would have actually changed, even if it had been played differently or what. So, although it surprised me, I'm not sure it actually changed any of what I thought, or made me re-think anything, or what.

As it is, that last third with the article didn't do a whole lot for me.

War is horrible. People can be beastly.

I feel like I already knew that, though.

Several people have commented that they'd like to actually see the Macguffin/item that Stark retrieved. Just wanted to comment that I'm a little disoriented about this because it was clear to me:

From the scene where the Thug teleports in:

But the Thug was out of sight. And his prize was there, right ahead of him, no more than a couple of seconds away. He braked hard. The damage sensors whined piteously.

The tiny object resolved itself as matte-black octahedron, with irregular spines. Directed heat dumps. The sort of thing you could never fine unless you knew exactly where to look.

…

He threw a smattering of drones at the satellite and waited for one of them to connect. …

Half his drones had been knocked out already, but one of the survivors had matched velocity and clamped to the surface. It wouldn't matter now.

From the penultimate scene:

Something else was trying to get Stark's attention. It was the probe he'd sent out, saying it had finished it's trawl and was ready to tell him what what it had found. He accepted, and too onboard the information through a narrowbeam laser.

Last scene:

“Is the prize worth it?”

“Not in the slightest tiniest infinitesimalist bit. Well, maybe an infinitesimalist bit, but I'd have to break out the old calculus to find out. Anyway, maps of what the Unfriendlies are doing? Fighting amongst themselves!

So they were there to raid a satellite for information (the little matte black thing). Stark hacked it with a drone and downloaded all of the information, which was Unfriendly location and conflict data.

>>CoffeeMinion

this wounds me, but I can't put this in my top tier

Tier: Almost There

You're under no obligation to use story tiers the same way I do, but there's actually a "Strong" category between TC and AT, which I use both for "excellent stories with significant flaws" and "good stories that don't rise to the topmost level". (I'm not saying this is or isn't Strong, I'm just mentioning that it exists.) I have a full listing of categories here.

Genre: Sci-fi

Thoughts: Just about everything I could say here has been said better by others.

In summary, I find that this hints at interesting stuff, but the quest for the spear takes up a disproportionate amount of time considering how little it appeared to matter in the end. Maybe that could be addressed by providing more of an explanation of why losing what the hero loses is significant.

Tier: Needs Work

This was a clever premise, I liked how you approached the prompt. The weaving of banter, plot and background description are well executed.

The characters seemed consistent, though we didn't see many sides of them. The prose seemed awkwardly phrased, sometimes, though. For example:
"Because they are weak. That didn't change<hasn't changed> and never will."
"You see, I hadn't<haven't had> anything to do with the company for fifteen years."

I was in the google-after-reading camp, and while things rolled along well enough, the meaning of the names was nice to learn and it was certainly less confusing once I confirmed that ayran was a yogurt drink, and not a nazi-associated race.

While not spellbinding, this story has a nice premise, and it plays out over a nicely textured scene. It suffers from the aforementioned grammar niggles, but is overall solid.

Will concur, pretty darn good meta fic, though for mad science, there is a sad lack of experimental rodents. Genuine over the top humor (and aussies can usually take a joke). While not a riot, I was grinning most of the way through.

Also retrospectively amusing in that (by my slate, at least) GFAI won't be any the worse for wear from this competition.

Genre: "Humans are Bastards"-flavored sci-fi

Thoughts: It was obviously a risk to structure a story as a translated intercepted message, and I have to give the author credit for taking that risk. I can see what the story is trying to do, in terms of commentary about humans in general, and about our society.

Unfortunately, I didn't feel like this quite hit the mark, and I think the main issue is that the commentary was too simplistic; we get little more than the aliens' thoughts that "humans are bastards," then the confirmation at the end that "yep, we sure are." I don't know what I might do differently to add more depth or nuance, but I feel like that would help immensely. Or, maybe it would help to have the humans do something--anything--to subvert their expectations.

Tier: Needs Work

The Difference Engine

That's a cute beginning, with the jab at inflation and all.

The very next scene leads in with a misstep – clumsy exposition about the bike mechanism.

A similar problem pops up later, with the explanation about electronics surviving the EMP. You could get this in more elegantly, a referring to them as “a smattering of electronic devices that had escaped the EMP blasts.”, or something along those lines.

Going forward, the plot progresses quite nicely. The exposition problem rears its head a couple more times, but it's not too distracting.

Things stop briefly for another big chunk of exposition in the form of a remembrance ceremony. This serves as a good time for me to stop and point out that exposition isn't always a sin. Here, it has a good reason to be recited, and it fits in well with the story, adequately building the stakes.

Okay, at the end, I'm uncertain. Structurally speaking, what you've got is very good here. You've got all the right beats for a mystery laid out. You telegraph the twist a bit too early, but that's always going to be a trouble with first draft mysteries (he says, a day after listening to the Writing Excuses 'cast that mentions this very issue).

My main issues were with the worldbuilding. First of all, I'll chime in with the all the above commentators and say that the notion of eradicating the entire religion of Islam and then successfully covering it up flies far, far past the bounds of believability. It also adds a shrill tone to the message you're trying to get across.

Second, I never really got the feel this was the future. Not an advanced future; not a decayed future. It feels like over the next 45 years, everything not directed with the plot had stayed pretty much the same. Your backdrop is basically a white screen and a couple of props.

The exception to this is Scout's background, which is handled with subtlety. seems to imply a bit of detail to the world. But being the exception, it works like the dash of colour that only underlines how pale everything else is.

I also liked the grandfather. He's easily the most complex person in the story. Somehow he manages to be a war criminal reveling in false glory, and yet somehow he still managed to be a little sympathetic. I just wish he'd pulled in a bit more screentime.

As a final note, I'll say I also liked the cleverness of the foreshadowing. Hold on? The machine war started four years from now? There's no way A.I. Technology would be advanced enough by then … Oh.

So, a mixed bag, all in all, but there are some gems hidden in there.

Suburbanism




We're off to a strong start. I'm impressed by how many thing this does well without showing off, in fact: We get a situation that simultaneously serves as a hook, and intro to the plot, and gives us just the the right amount of information we need to go forward. Later details are appropriately inserted without any clunky exposition.

Okay, some of the dialogue is getting a bit clunky:

"What do you think we'll find?" Logan asked quietly as she attacked the door.

"No idea." I shook my head, and glanced speculatively at the house. "Whatever they have in there, I guess."

I see no purpose for this exchange. The stuff tht follows is similarly awkward – it feels like it's all to try and tell us that regrowing fingers is a thing.

Okay, halfway through and I've picked up a fair few problems

Let's start with characterisation. All I get from this is that Martin is the brave one. Logan and Sydney seem to be interchangeable even at the most basic level: We need someone to be uncertain and question whether this is a good idea? Who shall it be this time?

Second, a lot of the interaction I'm seeing is cartoony in a way that jars with the rest of the narrative:

"Ooooo…." The three of us sighed in unison.

"Food!" She exclaimed, climbing in, sorting through the mess.

"Parts!" I followed after, heading for the stacked cardboard boxes.

"Soda!" Logan hooked a carton right through the door and ripped into it.

And elsewhere,

"Go unpack your bikes." He waved us away as he gathered the thing up. "I've got stuff to finish. Tomorrow, after you get back from farming—"

The three of us groaned.

These are highly stylised, entirely unrealistic reactions. That's not terrible in of itself, but they strike me as inappropriate for the story you're telling. Is this meant to be a comedy? Because it's not signalling as one outside the silly reactions.

Finally, prose. This sort of follows in way from my above issue with dialogue. Saidisms abound. Everything here reads as stylised. Characters nod, shake their heads, groan, sigh, &c. Its a very limited repertoire of actions, and coming as it does with almost no description, makes the story seem very bare indeed.

The end is strange. You've been progressing a nice, steady clip so far – I don't have many criticisms on that front – but then everything wraps up in a series of random occurrences. They pilfer the gun. They shoot it. A possibly-sapient police bot comes and lets them into the library. I can't find much to say about this, other than it all seems a bit anticlimactic.

On the other hand, thank you for not making this into a morality play about guns. I'm getting allergic to that sort of thing in this round.

Finally, the world. I like the world. It's a bit cute, but it's a interesting conceit, and, ending aside, the plot engages well with it.

This story has brought us closer to Stalin's grace.

This is great.

This story reads similar to a foreign 80s horror B-movie , with a classic sort of horror set-up that borrows heavily from well-known horror set-ups of a creepy object or place that has mysterious powers, like Stephen King's Pet Semetary or The Monkey's Paw that is consistently eroded by inexperience of the author in portraying this type of story and the limitations of his own linguistic abilities (once again similar to a foreign B-move) . This is a prime example of the type of story where the author has an approximate idea of the beats and rhythm of how the story should be plotted to progress, but no clear idea on how those beats should be executed. Hence the characterization, dialogue, and general "feel" of the story often veer in conflicting and often confusing directions. Very messy, but not un-salvageable. Underneath its very coarse exterior lay all the core components necessary for creating a neat little horror story, which is more than I can say for most stories, even those written at a higher level of technical competence.

I don't like referencing other reviews, because I don't feel it necessary to parrot what other people have already told you, but False_Fedora and Skyline bring an excellent point about this story's introduction. Which is to say that it fails to accomplish what a good introduction should, i.e. to catch the reader's attention with its premise and invite them to read further. Needless to say but I'm telling you anyways roughly 600 words of a furniture delivery with unabashedly blatant exposition dump near the end of the second scene is not particularly compelling material. Additionally, it is framed in such a way where we are not sure which character is the subject of the perspective (either Gary or Steve) until at least third scene, where our POV finally rests on Steve. It is odd to have such a jarring perspective ping-pong at the beginning of the story and it unnecessarily bogs down the story.

What this introduction should do is three things, and it should probably take less than 200 words to do so:
-Steve is our protagonist
-He is going to acquire a creepy cabinet
-This cabinet belonged to his sister, who is dead

An introduction is something that should hook the reader in, provide them with some immediate substance. Ideally, this should be a punchy, usually piecemeal line further substantiated by the rest of the opening paragraph. Of those three things that I just mentioned, certainly the death of the sister (and it being the only thing left of her) is worthy of mention. A good introduction would like focus on Steve anticipating the arrival of his dead sister's creepy things with some very minor exposition about its spooky past maybe slipped to the delivery guy in a very brief dialogue, and that would be it.

To further cement my point about a pithy opening line, let's look at the opening line of this story and why it doesn't work.

The grey van drove by, braked, then manoeuvred to pull into the garden driveway in reverse.

First, the opening sentence is a list of actions. It has no punch to its formatting and is generally unwieldy to read. Introductory sentences that draw out the opening action like this are rarely effective. Second, the action is not given any reason to be interesting, and action in that of itself is aggressively mundane. Imagine someone is telling you a story and they open up there story with "There was a car and it parked in a driveway." That would not be particularly interesting to you. And third, this detail is completely unnecessary. Who cares if the delivery man had to back in the driveway to deliver his damn cabinet? This isn't a story on how to park a moving truck.That's not important to the story you're telling at all. In fact, it's not even important for the cabinet's delivery to be shown. All that's important are those three factors I've listed above in order to comprehend this story.

Basically what I'm trying to tell you is that you need to rewrite this introduction, and you can frame the opening scene anyway you like, really, but for the love of god don't bog it down with unnecessary details like whether or not Steve signed for his packages, how sturdy the cupboard is, or whether Kate can hear Steve over pony show WHAT IS THIS DOING IN HERE?!

The real kiss of death on this story however is the dialogue and characterization of the cast based on this dialogue. Everything is a bit "uncanny valley" so to speak where the characters do and say things that are not befit of people in their situation, or just phrased in a unnecessarily obtuse manner. Several examples of this include:

-Gary brightening at the mention of the death of 14 people
-Gary asking in a huge invasion of privacy whether or not Steve's relatives died recently
-Steve calling Kate a brat
-"Unicorn Magic!"
-numerous conspicuous mentions of unicorns
-"dismissing his wife's request with a grunt"

Basically, the dialogue and narrative undercut the tone by being oddly worded, contextually inappropriate, and give us a strange, alien-like characterization of our ensemble cast that is removed from their humanity. The biggest offender of this is Steve, who I am not sure was intended to be written as a callous uncaring dick, but certainly came across as one, which is unfortunate, because for this sort of story to succeed, we have to at least sort of care about our main character. He doesn't seem to care much that his sister and her entire family is dead, calls his kid a brat, is dismissive of his wife, and ultimately burns his own kid alive without much serious hesitation and checks his smartphone immediately thereafter, completely unshaken.

Additionally, the story tries to sell me that it is set in the States, but uses almost entirely British vernacular, and in one case, Australian. Nice try.

In the narrative in particular, there is a lot of repetition and use of odd phrases that serve to distract from the piece as a whole. Examples of this include:

-roundabout
-vestibule
-"on cloud nine"
-squelched
-doorjamb
-diddly-squat

The end is not quite clear because the mechanics of the cabinet are not quite concretely explained. I believe if I am reading the story correctly that the Kate that entered the cabinet (i.e. the real Kate) was the Kate that was violently burned alive by her father in the story's conclusion, a detail which I think you should expand a bit for maximum horror points, and the Kate that emerged after entering the cabinet was some sort of duplicate that disappeared when Kim took her away. That however is a guess where I should be certain, so those details need to be ironed out a bit more.

Ultimately what this story needs is polish, which, good for you author. You really won't have to dismantle this story to get it up and running, just shine up what you have, make repairs, and fix it. It's perfectly acceptable from a narrative arc perspective, however, pretty much everything in-between needs to be improved for it to pass muster. Good luck!

Things to Consider:

-rewriting the entire introduction and drastically cutting the dialogue and direct exposition
-tightening most of the dialogue
-establishing a firmer and more positive characterization of Steve and Kim
-eliminating problematic phrasings and tightening the narrative
-establishing how the cabinet works further in regards to the final scene
-setting it in the UK
-include maybe one more spooky scene for Kim to have more motivation to be spooked
-have Steve actually care about his sister, wife, daughter anything
-eliminate unnecessarily pandering references to unicorns

>>horizon

The lesson here, author:

Is that a certain percentage of your audience will be good readers like horizon, able to pick up details flashing by in the middle of an action scene. And a certain percentage of your audience will be bad readers like Baal Bunny, distracted by the flashing and the swooping. A big part of the whole concept of "death of the author" is looking at a story through both readers' eyes and deciding where you want to balance things: how much help do you want to give the bad readers without hindering the good readers' enjoyment. 'Cause you never know who's gonna be reading your stuff...

Mike

>>horizon
:facehoof: Yes indeed, I see it now, thank you. I remember seeing all of those lines; I just didn't put them together. I may have gotten so caught up in the idea that the thing Stark was after was an object and not information that I forgot about the latter possibility, even though that makes more sense in the context of this world and these characters. It's a credit to the story for humanizing the characters to the point where I would make that kind of mistake, and therefore also a consequence of Stark speaking about his goal in very human-sounding terms.

However, I still feel like we're missing any kind of payoff for Stark's quest to get that information. Without a clear sense of what it means, and--worse--with a character only mentioning it offhandedly and then dismissing its significance outright within the same breath, it still basically feels like we don't know what it was.

(Though I should probably stop trying to defend my mistake and openly admit that I did an oops here. :-P )

As for review tiers and methodology: I suppose it was only a matter of time before I got called out for my mangled misappropriation of yours. :-P I should probably either adopt yours fully or do more to differentiate mine from yours. The HORSE system proper and the more robust set of tiers would be good goals for me to work toward. I'm sure I could do a lot to improve the objectivity and consistency of my review approach, which would be worthwhile given that I end up writing enough of them through the Writeoff...

Genre: Romance

Thoughts: There are many potential kinds of romance stories, and this isn't one that has a lot of intrinsic appeal to me personally. Among my issues are that I felt like the setup was overly convenient, and the characters felt more like archetypes than like real, fully-rounded human beings. I mean, I can see bits of characterization (notably their struggles, flaws, and coping mechanisms) that are trying to push them away from that, but I wasn't sufficiently convinced; I feel like I've seen those done before, and with greater depth and nuance. The recurring theme of the bluebirds themselves (and their placement) threatened my suspension of disbelief, though I will give the author props for including a few such recurring themes in a story of this length.

Nevertheless, one of the key tests of a romance story is whether it can has emotional resonance, and I'd be lying if I said this doesn't. The overall mood and tone are powerful. The characters' decisions at the end make sense and provide a great payoff for the story as a whole.

So, while not my personal cup of tea, I feel this is very well-executed and deserves commensurately high marks. Heck, this is the last story on my slate, and right now this is vying with Beastly for my top spot.

Tier: Top Contender

>>horizon On the 'metric ordinance' thing; I read it as being mass ordinance, like... actual slugs and what instead of energy weapons, which are otherwise used exclusively. I figured it was just a more hefty gun of some sort, though, because a 'jaunt' attracting heavy weapons made sense to me in a different way than the weapon bending space; something unknown coming out of a jaunt is probably a threat, and it's a good idea to shoot at it as soon as possible, given the nature of the warp mechanism and the threat of unknowns. So it's not really physically attracting the ordinance, it just attracts enemy fire really easily, given the tactics of the situation.

>>Not_A_Hat
You're correct, but you are misreading what I was saying. The jaunt never attracted the ordnance, it was the other way around.

And there is explicit text that says that there are gravitic consequences to "metric ordnance", hence my other commentary on it.

… I felt it through the planet when the cheeky bastard started throwing metric ordnance around, and I thought to m'self, I thought, Ticktock, kid, there's no way you're gonna get round the planet before your friend Stark is smashed into a million pieces, and then I thought Oh hey, but creating metric ordnance is exactly the sort of thing that would attract a precision jaunt so …

I liked this one. From the cynical beginning to the numb middle to the desperate ending. It encapsulated the philosophy at its base perfectly, and was a pleasant reading. I'm also not a fan of solipsism.

Technically the writing seems solid. The voice of the MC was quite telling (as in describing his as a person) if something already seen in other stories.

The ending was a logical following of the premise, which wallows in the pointlessness of it all.

I also appreciated the parallelism between the MC's creative crisis and the breakdown of his constructed reality, both connected and both mirrored in the ending where he discovers to be truly incapable of creation as everything is simply a reflection of his own being.

The criticism I can move is that the whole part in the void at the end could probably be cut down a little or made more dynamic.

At the end, not top of the slate but still enjoyable.

>>horizon Ah, I did apparently have that the wrong way around. However, I think it could still be mass if it's moving at high enough speeds. Enough mass, close enough to c, will definitely produce an altered gravity field. Looking back, Ticktock even mentions 'stress-energy tensor' in her 'precision jaunt' explanation in the opening, which I believe is part of relativistic gravity? Still, in a sci-fi setting, just about anything could be fooling with stress-energy tensors if you've got a bit of handwavium on... hand.

Well, I'm not really disagreeing with you in the end, I think. Looking back, whatever's going on here could definitely be less confusing, and it probably wouldn't be too hard to do. Have Ticktock say something like 'Without something going relativistic to aim at' and change 'metric ordinance' to something like 'mass ordinance' and it ought to cover it for me? He already thinks Ticktock's gone/dead at this point, so trying to bluff the readers too hard is probably more effort than it's worth. And perhaps hanging a plot-point on something as obscure as relativistic gravity should be re-considered, without making sure it's very clear to the readers what's actually happening. I mean, I'm really just guessing here.

Oh, one thing I did notice; in the opening, the teapot's made of titanium, so it can jaunt intact. However, it seemed like Ticktock said it was porcelain after she lobbed the thing? Might want to clear that up, Author.

I quite enjoyed:

What's here, but it's more a first act than it is a complete story. You've got everything set up, author: just ask yourself "what happens next?" and keep going!

Mike

I'm doing a bonus review here because this is one of two stories that only has two reviews thus far.

Genre: Murderous super friends UNITE!

Thoughts: Woof, this is some twisted stuff up in here. I think that's rather the point, though, so I'll give it kudos for hitting the mark.

Others have mentioned that the typewriter scene feels disconnected from the rest. I'll echo that and expand on it. It's a scene that feels complete enough on its own that I expected the story to end right there. And as much as I hate to say this, I almost wish it had, because the world-building and sci-fi elements that were introduced afterwards felt heavy-handed, and explained away the brutality and impact of that scene.

You're never going to restore the emotional weight of a character's death once we know that death is meaningless. Unfortunately, from the first break onward, the story kinda devolves into the characters trying to one-up themselves in terms of edginess while engaging in telly explanations of what it all supposedly means. That's not the most intrinsically interesting way to keep a reader going, though I will say that the opening scene and subsequent quality of prose were strong enough to maintain my curiosity throughout.

However, it feels like there's an arbitrariness to two of the story's biggest transitions. First, we're told that the trio's friendship has shattered, but it didn't seem like there was much explanation as to why. I guess the typewriter scene must have really pissed everyone off? But what made that so special compared to other such murder-suicide get-togethers?

Second, there's the mysterious unseen "Memtim" entity, who conveniently delivers the program to let them start again right at the moment when their relationship is at its nadir. Or does he? I re-read the ending, and now I'm not sure if it's a separate entity at all, or maybe something like a virtual Dread Pirate Roberts title. Either way, the story could have been much clearer on those points.

In the end, I feel like there's a huge amount of potential here, but I think there are some things currently holding it back from fully achieving that.

Tier: Almost There

Yop. I said I wouldn’t review any story this round for wont of time, but I make an exception for that under-reviewed story.

I agree with the other reviewers about the typos. Hopefully not enough to be distracting, but still noticeable.

The story is disjointed, to say the least. I like the first part, that intimation of a dull, grey life with little touches of tenderness that border on the mere reflex. The baby’s evocation seems slightly superficial to me. I wouldn't bet the author has no children, but it feels like this. The clumsiness of the guy never gets really explained though. There's something off-putting in it, as if he was somehow disabled, but we never get a clear fix of it.

It goes downhill as soon as we learn that this is a dream and the guy tries to control it. I've never been sold on stories where the dreamer takes control of his dream; it sounds totally artificial to me. So the end was really unsatisfactory. I'd suggest you keep on the dream track and rather suggest the guy is daydreaming or that, because of the accident, his brain somehow malfunctions and he cannot really tell the reality from hallucinations. That'd be stronger.

Beyond this, I have little more to offer. But don't fret, I don't fill any slate this round, so I won't dock your story.

Timezone is GMT + 9:30. That's Adelaide, Australia.

Featherprop, is that you?

Really just echoing the above reviews here. I do have to give this props for its deep wealth of technical knowledge about piloting — if nothing else, I really feel like I've sat through a takeoff in a cockpit, and it puts in a commendable effort to explain its jargon and why certain actions are taken. That's important to say before I dig the review knives out, because that's a subtle skill applied here with finesse.

But this falls down as a story, for reasons others have covered. Author, I suggest you read Impending Doom (and my comment >>horizon), and reflect on that story's first few scenes with the moving van, because IMNSHO that's what almost all of this story looks like from the outside: rich blow-by-blow detail that doesn't engage the reader because there's no conflict in it. (The "highway traffic instead of NASCAR" thing.) You set up a plot hook early on about whether Patrick's going to pass his pilot evaluation, but that quickly fades into the background, even more so when things start going wrong; and the crash itself ends in a massive anticlimax as we pull back almost without explanation and simply learn the end result from a distance. (See also >>Baal Bunny.)

I say "without explanation" because, even though all of the little technical details of takeoff are explained to a layman's level, if there's a reason why they weren't able to recover, it was buried in the subtext for people with piloting expertise to pick up on:

However, feathering the propeller had done nothing to decrease the drag pulling them right. In his gut, Hutchings knew something was seriously wrong with the plane. Feathering always produced a positive net result for the flight crew, except this time it hadn’t. He’d flown a Brasilia with only one engine before, but that plane had handled nothing like his now. This was no ordinary engine failure. A regular engine failure didn’t threaten to send an aircraft plunging towards the ground head over heels.

What made this "no ordinary engine failure"? Why didn't feathering work?

I get the sense that this slammed into a deadline wall and that ending was slapped in to make it submittable. This would definitely benefit from further investigation of the physical and emotional circumstances of the crash; it works much better as a first half (well, first two-thirds to three-quarters) than a stop-here-and-done.

The takeoff announcement was definitely the best part of this story as written, not only because it breaks up all the jargon but (more importantly) because it provides a precious moment of humanization of these characters, making them more likable and getting us invested in their fate. More of that, too; while I suppose it might be abstractly interesting to dig into the mechanical faults behind a plane crash, what turns this into a tragedy is the human loss.

Tier: Needs Work

I read this one:

Yesterday afternoon and didn't get it. Now, some 18 hours and a night's sleep later, I do get it and have moved it from my bottom 5 into my top 5. It needs a good vacuuming to clean up all the typos, but it really needs a little demurkification, if I might use that word, and right now I can't think of anything that'd help make the story clearer. Maybe bring in a bit more of a trigger for Tom's actions in the 3rd paragraph from the end: Marie served him with divorce papers after Jamie and Susan left...

Mike

I will agree with the other reviewers that the first scene seems a bit disconnected from the rest. It has a good opening hook and the dialogue is interesting and fun, but, considering it is probably the inciting incident that activates another reset of the memories of the friends, it lacks poignancy.

The following scenes seem to be a natural escalation from one to the other (as far as natural escalation can be used here), which makes the difference with the opening a bit more jarring.

What I also missed was some indication on how the new Memitim program was triggered. I understood that it has been set-up by the characters as a way to re-live their friendship despite the tensions that tears it apart every time, but some indication on how it judged it would be time for another reset would have been nice.

Nice story, interesting take on the psychological side.effects of immortality, it only needs some polish here and there.

It defies comprehension that any being
>> capable of [communism] would so freely resort to such levels of disparity.

Heh

By this means, we hope to move the study of the Killing Machine away from the physical sciences, and into its proper socio-philosophical context.

This is such a humanities-paper line. ^.^

And this really does read like a humanities paper, for good or ill. It's very strong authorial voicing, but it's dry and reserved in a way that doesn't always coax engagement. And you'd think that an academic paper would be the one place where historical exposition would be not only natural but expected, but even so, the exposition often felt a little off in a way I'm having trouble putting a finger on. I think that might be tied to the way this tries to split the difference between the story format and the paper format — it's got a lot of textual citations to, say, Kaufner or Sloan, but I can't help but feel the lack of footnotes and actual citations to their papers, because there's nothing more academic than a citation forest. (I don't think you even need to include the footnotes necessarily, just litter the text with them.)

On second thought, the intention here may be more presentation than paper. I note some criticism over that final em dash (cf. >>Oroboro), but that would make perfect sense if this were the transcription of a suddenly ending speech, rather than a paper halted mid-word. If that was your intention, you might want to add in some gratuitous references to the figures on the slides, or a little thank you to the audience at the beginning, to set the framing (and foreshadow the ending).

On a more academic level, I'd also quibble with the definition of "weapon" here; the examples may want some massaging. Abstractly I like the idea of the three categories, but a nuclear weapon quite definitively isn't outside of the weapon bucket; in terms of infrastructure destruction you might want to point to things like firebombs or ARPBs. And I think there's an element of weaponry development that your definition ignores totally: making destruction safer for the user (being able to kill at greater and greater distances). If it was only about greater destructive power, the first drone would never have been deployed.

Regardless, I think this works. The format keeps the worldbuilding front and center, and I think the worldbuilding carries it. I think it's got just about the right mix of cynicism and grounding in current trends, and while the decision to deliberately free drones of human oversight raises my realism eyebrows, I'm willing to spot it that as a cautionary tale. The ending is certainly blunt, but it feels very much in character with the piece.

Tier: Strong

Georg’s first Round Micro Reviews for the new stories on my slate The Killing Machine: Scores are letter grades for Plot, Technical Work, and Characterization mushed together, with an E for stories I find particularly Enjoyable. Ranked by how I like them, not necessarily how perfect they are on the score. (and posted all at once, from top to bottom so they line up on the chat.) It’s the last minute (again), so I need to get reading. (Darned real world) I would like to say right now that every single one of the stories I’ve read this round has been better than what I submitted. I hate you all. (and love you at the same time, but I’m not loaning you money)

Enjoyed! Read. Fiddlers Three - A+ - Not just from the Shrek vibe either. Everything as I was reading just clicked into place, from the characters to the scenes to the events. I was reading this one earlier this week and it stuck in my head enough that it was the only one I tried to explain to my wife (If you knew her and the way she rolls her eyes when I talk about writing stuff, you’d understand) Then I found it in my review slate and could not help but smile.

The Machine Of Literal Death - A+ - Top of my slate, obviously. I got an Asimov vibe off it for some reason, possibly some old and dying brain cells of mine connecting it to one of his older works. There’s a few spots that need a little polishing to knock off odd turns of phrase, but the plot theme behind it is solid and draws the reader all the way through to the end where it is not-quite-but-just-enough revealed as not to leave the reader scratching their head at “Rosebud?” and enough to make the trip well worthwhile.

Companions Addendum: A+ rating on this one too. Placed third on my slate.

Audit - A+ - Another reason why I don’t think I’ll ever hit Top Three on the writeoff again (but will keep trying) Despite being a plebeian from the middle of the US, the foreign intrigue and fluid nature of this story just drew me in and held me entranced. Each of the top three votes on my slate made me read them twice, and this one I could read again and again. I may even try to make a Celestia themed story based on this concept.

Bluebirds - A- — nice and slice of life-y and drifting along with great characterization and interaction. It just didn’t grab me and haul me along for the trip, but then again, it’s a slice of life story, not exactly Star Wars with laser battles. Not every story needs explosions (Sorry Michael Bay) but it didn’t hold my attention as much as I really expected.

Ego Sum Deus - B+ - I am an egomaniac, therefore I am God. Folks, this is why drinking and doing drugs before you try to write is not a good idea. (just kidding) A writer creates his own world in which he is an artist who creates his own drug-fueled world where he is god and finds out the job sucks, and rewrites the world (or redraws it, since he’s an artist) so he becomes the artist he once was (only slightly more talented) and closes out by beating himself around the head until he blacks out, which is what most of the readers were wanting to do to him anyway, so win! High marks for creativity and managing to keep this ball of rolling disaster coherent (for a given value of coherent), but somewhat lacking in the ‘interesting’ category. A certain Hugo award winner, but I can only give it the score I did.

Ship - B - An interesting foray into the science fiction worlds of Saberhagen and Laumer with an ancient wreck being tended by a people who have regressed, but still hold onto their humanity. Good intro, good pacing and fairly good descriptions right up to the long and tortuous path to get the spear, and the baffling ending. More needed to be cut in here than just one appendage. Trimmed down and focused, this would be a pretty darned good story.

I had some problems in placing this story on my slate. On one hand it reads like something I already heard before and doesn't stray from the predictable at any point. On the other hand it's well written, flows without a hitch and being very original doesn't seem to be the point anyway.

Now to some more focused criticism. The main question I have is: what is the point? The struggle against a deterministic universe? The futility of trying to avoid things that are beyond our control? The silliness of the human condition and the problems we create for ourselves? I feel like it is a bit too unfocused, or that I'm not clever enough to catch the meaning.

The difference in size between the middle and the ending is another thing that maybe should be changed a bit. I think that the ending should either be shorter or longer, depending on the point you want to make. Currently it feels a bit jarring and leaves me a bit unsatisfied.

Now, this seems to be the harshest critique I dealt out this round, which isn't fair because despite everything I said this is a good story. As I said, I had a few doubts about how to place it, but at the end I decided for the upper half of my slate. The things the story does it does well, and the things it misses are probably things that have more to do with my personal preferences than with any even remotely objective criticism. So, good job there.

An intriguing take on the prompt

Although it starts off saying the ship is in a gale, I really don't get that impression for the initial part of the story. Periodic mention of the rain on the windows and heaving deck would have helped, I think. When I read it the first time, for some reason I thought that the aggressor did have tentacles, so I was briefly thinking it was steampunk.

The descriptions are a double edged sword for this story. On the one hand, they are vivid and thorough. On the other hand, there is a fair bit of passive voicing and places where wordiness saps momentum. For example,

Only about five minutes had elapsed since the initial blasts. Paul and the rest of the bridge crew had made it to the main deck...

vs

Paul and the rest of the bridge crew made it to the main deck just fine minutes after the first blast...

With a second pass and some judicious pruning, though, you could really amp up the action.

The union jack was a nice twist, doubly so with the (apparently) historical nature of the piece. A quick google didn't turn up the reference, so I'm left a little confused. If it's real, that adds a chilling bit of punctuation to the end. If it's not, you did a very convincing job writing that article.

Decent overall, but needs touching up to bring out more of its potential.

The story had a good structure, but the individual elements didn't quite hit the beats they needed to for me. Others have generally covered most of the points I'd make.

I'll agree that the moving guy scenes didn't add much. If you'd cut to an argument about them keeping the thing, it would've been a lot punchier. I would have loved some foreshadowing, like if you had mentioned how his family has a 'history of dying in fires' or how the cabinet had 'miraculously survived' the fire or a little detail like how it "still smelled like smoke". Stuff to set us on edge.

The dialog seemed a little clunky in places:
"that massive and cumbersome cupboard"
"roundabout her preferred show time"

It might help if you read it aloud?

Also, it may just be my knowledge of this being a horror story, but It feels a little bit like he was holding the idiot ball by not checking on his daughter before setting the fire. And even if she was a duplicate, what kind of decision is it to set fire to a duplicate of your own daughter? The matter of the cat feels like a loose end, but from all we saw, it seemed to be a perfectly alive and normal cat. Now, if you'd set up something about the cloned cat not being a real cat, or if it came back 'wrong', it'd be a little better justified.

Overall, had good outline, but the fine details didn't all come together for me.

I just need:

One more story beat, author, one more paragraph pulling back to the upper world to show who or what triggered the mechanism that's made the connection in our narrator's head. If it's a raccoon that's gotten into the computer room of the dead city up above or whatever, I'd like to see it. And yes, leaving it unaddressed as you do is a legitimate storytelling choice, but I think showing the larger world at the end will make the whole thing stronger. Nicely done, though.

Mike