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No Prompt! Have Fun! · Original Short Story ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 2000–8000
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Homebound
The contents of this story are no longer available
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#1 · 3
· · >>Bradel >>Ratlab
Hmmm, people in horrible situations gritting their teeth and working on, I like it.

There's nothing much for me to say on the technical side, the narration flows nicely, I couldn't find any glaring errors and it is very well written.

As for the story, as already said I like it. The switching between hurried work to meet literal deadlines and the long pauses in which Vance can't really do anything useful helped a lot in increasing the tension. The final decision he had to take was appropriately dramatic and the stakes were high.

If I can move a criticism is that the MC seems a bit flat. We get to know a couple of things about him, but we never see anything beside him being a competent and cool-headed professional. The part were we see a glimpse of his personality is when he tries to pend the pods. but it's brief and almost isolated from the rest of the story. After that he is again there packing and preparing. While this is exactly what he should do, I would have liked to see a bit more about how he copes with the situation during the downtime he has.

Nice ending. It left me wanting for more but works perfectly as it is.

Stupid little aside, for some reason I expected him to land on a feudal earth dwelling in the ruins of the ancient civilization. You know, Nomen Omen and all that stuff.
#2 · 1
· · >>Ratlab
13 – Homebound

This is a very serviceable opening. A lot of information getting conveyed quickly. Tension. Questions. I was going to nitpick the avoidance of the perspective character's name—that's a thing I usually can't stand—but you drop it in the third paragraph, and two of those paragraphs are blessedly short. This could all be a bit punchier, but even so I'm pretty engaged with what you've got going. So nice work.

Four are confirmed dead. Fix your continuity, jerk! (No, honestly, I'm enjoying this. It's fun to get a nice, exciting, decently-executed adventure story. At the moment, I'm not seeing a lot of comments I want to make other than to watch out for unnecessary adverbs and other prose-tightening issues.)

The flight computer sequence feels a little... railroady to me. Sort of like the opening to a video game, where the character is being led from point to point to get necessary exposition. I think the biggest weakness in the first quarter of this story is that Vance doesn't really come off as having much agency. He's reactive—and that's somewhat okay because he's dealing with emergencies and you're keeping the pace up enough that the reader doesn't stop to think about it too much. But at some point he's going to need to start being proactive, and the fact that he's getting led by the nose through this computer interaction stuff is really a missed opportunity for building some character engagement and sympathy.

There are a number of little errors in the middle section here that seem like an editing pass would probably iron them out: the double-use of dream as a verb and a noun, the inspecificity about what was supposed to be red (it reads like Earth was supposed to be red, and takes a bit of thought to figure out that Vance is thinking of Mars instead). Also, simulation is kind of the ideal tool for something when you don't have a good idea of what'll happen—as opposed to when you do, and your problem is straight-up solvable. The little Britishisms hanging out here all feel a little odd to me, too, since I don't get an overall sense of this being a British mission—but maybe that's just American cultural imperialism on my part.

Okay, final thoughts. Where this story really shines is in the little details of the narrative, and in the overall competence of execution. Where it's less good—and I actually think this is a pretty substantial problem—is that there's nothing really new here. The most interesting questions in the story (what happened to humanity, why did the Providence malfunction) are either unanswered or seem to have uninteresting answers. What's left is a standard sci-fi potboiler. Now don't get me wrong, it's definitely well done. But if I were shopping for a magazine, this would get a very definite "Sorry, we're not interested—but please send us your next story" letter.

It's an interesting mix of good and bad. I really like this story, and I really enjoyed reading it. I think it's probably going to be one of the better things I read in this competition. But that said, I can't escape the feeling that it's all been done before and that you're not really bringing anything new to the table here.

HORSE: ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉
TIER: Solid
#3 · 1
·
I want to second >>Orbiting_kettle's comments about Vance and characterization, too. This didn't bother me much while reading, but it feels like some low-hanging fruit for you to work on. The pacing is strong enough that I didn't really feel the lack of strong characterization often, but especially with how much you're flipping between tension and downtime like Kettle mentions, you've got some wonderful opportunities to really flesh him out.

Potentially, I can imagine that that sort of work might boost this story to the point where I'd consider it publishable without needing more original ideas. Though I think some fresh ideas somewhere along the line, even if it's just a couple, would help a lot as well.
#4 · 3
· · >>horizon >>Ratlab
Homebound

8,000 words on the dot! I’m not sure I’ve ever managed to really max out a story like that. Maybe one of the minifics.

I spent a lot of time staring at the intro paragraph, trying to figure out whether it was trying too hard to be evocative. The wail piercing the darkness, the primal worry. Just in that first sentence I feel like these words are trying to bully their way into me. After a while thinking about it, I decided that it might not be how I would write it, but that’s fine.

A few pages on, and I think I know what’s bothering me – almost no noun escapes without an adjective, even nouns that don’t seemingly need them. Confused sweat, frantic heartbeats, worried knot, grasping elastic web. Later paragraphs do better, dialing back the adjectives, but then we get “electronic cry of woe.” This writing is… well, I won’t call it purple, but it’s treading the line.

Okay, after chewing through the narrative, we finally get to something that really grasps my interest: ‘This one works.’ There’s a lot implied by that note and those few words.

As we draw closer to Earth, I feel the story finally starting to grip me. I get the feeling there’s something wrong back home, too, and I’m surprised Vance isn’t intuiting that as well. There’s a good amount of tension in this writing, which is one of the hardest things to pull off as an author. In fact, tension is probably the critical factor that separate compelling fiction from ‘bleh’ fiction.

There are quite a few typographical, grammatical and construction errors throughout, particularly in the middle, but those don’t bother me much in the Writeoff. Just fix them at some point.

When we get to the end, a lot of the tension is left unresolved. As Bradel notes, we don’t get an answer to the most interesting question in the story. We don’t find out what happens to Vance, either, but really Vance is pretty much irrelevant to the reader’s interest – the fate of humanity weighs more on us than the fate of one individual.

The lack of dialogue starts to weigh on this story, the longer it goes. “But Cig, it’s a one-person story! There can’t be any dialogue!” Ah, but that’s not true! Look at Cast Away, one of the greatest marooned-self-rescue stories, or The Life of Pi, and you’ll see authors who manage to add dialogue to stories with only one character. That let’s you step around the dreaded overuse of italics to indicate thoughts.

Overall, I’m left with mixed feelings about this story. The tension was great in the middle, but it never really went anywhere. The over dramatic writing, especially early on (e.g. “electronic cry of woe”). But that fortunately faded toward the middle of the story, once we got away from description and more into action. Character development was minimal. I feel like Stone and Hansen were actually better realized, even though we only saw them in snippets. Again, perhaps, because they had actual dialogue and obviously made some very hard choices.

But I keep coming back to the tension throughout the middle and end of the story, which was great. Find some way to realize the tension with actual, meaningful consequences, sand off some of the rougher edges, and this story will really shine.
#5 · 2
· · >>Ratlab
I agree with the opinions of my esteemed colleagues here. This was a good story, but it wasn’t a great one. Vance is somewhat lacking in the personality department; he’s a person, but he’s a bit on the bland side as we don’t get to see much of him. The lack of any real resolution thus lead to it feeling like it didn’t quite go anywhere; it isn’t that it isn’t a complete story, but that the answers which seem most interesting end up unanswered by the end, and Vance’s lack of personality means that while we vaguely hope he survives, I’m not sure if I felt like it was as gripping as it would have been if I actually cared about him.

The tension of his actions towards the end of the story, of having to make a series of very hard choices, and him not knowing if it would even matter, worked well, I think.

All in all, this was solid, but it could have been more so if either we had cared more about Vance or if we got more resolution about the fate of Earth.
#6 · 2
· · >>Ratlab
I won’t lie here: whilst I really do appreciate what you were trying to do with the ending, honestly, it left me feeling cheated. The best way I can describe it is… imagine if Gravity had ended the moment Sandra Bullock starts her descent towards Earth, or if, when watching The Martian, Matt Damon begins his attempt to make it into orbit over Mars, only for the credits start rolling halfway through said attempt. Picture the reaction from the audience! There would’ve been rioting in the cinema!

And I bring those two films up not only because they share similar plotlines to your story here, but also a similar adventurey sort of tone… whilst I consider both of them to be major artistic achievements, ultimately, neither of them were aiming to be high art. (Though don’t get me wrong, I absolutely do not mean that as a slight against them, and by extension your story. I think a lot of people severely underestimate how gosh darn difficult it to write a decent crowd-pleaser). Both of them showed enough self-awareness of what they were to know to give us a definitive ending for their respective characters. I hate to say it, but for me, your ending didn’t feel particularly meaningful or challenging so much as it simply felt abrupt and non-committal.

BUT! It would be amiss of me not to acknowledge that, judging from some of the other comments here, this wasn’t such a problem for other readers. Maybe I wasn’t the right audience for this?

And honestly, right up until the ending, I was digging the absolute hell out of this story. The tension in the beginning was fantastic, and my mind was going into overdrive imagining what horrors Vance was going to uncover (‘This one works’ was such a brilliant moment). This was followed by a wonderful middle where the high stakes contrast brilliantly with the mundaneness of life aboard a tiny spacecraft. And the approach to Earth was both beautiful and chilling all at once – Lord knows that I spend enough time worrying about the future, so the vague clues we’re given that something horrible has happened on Earth hit me pretty hard.

As for Vance… I think my thoughts here are going to contradict themselves a little bit, but please bear with me. On the one hand, a few more little character moments here and there would be a huge benefit to this story – it would give us more of a reason to like him, and empathize with the sheer horror of his situation. On the other hand, it was also very cool to read about a level-headed professional handling a terrible situation with grit and ingenuity. I think a lesser version of this story would’ve taken the easy route and just had him PANIC, PANIC, PANIC in a cheap attempt to wring our sympathy for him. I sooo glad that you rose above that.

I mentioned The Martian earlier, but it’s worth bringing up again, even if it was in a different medium to this (I haven’t gotten round to reading the book yet). That film was a masterclass in walking the line between having the main character being a likeable human being with deep seated emotions vs having him act as cool, calm, and collected as you’d expect any NASA professional to be. It achieved just the right balance, and it was enthralling. By comparison, Vance isn’t quite there yet. But he’s close. Very close.

To summarize, for as much as I hated the ending, for the most part I really truly enjoyed this one. Bradel probably said it best. ’If I were shopping for a magazine, this would get a very definite "Sorry, we're not interested—but please send us your next story" letter.’

TIER: Solid
#7 · 2
· · >>Ratlab
I like the concept, a nice blending of the hopelessness and confinement of Alien with the at-odds survival of The Martian. Makes for a good, short hard sci fi story.

Related, I think the plot has some of the same problems as The Martian (book, not film, haven't seen the film), wherein tension mounts as a new thing goes wrong over and over again, but it doesn't really up the tension all that much because things are already bleak as sin, so rather than feeling consequential, it feels repetitive. The overall beats are fine: opening and the propulsion issues, the stuff wrong with earth, the stuff wrong with the other pods/crew, the hard choice, the likelihood of it failing, up through the ambiguous ending. Other stuff feels extraneous. All the little systems failures that are things going wrong, many of them that don't even get specifics, feel very repetitive, and the radiation sickness feels touched on too much for not going anywhere. A lot of it could be tightened up and feel just as treacherous. In the freed up space, might be worth exploring more of Vance's character and his past. It's there a little, but more to forge a stronger connection with him would not be remiss in the slightest.

Mechanically, the story is pretty easy to read, though I was distracted by the reliance on adjectives and adverbs. I love adj-words as much as the next guy, but too many of them lessens their impact, and can be distracting. Not to mention, adverbs can be kinda ungainly.

The one that stuck out like a sore thumb to me was "She looked around and sighed gustily." Gustily just feels awkward to read, and even more awkward to say. It also doesn't really add meaning to the sentence. What does a gusty sigh look like compared to a regular sigh? Windier? Albeit it's more descriptive than a heavy sigh, but that isn't necessarily a good thing, as it's kind of obtuse instead of clear. It'd work okay to reorganize the sentence so you could use the adjective form of gust instead (ie: She looked around and heaved a gusty sigh.), or switch it to a less awkward adverb like 'heavily.' Or, perhaps better yet, go for a more precise verb and ditch the adverb (ie: She looked around and huffed.). It's not too bad overall, and got better the further into the story, but strong, direct word choice with fewer modifiers will make the ones worth keeping more impactful, and make the prose that much stronger.

Overall pretty solid, though.
#8 · 1
· · >>Ratlab
Okay, so to begin with I know how you managed to get to 8,000:
…Providence was coming in coming in low…
…while the the landing…

No, just kidding. Proof is, you forgot some words too:
Over the next two minutes, he watching the with bated breath…
And there are some typos here and there:
His gazed shifted over the control console…, Hopefully the medicine is doing it’s thing., etc.

The opening paragraph stroke me as stylistically very repetitive: An electronic wail pierced the darkness, muffled, but stirring a primal worry. He tried to flinch but couldn’t move, the effort serving only to alarm him further. The insistent tone drilled into his head as he tried to open his eyes, but they were sticky-dry, the lids leaden sheets. His lashes parted like he was lifting a mountain, revealing a crazed green glow in front of him. “Clause, clause.”, four times in a row. I found it later on in this passage: He made his way down the hab module and tried dinner as a pick-me-up, but the food was ashy paste in his mouth. He went to bed early, but his thoughts went wandering to the cryo pod.

Anyways. The story is not bad, although, as other have pointed out, people coming to back to Earth to find it strangely unresponsive is one of the most mythical themes of Sci-Fi. There are problems, though:

• There is no real tension. The plot is very linear and somehow the difficulties the character has to face are relatively minor. The feeling I had was more of boredom than tension;
• The end is premature, happening exactly when the tension begins to build up towards a climax!
• The middle part drags on too long. I don’t pretend you should redact, but the minutiae you describe, while they give colour to the set-up, are mostly bland. I found myself skimming over it. Instead of feeding the tension, they water it down. Really, if I had my druthers, I would’ve liked you to chop in the middle in order to get some leeway and write a real end;
• I don’t understand why the pilot, the one who is awaken mid-way, is not still alive. Maybe I’ve overlooked a titbit, but I failed to register when he died and why;
• (nitpick) rehydrated waffles? Really?
• (nitpick) Time references: the guy finds out what date it is, but respective to what? Except at 12:00 GMT, I think you can always find on Earth two places where the date is not the same.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised, because, except at the end when the dragging on was a bit too much and I sorta riffled through the last paragraphs, it was a nice read. I was anxious at seeing the word count, but it is easy on the eye.

So, good work here, but deserves some burnishing to make it still better. And please, write a decent end! 😡

EDIT: I wonder if you made a good choice when you opted for third person. I think the story might’ve come across as less telly if you had chosen first person and present tense instead.



Wow. The pièce de résistance is done. I’m almost finished! 😀
#9 · 4
· · >>Ratlab
Alright, I've just read every eligible story as of now, and I have to ask, what is it this round with stories that have no ending? Also, stories that have people being revived or resurrected after many years?
#10 · 2
· · >>Ratlab
This story isn't bad, but seems to do very little with an awful lot of words.

Your MC spends much time eating, sleeping, pondering, and technobabbling; I wondered if printing out a paragraph of machine readouts was an indicator of how you were using your space, and that seems to have been the case. I think you'd be best of tightening up your wording and descriptions drastically, first and foremost, and secondly, I think you need to decide what you're trying to convey overall, here, and try to re-assess your ending to see if it's conveying it - because it really doesn't seem to be saying much of anything, to me. It just sort of ends. Kinda like
#11 · 3
· · >>Ratlab
A nice:

Nuts-n-bolts SF piece, but crashing hard into the word limit really didn't help. This isn't the sort of story where an ambiguous ending works. Something step-by-step like this needs to go all the way down onto the Dying Earth with our hero Vance--and wouldn't that by an interesting place to go with it!

Still, like I said, a nice piece.

Mike
#12 · 2
· · >>Ratlab
>>Cold in Gardez
The lack of dialogue starts to weigh on this story, the longer it goes. “But Cig, it’s a one-person story! There can’t be any dialogue!” Ah, but that’s not true! Look at Cast Away, one of the greatest marooned-self-rescue stories, or The Life of Pi, and you’ll see authors who manage to add dialogue to stories with only one character. … Character development was minimal. I feel like Stone and Hansen were actually better realized, even though we only saw them in snippets. Again, perhaps, because they had actual dialogue and obviously made some very hard choices.

Quoted for truth.

I have very little to add to previous comments, but wanted to point one thing out. (Note: This is a nitpick if you're writing a story where the science takes a back seat to the psychology, but is a pretty critical issue if you're writing a The Martian-style hard sci-fi tale.) The idea of being stuck in Antarctica is pretty wildly implausible; first of all, the return trip from Mars would bring the ship in on the solar system's orbital plane, and so the "default" orbit would be around the equator, with all possible landing sites between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Because the Earth is a sphere, it would be pretty trivial to choose any possible great-circle orbital path simply by aiming your atmospheric braking at a different point around the earth's horizon and slingshotting in three dimensions, so while it's possible that he could aim for Antarctica, it would have to be a deliberate choice, i.e. he thought that was his best chance of survival, rather than aiming for a presumably inhabited continent. If that were the case, though, it seems highly unlikely he would have expected any possibility of a rescue and might have chosen orbit instead.

The rest of my reaction is mostly an "I agree with the above comments". The biggest part of that was what felt like an artificial isolation — given things like the videos left on the computer, and presumably whatever communications were acquired from Earth before they were cut off, this could have easily felt more populated. For a story that for a long while is about his struggles to save the crew, we see precious little of them, not even artifacts of their time together. The one message from Stone (for example) is a how-to guide, but given how much time she presumably had in between waking up and dying, there's no reason for her communications to be hurried — in fact, since she knew she was going to die, why not record more messages for posterity, or a diary, or some message to pass along to whatever great-grandchildren her family once had? I think focusing a little more on that human element would help raise the stakes for the technical problems.

This held my attention all the way through, but felt … I dunno, a little empty. Certainly not a bad story, but none of the finalists were, and a number of them found better ways to grab me and keep me engaged. Low-middle slate.

Tier: Solid?
#13 · 3
·
Congratulations to our medalists, this was a tough round.

So, Homebound.

Orbiting, Bradel, CiG, TD, Lucky, bats, Mono, Solitair, !Hat, Baal Bunny, horizon, thank you all so much for the reviews. I’m not sure how much to attribute to the new system or not, but this round had some of the highest quality reviews (and stories) that I’ve seen so far.

I found them by parts encouraging and enlightening. In particular, it seems like the important elements of the story generally worked (keeping the action interesting, while gradually building tension about what happened on Earth), you gave me good advice on shoring the characterization up, and the main flaw pointed out was one already slated to be addressed. Unfortunately, while I tried to leave it off at a good place, this idea was conceived as part of a larger piece, so the ending left a lot unresolved as was (rightfully) pointed out.

Some of you may recall me discussing writing a story set on a near-future Earth reshaped by major climate change. I’ve been working on that story but wasn’t satisfied with the way it was progressing, and recently had an idea of a different tack I could take in that setting. This writeoff seemed like the perfect opportunity to explore it.

Unfortunately, since I had discussed the setting before, I had to shift the time period and omit some clues about precisely what had happened (no Arctic sea ice), to avoid making it obvious that I was the author. And, of course, we never get to the part where Vance actually lands, starts finding out what happened, but is mostly swept up in dealing with the local troubles and a larger conspiracy. I’m sorry that those changes hurt the reading experience.

I’m also still minorly shocked that I actually managed to pump out 8k words by the deadline. Even with the benefit of having an outline this was a stretch for me, and it shows, with the various mistakes and sloppy writing that crept in. Still, I’m happy overall with the feedback and how the story turned out.

>>Orbiting_kettle Heh. Somewhat appropriate that you had the first review. Thank you for the characterization advice, and I was gleeful that you mentioned that it left you wanting more; you’re not far off the mark in imagining some of the scenes waiting for him below.

>>Bradel as mentioned above, it is intended to answer to one of those larger, interesting questions. If I can improve the characterization as you mentioned, and then move on to addressing that question, then it sounds like I’ll be off to a good start.

>>Cold in Gardez I very much appreciate your detailed account of your impressions in reading the piece; I’ve already been working to correct the stylistic points you identified, and am working on the dialog issue.

>>TitaniumDragon Thank you, I appreciate your confirmation on what elements did and did not work for you.

>>Lucky_Dreams, Sorry that the ending messed up your reading experience, but I’m glad that it worked for you otherwise. In particular, I’m happy that the work I put into the Earth approach scenes paid off. I also appreciate your thoughts on Vance’s characterization and do intend to keep his professionalism, while adding some dimension and coping mechanisms during the downtime scenes. I’ve read (and thoroughly enjoyed) the Martian; I didn’t want to ape it too closely, but it was certainly an influence.

>>bats, Thanks for the points. I’ll see if I can make the ‘downtime’ segments a little less tense, so that there is more contrast. As to the surfeit of problems, well I was just trying to picture what might have reasonably happened for a craft sitting in space for a hundred years. Not every problem is consequential, but I’ll see if there are some prunable ones. In particular, I will be going back and fleshing out his personal condition and the radiation issue.

Prose-wise, yeah, I fell back onto some bad habits; I wasn’t particularly happy with 'gustily' when I wrote it, but I’d envisioned Stone heaving a short, sharp sigh, and couldn’t express it well. Huffed isn’t bad, but it implies anger, which I didn’t envision; more of a resigned frustration.

>>Monokeras, I appreciate you sharing your perspective; the “clause, clause” point was interesting. I’ll be going back over the prose, so pointing out the stylistic quirks is helpful, as those are very difficult to self-spot.

To clear up one point of confusion - the suspension pods were breaking down, so re-suspension was (almost certainly) fatal. However the mission was designed with them in mind, so there were not enough supplies onboard to keep someone alive for years. So any crew that woke up early knew or suspected that they were doomed.

Interesting that you mention first person; I’ve toyed with the idea, and it’s still a possibility. Present tense, though… That’s just crazy talk.

>>Solitair No conspiracy that I know of; In my case, the reason for making those choices was out of the scope of the story itself.

>>Not_A_Hat Hmm. Sorry that this didn’t connect with you, and it seems like there wasn’t really one issue that was the problem (though the ending, at least, is a known quantity). I was trying to make an interesting / exciting tale that would appeal to the Tom Clancy crowd, while cultivating an overall dread/curiosity about the state of Earth.

>>Baal Bunny Glad it worked aside from the ending; I do hope to take those next steps.

>>horizon, this is one of the bits of the story I worried over. I’ve played a bunch of KSP, but admittedly I’m no an astrophysicist. Still, I tried hard to avoid this issue, with the relevant passage being here:
We’re just five days out from Earth, but we’re off course. Not far enough to trigger Hansen’s failsafe, it seems, but we’re coming in much too far under the ecliptic. At this rate, we’ll pass completely beneath the planet.


The idea being that his original trajectory would be passing well ‘south’ of the planet, and then after the engine fails, he doesn’t have enough fuel to correct into an equatorial orbit - just barely enough to get an encounter that aerocaptures him into an elliptical, polar orbit. The problem is that aerocapture over Antarctica sticks the low point of his orbit there, and burning fuel to raise it wouldn’t leave him enough fuel to re-enter properly later.

I didn’t run the numbers like Andy Weir did, but I tried to make the scenario at least physically possible, though it’s threading the needle in terms of orbit/fuel coincidences.

More messages is another good approach to characterizing him/the crew, though it runs the risk of chewing up words.

--

Again, thank you all for the thoughts. I plan to expand on this, so the ending should get fixed. I’ll also try to incorporate the feedback on improving characterization, though opinion seems to be divided between those that found the downtime to be boring / bland, and those who felt that it accentuated the tension.
#14 ·
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For anyone that's interested, I've just completed the rewrite of this initial section of the story. If you'd like to see it, PM me on fimfiction, and I'll send you the link.