Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.

http://lifeasparesh.blogspot.com/2009/11/clr-z.html

by rick_2047 • 17 years ago

7 15 17 years ago

lifeasparesh.blogspot.com

dan_sim• 17 years ago

it should be formatted to be easier to read.

rick_20473• 17 years ago

Blogger craped up my formatting, I am not a regular poster, but will improve on it though. But I am looking for some comments on content. Anything which might help me improve

tsestrich2• 17 years ago

It's very difficult to critique specifics without handing you back a physical paper with redlines on it. Generally, the grammar needs a lot of work, as does the tense (jumping back and forth between past and present), and the flow from paragraph to paragraph. A lot of sentences are actually sentence fragments, and a lot of times I feel like you're instant messaging me your thoughts rather than writing a story about them.

The content itself is entirely vague as well. Sentences such as "OK if you eliminate the fact that he was a researcher of math at the age of 25, but what do you know, he was actually _the_ math genius." just confuse me and make it difficult to read. Saying "OK" as if I just called you out on something just does not seem right for anything except dialog (OK, maybe not all the time, but pick your places).

Saying "It wasn't just numbers, same was true for logic, innovation, ability to ask the awkward question, and then solving the hell out of them." is such an awkward way of introducing someone. You're building this person up so much in such a short amount of time, I have a hard time believing any of it (it's not true, but you need to be able to suspend disbelief). I've always learned that you should never ever ever tell your reader an opinion about something... that's "meta-story". Let your reader determine that he is a super genius if that's what he is, but don't tell them all these super-human things he can do... it sounds like a kid describing his action heroes. What you need to do is build up the character's credibility as the story flows, not wind up the character like a toy and let him run through the story.

The first few paragraphs of the story really need to pull a reader in to make them want to read more, and what I see in the first few is "another story about the future". I don't really see a character at first, and that's a big minus to me. I don't really want to read about a list of things that are true in your future, I want to read about the people in that future, and let the way they interact with their world describe what the world is like.

"He used a lisp program for all this stuff.He had read in school that it was one of the most oldest languages around but never belived that,it had the most advanced features." -- This contains detail that is not really pertinent to the story... not sure why it's really in there. In stark contrast to that specific technical detail, it seems odd that among all the other "future-y" stuff, it still takes long enough to collate some Google search results into a database that he is able to read a book (about more things that are too technically detailed).

Adding to this... "By this time the database was over with indexing and he was presented with a nice command prompt on his DataBaseLinux machine." is like saying "he raced to his car and drove to the store. his car was blue. he was sad to discover that the store was closed, however, so he could not buy the Sony 42" LCD TV with support for Dolby 5.1 surround sound built in that he was looking for". The key here is not that detail is bad, but you need to be consistent, and it has to be relevant detail. You need to expand on the parts that make the story human, and really cut down on the parts that make it technical.

Stylistically, I personally would not go into a story attempting to point out "this is like this in the future!" every chance I got. Specifically, it seems irrelevant that DRM is not an issue in the future, and it would confuse the hell out of a reader that was not familiar with the subject.

More comments to come likely, as I get some time to dig deeper.

EDIT: Sorry... if this is indeed a language barrier issue, that would explain a lot about the style comments I had. I then agree with khafra's comment. Otherwise there is a lot to discuss here. However, sentences such as "He didn't really thought about robots , but he did knew that his secretary robot was a good talk." makes me think the former is the case.

rick_20473• 17 years ago

This indeed is a fine critique here. Thanks for your points. Actually this story was written some time back and I pulled it out of my backups just in the hope of getting something out of it. To tell the truth I could have done better if I would have written it now. But I would have indeed retained some of those mistakes you pointed out. I would make it a point not to repeat it the next time.

khafra• 17 years ago

I don't see any big problems with the idea behind the story; but you might want to write it in your native language and have someone fluent in both languages translate it to English.

Also, like tsestrich said, it fails to draw in the reader. "The year was 3065" is not a magnetic, memorable, or unique opening sentence.

synnik• 17 years ago

I read the first two sentences, wasn't drawn in, and would have closed the page, had this not been explicitly a request for help.

In short, what you wrote reads like notes for a story, not a story itself. Don't tell people it was 3065, and then give 3 word descriptions of other aspects of society. Instead, write out events that take are taking place that will lead people to understand these facts. Let the events pull people in, and when they are done reading, they will understand your setting. Once you've done that, the rest of the story should flow in a similar way.

TomasSedovic• 17 years ago

I cannot agree more. Too often I see writers go at great length to define and describe anything but the story.

Also, not everything should be stated explicitly. Sometimes it's good to make people figure it out.

sethg• 17 years ago

I couldn't get beyond the second paragraph; asserting that your main character is a Super Genius living in a Perfect World is not a good way to make me care about what happens to him.

One SF author (Damon Knight?) once said that when he has an idea for a science-fictional world, he asks himself, "who does this hurt?" and that becomes the main character of the story.

roundsquare2• 17 years ago

So, the story has some potential. I would like to see what comes next.

However, you are severely limiting your audience in many ways. Most people don't know what it means to index a database. Many don't know what lisp is, or even what a programming language is (even worse that you call it a language and not a programming language). Etc... Ask someone who has never written a line of code and is afraid of computers to read this and they will come back confused.

Also, at the end, the character doesn't mean much to me. By this point I should feel the characters's passion for the question. I need to want the answer as much as he does. Giving him the feeling that its important to find out and conveying that will help a lot.

My guess is that something will be "undone" and thats the point of the story. If so, you have a neat idea here, but you need to keep the reader engaged. Take out technical details, flesh out the character, make me care about him and the world around him (whats good about it, whats bad about it) etc...

FYI - I don't mean to fully disparage your idea here. I think if you re-wrote it with the suggestions people here have given, it can be really good.

Also - nice idea having HN review a story. Its a nice change of pace.

srogers• 17 years ago

As far as technical details in fiction are concerned, I think they can enhance a story when they are described in a way that lets non-technical users image a system that at least has roughly the right inputs and outputs. I find that Charles Stross does this very well, particularly in Accelerando, Atrocity Archives, and Jennifer Morgue.

From Atrocity Archives: "he'll have to enlist GCHQ and a scanning tunneling microscope to find it under all the 0xDEADBEEF spammed across the hard disk platters."

Even without fully knowing about these concepts, you still get a rich picture of of a hard-drive wipe (hopefully the reader is savvy enough not to imagine anything too bovine).

What this pretty much boils down to is the popular fiction writing mantra "show, don't tell".

roundsquare2• 17 years ago

Yeah, your right. I guess I shouldn't say "remove technical details" but rather "use enough regular sounding English so that most people will get it."

adriand• 17 years ago

I read your story. Here are my thoughts.

The good: you actually wrote it (well, the first half of it). It flows well from a plot perspective (something happens, then something else happens, with good pacing). And you asked for criticism, which is important.

Which brings me to the bad: the grammar is poor (see tsestrich's comment). The setting is not realistic or believable. One thousand years have passed since the present day, but the only obvious difference between then and now is that there are pretty capable robots. Your character is still downloading web pages, putting them in a database, and processing them with Lisp. In an era with AI computers so advanced battles have been fought and won over civil rights for them, how does that make sense?

You also tend to explain things a lot - there are a lot of sentences in parentheses with explanatory information. Good sci-fi tends to leave a lot for the reader to figure out, because otherwise the world does not feel like a natural place that the characters are inhabiting. In other words, it feels like you are writing the setting for a play, rather than immersing the reader in a novel.

Your metaphors also need work. Your character has a nightmare where he is lost in a grid of big, black machines. He "ran and ran and ran like a race horse" to try and escape the grid. This does not strike me as an appropriate metaphor for this particular nightmare (not to mention that it is debatable whether horse-racing will be a popular sport in 3065).

I think you need to read a lot more fiction, and keep practising your writing. I think it's great that you've asked for criticism and I can't fault you for your courage!

mkyc• 17 years ago

I've re-written your story to read as I read it:

In the year 3065 of The Future, people not only have all they need to be happy, but are indeed happy. Alas, uploads remain an imminent futurist dream.

Enter a man, a normal man, a man filling in a 10x10 multiplication table. But that multiplication table held not the numbers 1-10, but pi, and i, and all sorts of other crazy future symbols. If you looked at the sheet, you would find that the correct answers were all there to all their decimal places - that's right, the man was a complete badass at math. And logic. And innovation. He was the type of guy who would ask dickish questions in university classes, which he finished when he was 13. At five months old he beat his mom at math, and his mom was pretty awesome.

He read his idea journal, and it was like reading science fiction because he couldn't remember what he wrote at 2am last night. He lived in a research center, where he goofed off but was still awesome. He had a paranoia of doing math in the dark (e.g. at 2am) which he never could justify to others. So on this day of year 3065 of The Future, he went to bed.

And had a nightmare about being surrounded by Big Black Machines (I kid you not). He thought he could use logic to get out, but ended up sweating a lot instead.

You would think he would shower, but no, he just dressed and shaved. Usually, people shave and then dress, but not this man. He felt strange, like that time he thought he proved time travel (but it was just wormholes).

He drove to the office where his realistic and probably conscious submissive fembot greeted him.

He used Google and manually made a database of all the webpages he visited (grand technologies like "Google Chrome" were lost to the ages). As usual, he wasted most of the day reading 1000-year-old blog posts about how crappy DRM was.

He got back to "work" though. Turns out, everyone except him stopped caring about the origins of life, the universe, and all that.

"Hey babe, get me some coffee!" The smack on the ass that he gave his female robot coincided with the exclamation point.

"It's bad for you, sir."

"Don't care."

She brought it.

"What are you working on, sir?"

"You damn well know what I'm working on based on my search queries, which I know you peek in on."

"...any luck?"

"Not on finding out the origin of the universe. But that's because I'm working on finding out what's real. People seem to..."

"Ignore, sir?"

"Stop trying to end my sentences, sugarbuns."

"Sorry, sir. By the way, I was reading Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and..."

And then it struck him. Maybe he was in the Matrix. A quote floated into his head, "we are someones dream but of whom we cannot know". He decided to get to work.

The story is not good. It's actually pretty bad, but all early stories are bad, so don't worry. My advice is to read a lot of science fiction, and a lot about how to write, how to write SF, and how to write short stories. Pick something and focus on it. In this story, you don't even have anything to focus on - what theory of reality are you actually getting at, and why doesn't it permeate the story? Never describe how awesome things are.

tsestrich2• 17 years ago

Can you please continue down this alternate thread of straight-to-the-point-badassness? I was enjoying the story until the last paragraph, when it wasn't a story anymore

rick_20473• 17 years ago

Ok I read what you have rewritten but found it oddly very very fast paced. May be its just me, I wanted this story to be subtle and a bit slow. That may become clearer why in the second half which has some good pace but I want the effect of the second half to be as subtle. May be the experiment went wrong with the style.

Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.

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