Help my scifi story get to 10 votes?

[Tanuki]

I'd love to get some feedback on my first story from you guys and ladies! I have 9 votes, I couldn't quite make it to 10. I got almost all 5s, and I think a 1 (and some crazy feedback for that 1). But please don't vote just to be nice, please read it (if you don't fall asleep).

Feel free to be critical, it helps me learn!

 

[Guest]

Feel free to be critical, it helps me learn!

George, Dick and Donald is rubbish!

Arabs! Bomb them!

 

[Tanuki]

Re: Re: Help my scifi story get to 10 votes?

George, Dick and Donald is rubbish!

Arabs! Bomb them!

Shouldn't that be "are rubbish?" But I don't know, I'm not British.

 

[Guest]

Me either! Neither!

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I tired to read it love, but at 4 pages it’s kind of long for me, and actually I already got hopelessly confused with this vast cast of characters you presented and all the information you unloaded at the very start. My feeling is that a story should start with the action and that we should get to know the various personalities as the drama unfolds. I also believe that the best way to get to know a character is through their words and actions and not by having the author directly tell the reader about them. You can tell me all about so-and-so in the first few paragraphs, but unless so-and-so is part of some action at the start, I’m going to forget everything I’ve read as soon as my eyes leave that paragraph.

You paint a strange picture of the future. They’re in deep space patrol, but everything’s measured in days, weeks, and months. Okay, so they use earth time as their standard. Still, it gives a kind of yesterday, space-opera feel to your setting. I didn’t understand how they could be two days away from a radio signal and yet the signal is a week old. Do you mean that the signal is a light-week away from them and that they can travel at faster than light speed and cover the distance in two days local time?

There’s a lot in here that seems like the future as seen from ten or twenty years ago, like the use of the world “girly” and the old chief sitting and smoking a cigar, the mention of her bikini pictures and even the idea of “shipping lanes” in space that can be patroled, as if deep space were the same as the English Channel where ships get in trouble and need someone to come to the rescue. Space is huge, and travelling at the speed of light it would still take years for a rescue ship to reach someone, so it makes the story’s whole premise kind of hard to swallow. In fact, the entire first page of the story could just as well as happened on a WWII coast guard vessel, as far as I can tell. This is a very retro future.

And then, once the distress call comes in and we think like there’ll be some action, you switch us to this sword-sparring scene, which is basically a little battle-of-the-sexes flirtation, which defuses whatever tension you’ve just set up.

You write well, but I would urge you to drop the use of excalmation points in the narration. Exclamation points are fine in dialogue, but there’s something disconcerting about reading them in the expository part of a story. It makes us too aware of the narrator, as if you’re giving us an elbow in the ribs.

So I’m sorry I won’t be your tenth read. The story just didn’t engage my interest enough in the first page. A swifter plunge into the action and more concentration on characters revealing who they are through their words and actions would have helped.

Best,

---dr.M.

 

[Tanuki]

Thank you doc, that is great criticism. I've since worked on two other stories, because I'm having trouble continuing this sci-fi one. It's a bit unwieldy, going in too many different directions with too many characters. I will cut down on the exclamation marks too, that's a good suggestion!

I know what you mean about the retro scifi feel, but that was intentional. I don't like real futuristic sci-fi like Star Trek or a lot of the sci-fi novels, I prefer something more like Aliens, Firefly, maybe even Star Wars, where the future is simply a setting for a present-day style story. Of course it's not easy to write, which is probably why you didn't like it.

8 of the 10 or so feedbacks seemed to really like it, so for their sake I am trying to continue the story, maybe after I post my other two.

Do people rewrite stories here, or do they mostly leave them up once their posted? Thanks again!

 

[Lovelynice]

I really liked the retro sci-fi feel.

Besides, in truth, despite Dr_Mabeuse's comments, it's not going to be that clear in the present time what the future will be like.

His point about the shipping lanes forgets the vital little detail of velocity. If you have vessels charging around the Universe at light-speed or faster, you better hope that they don't hit each other. Even a peeling fleck of paint hitting a vessel at that sort of speed would hit like an explosive missile. By having shipping lanes, the risk of instantly deadly collisions with either other vessels (or bits that fell off them) would be greatly reduced.

There's always a counter-point to every argument.

I liked the story, and really hope you can write more for it someday. Don't be intimidated by people coming up with "hard-science" facts and explanations. A hundred years from now, the scientists will be likely saying all our current theories and facts were naive fantasies anyway....just like modern people think of the "science" of a hundred years ago. Sometimes, also, an old theory gets ressurrected with a new name or turns out to have been right all along even when the mainstream scientists had criticised it for decades.

 

[SexMaster73]

Nice

Love the way the story unfolds. I especially like the sci-fi one. Got a thing for rape fantasies.