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Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.

lifeasparesh.blogspot.com

11–16 of 16 posts

Re: Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.

#11
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!

Re: Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.

#12
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.

Re: Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.

#13
post #12

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, y…

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

Re: Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.

#14

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 t…

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.

Re: Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.

#15
post #12

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, y…

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.

Re: Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.

#16
post #10

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…

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 micros…

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."
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