

Ask HN:Review my science fiction story. - rick_2047
http://lifeasparesh.blogspot.com/2009/11/clr-z.html

======
tsestrich
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_2047
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.

------
mkyc
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.

~~~
tsestrich
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

------
synnik
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
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.

------
adriand
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!

------
roundsquare
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
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".

~~~
roundsquare
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."

------
sethg
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.

------
khafra
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.

------
dan_sim
it should be formatted to be easier to read.

~~~
rick_2047
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

