The United States has already moved almost entirely away from actually producing physical products. It’s a service economy, based on middlemen, assembly, design, and management. The things actually produced are pretty much all instructions of some kind, whether it’s how to make something, what to do with one’s money, or computer programs.
“Her carriage was now definitely a pumpkin and pretty soon it would be pie.” Best sentence of Wednesday, February 6th, 2008. Officially. Because I say so.
Very nice narrative voice. Thoughtful for a dog… sounds like he (well, assuming it’s the alpha male, and these dogs are like real canines) is scraping up against the edges of sentience.
It’s spelled accident. Uhh. Nothing personal, but this is dreadful. It’s three sentences without proper capitalization. The third is a run-on. I’m not sure what you expect your readers to get out of it, but seeing as how little there is and how little effort you seem to have put into it, I’m going to bet you weren’t thinking about that.
Good sentiment, but it’s stylistically inconsistent. Some of your “I”s are capitalized, and other’s aren’t. Some sentences are punctuated and others aren’t. Comes off as OCR’d, but that’s probably not it.
First sentence shouldn’t have a question mark… and really, your narration shouldn’t use exclamation marks. It’s an interesting story you’re constructing, but it definitely needs some heavy stylistic polish, as well as spellchecking and some grammatical work.
Not cheating. Brilliance. Looks like you’ve really gotten into a good groove here. Now, with all those AI chips floating around as currency, what’s the impact on chip manufacturers, financial institutions, and people who actually want to use the finicky little things?
So, is his rant a sociolinguistic hiccup, or does he actually mean it? He sounds almost like he’s advocating a view Søren Kirkegaard discussed in Either/Or...
I like the dialogue, but I’m not sure about the narration. It feels like it can’t decide if it wants to be first person for the guy or third person with an agenda.
Don’t take this personally, but… This is crap. Your quotation marks are unbalanced, you end all your sentences with exclamation marks, and you change from past tense to present tense in the fourth sentence of narration. I’m not going to even begin to comment on the content.
Gibbering into internet text boxes and hoping to receive advice is like writing letters to Santa Claus and throwing them into the sea. Talk to people you know. Leave strangers alone.
This is not the appropriate place for this, unless it’s actually meant to be fictional. If it is, one would expect some sort of indication as to that… but since you signed your name, we would have to assume not.
This is an insult to language and an abuse of your readers.
In your profile, you claim that this is justified as some sort of expression of individuality.
It’s not. It’s garbled.
Your use of “delegate” instead of “delicate” would indicate that you don’t really have a passable command of the English language, rather than an urge to prove your uniqueness.
If that’s the case, then I leave you with the following:
... No. This is impossible to both read and take seriously as an attempt at a ficlet. Sensible punctuation, non-credibility-smashing spelling, reasonable formatting, and proper capitalization might have helped… but it looks like you just didn’t care.
I wasn’t aware that fusion propulsion would be as good as you’re suggesting. Thought we were looking at needing something better than antimatter/photon rockets in this case.
Well, stylorouge, the point is that some SF concessions are easier to tolerate than others. A power supply good enough for a commuter-flight-style rocket voyage from Earth to Mars (if Denubis is wrong, but it looks like he gets the math better than I do, so we’ll have to wait on that) would seem to imply a level of advancement over and above that one might expect for some FTL solutions.
Yet he doesn’t really confirm that it’s heaven. The best sort of nasty afterlives pretend to be the best sort of good ones… And, of course, there’s always the possibility of resimulation by curious matrioshka brains…
The cookie is a lie. Nobody lives like this, even in the most prototypical suburb of them all (that I happened to grow up in). The successful live in a world apart from the real suburbs. Nobody gets pensions anymore. Anyone making seven figures doesn’t need a pension… and is probably an executive who changes posts every few years to stay ahead of the fraud that earned their salary. Suburbia is mediocre, and thus the paragon of democracy. Suburbia is full of people who wish for the above life.
At some point someone is going to need to address how they’re expecting to get to Mars so quickly, or how they can leave whenever they want. It’d take one helluva propulsion system to be able to ignore orbital dynamics and just motor straight to the destination in less than six months. At best, Mars is, what, two light-hours away? Hope they have some sort of FTL assistance along the lines of orbital Stargates…
Juliet. It takes some time to pull hair into a tight bun, especially curly hair… didn’t really get a sense of that time here. And… what’s R&J except the names?
I love it when the creepy people/monsters in the shadows mistake one for someone else. Awkwardness and the ensuing absurdity is a powerful revenge even if they eat you.
Eventually history classes start doing things like teaching out of A People’s History of the United States and then you learn about all the lies earlier history classes taught.
If they push their luck with a poorly-timed strike, they might find themselves replaced with industrial robots… outsourced to normal manufacturing plants around the world, like all other toy production.
Argon gas. No need for hyphenation or second s. Allowed Johnny to unleash. Infinitive, not past tense. Critical mass isn’t something a reactor does. It’s the minimum amount of fissionable material for a sustainable chain reaction. Fission reactors don’t explode when you breach them. If it’s something else, there wouldn’t be anything like a “critical mass” involved at all. Within the cockpit? Nice action, but it’s in dire need of proofreading.
Malevolent War Hounds? Sounds like a civilization that would name a command vessel the “Cloak of Untrammeled Dignity” and a battleship the “Sword of Inevitable Justice.” I take it their enemies name their vessels things like “Polysyllabic Designation”?
(http://www.schlockmercenary.com/ if you don’t know what I’m talking about)
This is obviously a civilization that never got very good with robotics or cybernetics… And pretty clearly didn’t understand their own gene-splicing processes.
I hate the justification that fictional agencies always give for hiding information on the grounds that “it will cause a panic.” Progress does that. A good civilization gets over it without too much rioting. A bad civilization burns down cities over it. The bad ideas of the characters shouldn’t directly reflect on the author, though. How anyone would make such a discovery or how that sort of thing would make any sense, though, is another matter.
If it were a steady roar, why would it wake anyone who had been sleeping? Stylistically, I would suggest avoiding arabic numerals in text whenever possible, in favor of writing out the numbers. Fun, though.
The anachronisms imply a post-apocalyptic world. It’s a brilliant turnaround from the classic “they only come out at night” stories. Probably the first second-person ficlet I’ve seen that hasn’t sucked. Bravo!
Now, if we take this as couniversal with the other thread in this world, we have to wonder what the humans were doing with psionic warriors… or are these the humans?
Love the description of laser fire as “brilliant needles.” Of course, it’s more a description of cinematic lasers than realistic ones, but you’ve earned the benefit of the doubt and I’ll assume they’re just that powerful or it’s just that foggy/smoky.
Ah, a civilization with too many people and too much rocket fuel to drown themselves in megastructures. May try to sequel if nobody else does before I get around to it.
Without a baby, she might have survived by unbuckling her seatbelt and being ready to swim of the car. With the baby there… ugh. Need Asimovian robo-help.
All my conversations with my friends sound like this. It gets old after a while, but listening to any other version of that sort of banter is refreshing and new-seeming. Is that shallow of me?
Of course, if one subscribes to the idea that human creativity is a sort of very complex pseudorandom number generation algorithm, all you need to do is throw some hallucinogens into the mix and it stops being trash.
Fun, Spy-movie-esque. Why is the first sentence in present tense? Need an apostrophe for the possessive at the beginning of the fourth mini-paragraph [minigraph?]. Can’t wait to see more.
Really creepy, but I’m not sure how someone would live long enough or get enough nutrition to grow much on a diet of oak leaves. Scurvy, malnutrition, and dehydration would probably have caused her to lose consciousness and starve to death long before she could grow appreciably.
I hate true stories. 0.o The real world is overwhelmingly filled with hatred, violence, and pain. In fiction, the good guys can win against those things. It’s a nice poem, though.
Your verb tense switched to present tense for sentences 2 through 4. Intentional? The comma after “This discovery” seems unnecessary in sentence 2. Still an interesting character, though.
Radical empiricism can be destructive, though. For example, one can never directly observe an electron or a black hole with one’s senses… but you’d be pretty hard pressed to say that electrons don’t exist. Science builds knowledge not just through direct observation but through cooperation and webs of trust that allow individuals to have very high degrees of confidence in information that they themselves did not obtain. History, archaeology, and most other intellectual pursuits work the same way.
It comes dangerously close to some horribly abused clichés… but is well written enough for that to slip by without too much pain and suffering. Without part n (where n > 1), though, it fails to escape the aura of Christmas Carol cloneieness. In dire need of sequels.
Every morning? Also, verb tense agreement! Clockwork. One word. I see what you’re getting at with this ficlet, and it’s a good idea, but an apparent poor understanding of the English language gets in the way and makes it look like you don’t care.
Yol’s complaint was valid, however rude and poorly spelled, though, but ILFIAWB’s comment is also valid.
Cute. Also unoriginal, unrealistic and from a very strange perspective.
“Nerdiness” has nothing to do with how one looks. The Steve Urkel-esque and general TV picture of young adult social clique, subculture, and stereotype ideas really bears very little resemblance to reality.
I like the idea behind this ficlet, but it could have used some more care in its execution.
Verb tense consistency? You switch from past to present tense in the first paragraph. In the last sentence you switch back halfway through. Otherwise, intriguing.
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