Scifi Story I'm Writing: Help?

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Zinia
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19 May 2012, 12:20 am

I like the info in it, but the biggest problem I see is the voice. Who's point of view is this written in? The narrator sounds like he's making certain human calls, "the [something-or-other] looks like bulky boxes." Ok--that quote wasn't accurate--but you can see the narrator is filtering the view through his own perception with words like "looks like."

But who's the narrator? Is he the man? The story needs a clear voice that the reader can connect to. If the narrator is omniscient then it still needs some work, IMO.

I like the details, but it sounds more like a bit of info about the world than a story.

redrobin62
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19 May 2012, 2:14 am

You're missing my point about fiction. As a fiction writer you are a creator. You are free to do whatever you want as long as you make it believable to a reader. You can "create" a car than runs for 1000 miles on just a tank of gas. You can make us believe it by writing about some kind of freak fuel efficiency that a company has developed which no other company has. You can "create" a house that can withstand the force of an atomic bomb and make us believe it because of some ingenious design. You can "create" a gun that's as small as a mouse but with the kick of a quarterhorse by making us believe it. (This idea you'll notice I borrowed from the first MiB). That's the joy of fiction. Doesn't matter what you "create", just make us believe it somehow.

Last edited by redrobin62 on 20 May 2012, 12:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

Tollorin
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19 May 2012, 2:02 pm

Anarbaculardrop wrote:

The reason they use bullets are because, while a rail gun or laser rifle/blaster aren't used are these:

a)Portable rail guns and lasers are weak, expensive, and hyped up. A machine gun, on the other hand, is powerful, cheap, and has more than enough ammo.

b)If you are on a battlefield with a normal gun, you can just have enough bullets to last through the fire fight. If you have a the other two things mentioned, you might only get fifteen shots, at best.

c)a pistol can be just as good as that plasma thrower you saw your alien nemesis using.

Do you see my point on some of the things?

Didn't you mention that the colony is made of carbon nanotubes? Bullets are weak against the tremendous strenght of carbon nanotubes. (Most likelly firearms will become obsolete for war before the end of the current century.)
More so, carbon nanotubes could also be used to make super-capacitors allowing force armors and powerful lasers for the infantry. Railguns would also make sense on spaceships, particullary if they nuclear powered and mass-produced carbon nanotubes for making say railguns. (Allowing railguns to be resistant enough for multiple uses.)

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naturalplastic
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20 May 2012, 9:44 pm

I think old fashioned bullets may well still be the chosen way to kill one on one at close range five hundred years from now.

Atleast you could make it believable to your readers that they would still use bullets.
Thats not a problem.

But there are other things that are problems.

This future world just doesnt make sense to me.

On one hand you have humans recently starting to colonize our own solar system.
And thier technology is only slightly beyond what we have now ( you go into technical details that an engineer can already envision today). So this seems to be set like a centurey into the future- maybe even sooner.

But in this world we routinely interact with intelligent space aliens. In fact-you have two races of aliens living on earth among humans.

By definition any alien would have to have evolved in another star system. So to get here any alien race would have to be capable of interstellar space travel. Which means they would be thousands of years ahead of us today- and thousands of years ahead us in this future you're envisioning in which we humans are still only at the interplanetary stage.

So on one level its a story about conflict between human groups as the human race expands into the rest of the solar system, but you're mixing it up with a story about humans interacting with aliens from other stars. We fight each other- but we let aliens peacefully migrate to our own planet.
We fight our own species- but in this future of yours its considered odd by humans that other humans are intorlerant of extraterrestrials. You see how that doesnt make sense? On top of that since the aliens would have to be infinitely more advanced than humans in this world you envision- why havent they just taken over and just wiped us out?

This story is an annoying mix of a near Arthur C.Clark type future with a more distant Star Trek type future.

Anarbaculardrop
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27 May 2012, 9:14 pm

naturalplastic wrote:

First off, the Celestials and Demons came at the era were people on this alternate version of Earth(read:alternate) were in their Bronze Age, which is to say that they were, well lets put it in this guys words:

Quote:

“Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body—or without the body, they would have been the same. . . . That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual—that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy—are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.”

That's Charles Lamb, but it is at the beginning of the great story,"The Dunwich Horror" by HP Lovecraft.

Second, they are like the Eldar and Dark Eldar from Warhammer 40k: To rare and to busy fighting each other. which also means they can't make a stand against the humans.

Third, just because you traverse the stars doesn't mean you are infinitely more advanced. IF you have seen the "Morgan Freeman through the Wormhole" episode about traveling faster then light, you find out about a certain thing called a "Warp Drive." It is pretty interesting and shows that aliens might not be a few millennias ahead of us, but only a couple centuries(Note: Celestials and Demons are the former, but the other aliens are like the latter. Look at the Second reason to understand why the Celestials and Demons are not all powerful.)

Fourth, the prejudice isn't rare. Everyone in the Red Bureaucracy Clone Nation has it. Also, some people in the Empire do't have a high opinion of Dramer.

Finally, the 'living with space' alien part is not really that much. Jabbernaks and Dramer aren't aliens. They have been on Earth just as long as humans(with the exception of Dramer; they've been here longer.) The Celestials and Demons also are not everyday things you might see while driving down a road. Seeing them is like seeing a Yak in Costa Rica; Rare.

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Silvervarg
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28 May 2012, 1:29 pm

The end piece is better, it acctually sucked me in pretty good, but there are still moments where you're just tossed out of the story by some WtF-phrases.

Quote:

He decided to make a tactical decision.

What you wrote here was that he deliberatly thought the (example)phrase "I am going to make a tactical decision now when I'm finished thinking this sentense."

Quote:

Several purple missiles were coming towards the base. He thought, "what the hell is happening here? I need to get the damn spaceship ready." He went to the spaceship, opened the door in the tube, got inside it, and was inside.

Two points on this one.
1. No trained militay personel would phrase their thought like that, it would be something in the area of "s**t, missiles" and then he would just react to this threat, any thought process would take place as he sits down inside the space ship and he prepares to counter the threat, and so it's the most appropriate place for him to start thinking more complex thoughts.
2. (This is not very important but anyway) on the moon you won't see any colours on things approaching from above, either it's dark because it's night, or the sun is up and you won't see colour on anything small because the rays are too strong.

Quote:

554 thoughts screamed," You bastards! Why? Why? Damn YOU! DIE! DIE, DIE, DIE! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU, SLIMY BASTARDS! I HATE YOU!"

This sounds more like the tantrum of a five year old rather than a grief struck elite soldier in a moment of chock.
The die-die part would have been more understandable if he was beating an alien to death with his bare hands at the same time. (Or just shoting it, what ever. ^^)
And why was he so devestated? He sounds almost like a bipolar (I guess that is possible, but it's a bit strange to have that trait in your troops if they are clones) and it's my guess that was not your intention.

Quote:

At the same time, 554 exited the ship and got on one of the tripod's legs. He used the breached section of the hull to get in. He climbed through what looked like wiring and computer parts before reaching the center. Inside was a thing that was extremely disturbing.

This one always cracks me up, when I first red it I was half expecting him to basicly walk in on someone he knew... doing stuff... to his mom. :lol:

Quote:

554 grabbed his pistol and pointed it at them. He sent back this message,"You know what? Do you care that all those scientists died, as well as your fellow soldiers? I don't think so. You always think of acting first. The reason I survived the Polar Incident had nothing to do with fighting. I had one thing that the rest don't: Emotions. So, why don't I just shoot you all? Because you are all that's rest. Let's kill all those two-limbed squids and show them what were made of!" He put his gun down and looked at the remains of the base and walked forward, followed by the rest of the group.

... What?

Ohh and to be a bit picky:

Quote:

The container he had entered is a device that keeps people in stasis and takes care of the body. The green liquid actually provides proteins to the body, as well as nutrients. This is the way people in the nation sleep: like they’re in an embryo.

An embryo is a high organsim (complex cellular structure) in an undeveloped state. So the the correct term should have been "like embryos" or "inside an egg".

Appart from that it was fairly good, enough to suck me in, you have a talant for creating tension, which is good, you just need to learn a bit more on how to present the images in your head, and not use alot of things you don't really know what it is.

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AudaciousLarue
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28 May 2012, 6:59 pm

This is how I'd rewrite the first few paragraphs:

Quote:

The large, gray spacecraft cruised above the surface of the Moon, its four ion engine drives leading it onto the landing pad. Its vast array of weaponry, which included machine guns and missiles, were powerful enough to vaporize entire cities.
After the ship had landed, several figures in space suits stepped out of its door, which gradually slid open. They quickly set up a perimeter around the landing pad.

It flows better the more simple you make the introduction of the ship and its' crew of soldiers seem.

Your draft, which you should rewrite, got bogged down in unnecessary, unimportant details. Your mission as a writer is to show, not tell.

Here, for example, is how I would open up with a character in my own writing:

Quote:

Nathaniel Washington was getting old. He ran his hand through graying hair, sighing as he simultaneously removing the letter from the desk drawer in his office. "I shall open it today, my dear." He muttered serenely while tears ran down his reddened cheeks, which he quickly wiped away with the sleeve of his sweater. He opened the letter slowly with a penknife that sat on the desk next to an old photo of his smiling wife, and began to read...

This opening paragraph establishes the main character, and adds some emotional sadness to the scene by implying that his wife is dead. Notice how I only describe important things that the character interacts with, such as the pen knife or the old photo, instead of adding pointless details about how his office looked or what the color of his sweater was.

We want to focus on the character and not details about the room or various objects.

Again, an exception to this rule is if they have importance in relation to the plot.

Anarbaculardrop
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02 Jun 2012, 5:18 pm

Silvervarg wrote:

The end piece is better, it acctually sucked me in pretty good, but there are still moments where you're just tossed out of the story by some WtF-phrases.

Quote:

He decided to make a tactical decision.

What you wrote here was that he deliberatly thought the (example)phrase "I am going to make a tactical decision now when I'm finished thinking this sentense."

Quote:

Two points on this one.
1. No trained militay personel would phrase their thought like that, it would be something in the area of "sh**, missiles" and then he would just react to this threat, any thought process would take place as he sits down inside the space ship and he prepares to counter the threat, and so it's the most appropriate place for him to start thinking more complex thoughts.
2. (This is not very important but anyway) on the moon you won't see any colours on things approaching from above, either it's dark because it's night, or the sun is up and you won't see colour on anything small because the rays are too strong.

Quote:

554 thoughts screamed," You bastards! Why? Why? Damn YOU! DIE! DIE, DIE, DIE! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU, SLIMY BASTARDS! I HATE YOU!"

Quote:

This one always cracks me up, when I first red it I was half expecting him to basicly walk in on someone he knew... doing stuff... to his mom. :lol:

Quote:

... What?

Ohh and to be a bit picky:

Quote:

An embryo is a high organsim (complex cellular structure) in an undeveloped state. So the the correct term should have been "like embryos" or "inside an egg".

About the emotions part:554 is actually an odd one out. He is something of a variant, The rest, however, are not.

Also, 54 has no training in controlling his emotions and I really wanted a Planet of the Apes-esque ending sequence, at least dialogue-wise.

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