posted
I just got my new February edition of Assimov's and in the spirit of this board I thought I wou ld fip through it and find a random story beginning that worked well for me. I have not finished reading the story yet, but how about this one...
"Romance for Augmented Trio" by Tom Purdom
I knew there was something wrong as soon as I took my eyes off Ganmei's face and looked at her clothes. She was wearing the lose shirt-and-shorts combination she usually wore when she went about her everyday business on the ship. In the past, she had always put on something special when she had activated my baseline personality--my normal personality, as my old-fashioned brain still thought of it. The last time she had brought me back she had been wearing a black form-fitting gown that sheathed her in the glitter of the High Cold War period.
I stared at her while her litany of disaster flowed across my brain. Our ship had been taken over...twenty robots of unknown origin now occupied the outside of the hull..the robot invaders had destroyed every long range antenna on the hull...it had been almost three tendays since she had received any incoming messages...or sent any messges out.
[This message has been edited by Christine (edited February 03, 2004).]
posted
Good, but there was too much inconsistency between the first and second paragraph. There's too much time spent explaining the woman's wardrobe between the opening line(something's wrong) and its continuation (telling us what's wrong). Also -- and here's the problem of only having 13 lines to work with -- I'd much rather see their converstaion than hear about it second hand. But all this depends on what the focus of the story is. Obviously their relationship is important, and so I'm guessing the story is going to be about that more than the potential disaster.
Grade: LINE.
Why did you like it, Christine?
[This message has been edited by Jerome Vall (edited February 04, 2004).]
posted
First of all, I don't think there was a conversation. I think they were communicating telepathically. "her litany of disaster flowed across my brain"
I thought the wardrobe description was a nice way of introducing some of the major points of this story. For example, and this is one of the reasons I'm eager to keep reading, this guy apparently has more than one personality that can be brought on-line or off-line. We also see that these two have a special relationship, and that we are ina situation that is different from that normal situation. If he perhaps could have cut the clothing description by a few words or even a sentence, it didn't distract me enough to stop reading.
The end had such an abuse of punctuation that I could not take it. I also found the technology terms to be too heavy, but they were endurable. But the puntuation...
First paragraph was a bit too slow for my liking and I felt about half of it could have been chopped out. Not that I've got anything against slow beginnings, it's just that there was nothing in there that built up any interest for me. However, the second paragraph snatched back my attention in the nick of time just as it was about to wander off and put the kettle on, and so, with the story in front of me, I would have continued.
I'd have to disagree about the punctuation. I thought it did a good job of filling in the background in a short, snappy way, without making it feel like too much of a list of events. That's what caught my attention, although the 'or sent any out' does seem a bit abrupt after the longer snippets of information that had preceded it.
[This message has been edited by Gwalchmai (edited February 04, 2004).]
posted
I completely disagree with you, Phanto, about the punctuation. I think it worked; if this had been a story for critique, I probably would’ve suggested using a period instead of ellipses to create better sense of urgency. But that’s a stylistic judgment, and nothing more.
Posts: 68 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
Yeah, the punctuation's fine, I think. I would probably have used em-dashes, although I do use ellipses in this fashion sometimes too.
I also wouldn't say that the technical terminology is too heavy; there are only a few technical words in there and they are almost all words that should be very familiar to most SF readers. "Baseline" is possibly the least comprehensible word in there, but the meaning is explained, so that's probably OK.
I did actually find the second paragraph a let-down from the first, which raised some interesting questions. It seemed as though the story was likely to decline into too much action too quickly, not allowing us to see enough of the characters -- although I would definitely keep reading.
posted
I wonder if the second paragraph is less effective due to the language:
quote:I stared at her while her litany of disaster flowed across my brain.
I felt distanced by this. Perhaps it's because the reader is ready to get into the action and the emotion of what's going on, to feel connected, but the language ('litany', 'flowed across') doesn't allow that. Perhaps it's because the narrator is an AI or something, I don't know. But regardless of the reason, the result for me was ambivalence.
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