From: Dr. Randall Stern
To: Dr. Alfonse Floyd
Subject: Re: A Death in the Test

Original E-mail Message from Dr. Alfonse Floyd

> Doctor,
>
> There was a death in the last cycle of the test. One of the examinees who
> entered the test was killed by a gang of the Morlock-class inhabitants
> of Atlantis. The subject was not one of our noteworthy examinees, just
> an average intellect that we inserted for observation.

[Edit: I removed the e-mail addresses from the text. In the future I or any publisher who picks me up might buy the domain name, but for now that's the safest way to keep anything from getting registered preemptively.]

My reaction when I got to Morlocks and Atlantis is -- what, is this the Weekly World News? This is too silly.

So what do you do about this reaction? If you mean for it to be silly, play it up; and if not, well, maybe one possibility is to use other terms, possibly made-up ones, instead of Morlocks and Atlantis. There are probably other ways to avoid the "silly" reaction I gave.

Can you situate us a bit more within the context of the email? "..last cycle of the test on Planet X. (or in the biodome...or wherever we are.) And where in time are we? Does a test cycle last a week, month, day, minute? Did this happen yesterday, last week, last year?

How far in the future are you headed? I worry that the @atlantis-test.com domain name would be problematic. I'm thinking of the issues created when Tommy Tutone sang his infamous song about Jenny's phone number, causing those who had that phone number to get thousands of calls. If you're going out a bit into the future, you can probably be more inventive/crazy with the email addresses. Use a different character for the break between person name and domain name. Don't use currently accepted .com, .net, .org, etc. - make something else up, etc. I am probably being over-sensitive, but just wanted to point out a concern.

Interesting enough to keep me reading, definitely!

The salutation of 'Doctor' seems very non-descript. I would expect a name if a salutation is used like "Dr. Floyd,". Or you could not include a salutation at all.

1) I send sensitive emails all the and my "Re:" descriptions are not so obvious because I don't know where the email might get intercepted or who might look at my receipent's email on his computer screen. Something that says "death" is bound to get attention.

2) The relationship was too formal - i.e. Doctor. Either he's "Bob" or if he's a superior he's "Dr. Stern."

3) What test? HOw many cycles have there been? The Drs know but no way for me to.

4) The names - Morlock and Atlantis - are too corney and overused.

5) I don't know what the "examinees" are or the "Morlock class inhabitants" are.

It would be clearer/ more beleivable to me if the email was:

"Test subject #4546 lost. Gang #876 suspected."

Then jumping into someone's POV to explain that to me.

From: Dr. Randall Stern
To: Dr. Alfonse Floyd
Subject: Re: Anomalies in the Test

Original Message from Dr. Alfonse Floyd:

And "average individual" is redundant when it follows "The subject was no celebrity".

It's got a hook, though.

Excellent hook! Definately a story I would love to read.

I'll make you a deal. As soon as I get far enough in my short story to take you up on your offer, I'll then be in a place to read someone else's work for a bit and would love to read more. Hopefully that will be in the next week, I'll let you know.

Maybe you are too young to realize how quickly computer technology evolves... those of us pushing 50 realize that what is standard format today will be a thing of the past in another few years. I cannot suspend my disbelief when you use email in this format and try to pass it off as a futuristic sci-fi story. (If it's an alternative world set in our current technological era, you'd better establish that in the first paragraph through some device, like mentioning Al Gore as president.)

I remember when email addresses had numbers only, and the internet was a two-layered strata affair that few businesses accessed. Heck, I remember when the salesman told me that the 8088 I was checking out, came with a 40-meg hard drive that was so large "you'll never need anything bigger."

If you want me to believe you have any skill in creating a futuristic world, don't start off with a technology that probably won't exist in it's current format in several years. You are already behind the curve of modern technology. As it is, most email users now use HTML format, which means we never see the >> at the beginning of a forwarded email anymore.

Elan, the story establishes itself very quickly that this is not a highly futuristic world; the technology I use in my story is not technology that's too advanced to build today, it's just too -expensive- to build without good reason.

As to your debates about e-mail, I've been a computer whiz for ten years and learning since I was younger and my father got us our first C64. I seem to remember a little something called the Y2K bug where they didn't bother preparing their Fortran and Pascal code for the millennium because they didn't think the two would even exist that long. I can say with some measure of confidence that e-mail will still exist in approximately fifty years. Also, I generated the e-mail prologue by sending an e-mail from my Gmail account to my Horde mail hosted through my website, and it inserted the > brackets automatically. So those brackets do still get entered in through professional software. Even with how quickly technology advances, never underestimate how -slowly- it advances in other areas; especially the ones largely connected with the billions of consumers that own computers now and did not in the days of the 8088 and the C64.