Random couple of reviews from me, can't promise any more as it's a busy week for me. As usual these are intended as constructive critisism, they are all personal opinion and not reflective of reality, no woodchucks chucked wood during the making of these reviews.

Unique Haplogroup

Well, I do love a good timeloop story, alas, I’m not sure that this one really hit the mark. Ultimately Haplogroup is a story about a self-causing event, but there’s very little that happens in the story to drive said event. The lack of action is endemic in the story, the main character is ambivalent about the central mystery for the majority of the piece and, well, when the narrator doesn’t give much of a damn, how can you expect the audience to? That malaise penetrates the rest of the story. There’s no high stakes, or emotional investment, and the story falls straight into the timeloop trap of having no real justification for events other than that they happened.

Overall it's a cool idea and flowed well, but Unique Haplogroup desperately needs a hook to invest the reader. Unsolicited advice ahead, but I can’t help but wonder if the whole thing would have worked better backwards. I.e., starting with the main character abandoning the baby and slowly unpicking the mystery of what brought them to that irrational moment.

High Above

Kind of the same problem as Haplogroup, while I liked the concept and ideas behind the story the actual execution left me somewhat lacking. As other reviewers have noted there’s a severe disconnect between the reader and the main character and, ultimately, I never really liked Patrick. He was a moderately sympathetic child, cut off from his natural home, but it wasn’t like he had a hard life and everyone pitched together to build him up. As an adult he was a spoiled brat who threw away a lifetime’s work (and not just his own) over a disappointment, and got exactly what he deserved, which was nothing at all.

My biggest struggle as a reader was, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to feel as if this was a tragedy or not. I felt as if the story expected me to be horrified by what Patrick was driven to, but the more I think about his life the more I dislike the man. There’s something to be said for devotion to a dream but, he wasn’t the right man for the job. His failure to accept that is a sad end, not a tragedy but the final section tries to say the opposite.

When The First Quail Calls

This was pretty damn hard to read for me. Kudos to the author for keeping in pigeon english for the whole story but, unfortunately, I’m somewhat dyslexic, so this was extremely difficult to read for me. In fact, this probably took me twice as long as any other story on my ballot. There’s a healthy argument to have between representing the character voice and easing readability, but I’m pretty on the fence when it comes to Quail, as I thought the muddy language was a great window into the character even if it was a slog to get through.

Anyway, Quail is about a slave escape and the somewhat perplexing man leading them, John Peter. There’s a constant discussion as to whether the man can be trusted through the story, indeed I think it might be the central theme, but as the story ends before they make it to safety it’s pretty much impossible to say if he was a hero or not. Ultimately, to paraphrase, John may have been the devil, but he definitely wasn’t an angel.

While I loved the theme of this story it left me extremely lost in most places and I really struggled to keep track of the characters and events. The core narrative was strong, but everything around them was obscured by the rough language and I was left with a lot more questions than answers. I feel that many of these questions were left open intentionally but a lot I feel were due to the style rather than specific narrative choices. Overall, this needs polish and careful editing for clarity, but it's a very strong fundamental story.

4978642
Not tonight, I'm all in and already in bed.
But tomorrow I'll bring crumpets if you want.
Or shortbreads.

4978662

I'm going horseriding tomorrow, sorry. And to bed now, in fact.

I've been having a really stressful week, and it's made it hard to focus on reading stories. I'll do my best to put out reviews for my initial slate, though.

Asteris Anima: This one feels really lopsided, structurally. We've got more than 2000 words of set-up, which includes some pretty heavy world-building. And then the story ends really abruptly, without much of a chance for this world-building to pay off. It also feels odd that the story would spend so much time in one conversation and later jump two days in two paragraphs without even a scene break. Generally speaking, once you've established a word-count to time-elapsed ratio, big deviations are going to throw your reader off, at least for a little bit. The idea itself is interesting, but the narrator never really came together as a character for me. He never seemed to have much agency—he is told what has happened, then he is told what he needs to do, and then circumstances kind of just lead to his death. It makes it a bit frustrating to read, because the lack of agency combined with the lack of payoff for the worldbuilding makes it feel that nothing really happened.

A Winning Formula: I was engaged throughout in this one; you did a good job of giving the reader reasons to keep reading, even when our duo weren't in direct danger. Prose was solid, as was the voicing. However, when all is said and done at the end, I'm left just a tad disappointed by the ultimate payoff. This very much feels like a shipping story, in that it's ultimate goal seems to be to leave the reader with a case of "Awww, these two would be cute together." The main reason, IMO, that these kinds of stories work in fanfic is because we have a lot of pre-existing characterization and investment in these characters before they're put together romantically. The fact that we don't have that kind of familiarity with Shara and Mira make them feel like they exist just to be cutesy with one another. In the end, while I was certainly entertained by this one throughout, it has a tough time getting a real emotional response from me.

I may not be participating in this round (and may or may not read stories produced by it later), and I may be several days late... but that doesn't mean I can't provide stats!

28 stories.
128,880 words.

2,000-2,499: 4
2,500-2,999: 3
3,000-3,499: 1
3,500-3,999: 5
4,000-4,499: 4
4,500-4,999: 0
5,000-5,499: 2
5,500-5,999: 1
6,000-6,499: 2
6,500-6,999: 0
7,000-7,499: 4
7,500-7,999: 2
8,000: 0

Mean: 4,602.85 Words.
Median: 4,047 Words.
Mode: Not useful (every story is of a different length).
Range: 2,029-7,916

Most surprising to me is the lack of precisely 8K words. Usually some hit the word limit, but this time the closest was almost 100 words off at 7,916.

Also somewhat surprising is that we have 3 ranges with 0 stories representing them. A bit weird.

Anyway, not too surprising otherwise. Range is pretty spread out, not too top or bottom heavy. About what I'd expect aside from the above, and those can probably be accounted for by the fact that non-pony rounds garner less attention overall.

4978750
Those sorts of gaps are to be expected given the meagre number of contestants I suppose.

Unfortunately, due to story commissions and a wacked-out sleep schedule, I don't really have time to read a lot of the stories this round. However, there was one title on my slate that really caught my eye: Quiet Boy and Moon Horse. So, I told myself that if I could only read one story this round, that would be it.

What a lovely story this was. I dunno who wrote it, and I really don't have any guesses, but thank you for this. The narrative voice was engaging the entire way through, the climactic line was perfectly positioned, the ending was so sweet... Amazing. I'm tempted to read another story now just to put this at the top of my ballot and actually have it count for something.

8. Siren Starlight
spreadsheet

It starts off strong with a good hook, painting Dr O'Malley in sharp, memorable strokes. The focus is tight, and the story moves quickly. You also keep the characterization consistent throughout, though I had a couple of minor issues. One was already pointed out by Not_A_Hat regarding the MC's initial 'sociopath' opinion (much as I adore the opening line).

Another is that for all her vividness, O'Malley is painted a little bit two-dimensionally. There's a ton of detail about her foibles (and especially the Siren), but we don't get any sense of background; how did she earn this lab? what reputation does she end up losing? As-is, there's no mention of her having any expertise in supernovas, so her bit of help with picking out the next supernova comes out of left field. Is she a supernova expert, or some sort of pattern recognition savant?

Mechanics-wise, I noticed a few misspellings and what looked like leftovers from sentence edits, but nothing too major. I'm not sure if this is why the section where they were discussing her replacing light bulbs was confusing, but it still doesn't quite parse clearly.

As far as I can tell, the science was good and explained clearly. I had to look up the conversion to realize exactly how fast .64 hertz was, but didn't have any trouble otherwise.

It might have helped to explain a bit more what exactly O'Malley was presenting, before she presents it. As is it's rather vague, and we have to infer (the horror!) that she has some evidence that the current theory is wrong, in addition to the pattern that she doesn't understand. Why is she so convinced there is a pattern, if she doesn't understand it? Also, shouldn't the signal to noise ratio be small, if they are discounting it?

Regardless, the scene after the conference was a great resolution, and tied everything together quite dramatically.

This was a top notch fic. I'd love to have given more feedback, but I'm afraid I don't really know what I'd change to improve it.

As promised:

25. When the First Quail Calls

First off, I think I would buck the trend by whooping the tour de force that consisted in writing consistently in that English dialect you created. It’s difficult to assert whether it is historically sound, but nonetheless it adds a little spice to your story, even though it’s hard to get used to it at first. Kudos also for choosing to set up your story in the past, while the prompt was obviously pointing to the future.

On the story itself, I must admit I’m pretty at a loss. Jon underlines that as Europeans, we are not as in touch with slavery as you Americans can be, though this is a very debatable (even somewhat invidious) opinion. In any case, understand the story does not necessitate any special historic background. The only thing I didn’t catch, and sorry if I pass for being as thick as a log, is what the guy/guide is supposed to stand for? Some kind of spirit? The devil? A wizard? Something else?

Otherwise, I wouldn’t say the story elicited a big reaction on my part. They flee, and they escape by whatever miracle to their followers. There’s a bit of tension, of course, but the plot is not very elaborate. It’s very linear. And the end is somehow predictable. Maybe it could’ve been better had the stakes been higher.

1. In Living Colour

The idea is sweet, though I wonder if I haven’t read something a bit similar before. The cooler concept here is maybe that of a true “second life”, though I find very disappointing that you did not explore that line further. You merely mention the guy has to take pills to survive, has had a former life, but you barely elaborate on this except for an exposition-dumpy passage. Also, we never know how the heck that guy has managed to slink his passage in this ship, where obviously everyone has a definite purpose but him.

The guy’s mood swings a bit quickly from an extreme to the other, and though this is typical of the depressive mind, it’s a bit jarring here. Also, the role of the pens and the paper is hardly elaborated on. Why does he use them rather than the tablet he seems to use too. It’s a bit confusing.

They make an emergency stop at Titan heading for Saturn, but Titan being one of Saturn’s satellites, I don’t see the point. Stopping on Europa, for example, would’ve been more realistic. As for the possibility of setting up a colony on a planet composed mainly of liquid hydrogen/helium, I’m sceptical.

In any case, not a bad story, but not outstanding neither. Fair.

Pact

The first thing I’m struck by is the nice, easy style. The radio codes are an annoying bit of jargon, and that’s something I’ve been accused of before, but I think there’s a difference between saying someone has a heavy weapon like a PKM compared with a request for a 10-15. The former, at least in my opinion, gives enough hints for the reader to guess what a PKM is. But “Chief says he wants a report on that 10-15 as soon as it’s done”? I’ve got nothing for that.

Anyway, minor quibble, that. Moving on.

Nice descriptions throughout this thing so far. Despite the strong voice leaking into the narrative, it’s still easy to see what’s going on. I’m really liking this so far.

I don’t know enough about police work to say if the interaction between Officer Miller and Owen Way is realistic. I suppose police officers are just as varied as humans in general, so any development is valid, but it nags at me nevertheless, simply because there’s so much emphasis on how they engage with each other. There’s nothing about it that leaps out at me as unusual, though, so perhaps I’m looking for things to criticize where there are none.

I like the way this slowly plays out. On the other hand, the device of an officer’s interview is fairly… well, simple, I guess. We’re reading a story about a story, at least through to this point.

My fears are assuaged. We get downstairs to the altar very quickly. Oh, and I love this line: “That’s the thing about crazy people, they go from zero to spiders in their brain in nothing flat.”

On the other hand, I wasn’t such a fan of this one: ““Another promise, another seed, another packaged lie to keep us trapped in greed!” My pants are shaking. And it’s Mindy. Fuck!” I didn’t recognize the lyrics, and it wasn’t obviously a cellphone until I’d read it a few times. Coming as it did right after the introduction of a pagan statue and sacrificial altar, ‘cellphone’ wasn’t at the top of my brain. Broke the immersion, sadly.

Huh.

Okay, that’s… huh.

“...and to pray for the swift resolution of her one hundred year journey to Earth.” Ominous line is ominous.

And that’s pretty much the tone for the rest of the story. I’m left with the odd combination of unsettled and yet relieved.

Great story, author. Except for the quibbles I noted above, I don’t have much to offer. When this is over, I really want to hear where these ideas came from.

Uh, last story on my slate:

2. Pact

Cf. 4980340 (CiG, I appreciate your doing the work for me.)

EDIT: Okay I cheated.

Well—I’m certain others have pointed out the obvious Lovecraftian tang: the deity’s apparence, the statue, the altar, the strange physical manifestations. All that is strongly redolent of Cthulhu’s myth. It’s competently written, and CiG singled out the nice sentences (“go spiders”).

But there are some flaws, IMHO. First of all, the phone call sounds extraneous. I mean, he can pick up a phone call, but all the elaboration on the joint account and so on looked to me as a sly way to sidetrack us into a secondary plot: sounds realistic, but it’s mostly wasted space. Then it does not really add up why the wife calls, and not the boss to know why the guy is away for so long.

The deers are much too tame. I’ve really a hard time imagining how a wild animal could barter its life against the assurance that its offspring lives the same life as its. Would you? I don’t think so. Unless this is a pretence…

…maybe that would have made for a stronger story: imagine what would happen if the cop transformed into a deer after touching the altar? Mmmm? This is also to say that the ending falls flat. It is really anticlimactic and it’s a bummer. You’d done a really good job setting a kinda mysterious setting, and you don’t squeeze the marrow. Too bad.

Next time, be bolder.

“Oh deer,” the buck said kneading his doe. “Time to go that stag.”

4980371

I almost completely disagree (at least on a couple of points). The phone call was my first hint that something weird was going on with time. Plus... I quite liked that you're left suspecting, but not completely sure, if anything truly cthuluionic happened at all, or if its just a wierd, eccentric rich person. That uncertainty was creepier to me than actually, really knowing something horrible is coming. Maybe if the cop believed he became a deer, through to the moment of putting his head on the altar, but instead of being sacrificed the rich man wakes him, as if he's hit his head or passed out for a moment. Although its a horrible cliche, so maybe its better not...

4980815
Uh! That’s nice we have different expectations! Makes for a richer experience. But I agree our points of view will be difficult to reconcile. The author will have to umpire. Let’s see who wins

Just to let y'all know: I'm going a little nuts here because I'm about to head off to a convention for the weekend. Gotta throw my things in the car and drive to the con today. I'll type up reviews on the rest of my slate once I get settled into the hotel, though, and I'll see if I can't sneak in a little more reading around the edges.

Continuing with the "cool lines from stories you just read" thing 4977635:

Pact

"...Time to go be with the others."

The deer snorts and shakes itself out. Herself out, I guess. It’s a doe. She takes a step back from me, and turns a half step. Towards the altar and the fucking statue. She steps up that way. Then, she puts her head down on the stone, laying it there sideways.

This scene was one of the most effective and memorable at selling the story's underlying Lovecraftian horror, and did so with an admirable economy of words.

Dinner in Thebes

“I guess. Hang on, I’ll get an interpreter.” I turned and walked behind the truck.

That saved my life.

I love that the spoilered text is just inserted, casually and matter-of-factly, into a larger paragraph of description, reinforcing the suddenness of the attack and becoming nearly lost among the flood of sensation of the explosion.

A few more.

Mike

14. "High Above" - You've already gotten some good advice, author. I'll just add that dialogue is important in a story because talking is how we humans relate to each other on a day to day basis. We readers need to know who Patrick is as a fellow human being, and having him talk with other people throughout the story is an easy way of making that happen. Right now, nothing comes alive in the story till the very end--when the talking happens--so I'd recommend replacing most of the narration with actual scenes containing actual talking.

9. "Freedom" - This one, on the other hand, is pretty much all talking, and I'm not exactly sure how it all shakes out at the end. Our unnamed narrator discovers that his job isn't what he thought it was, so he decides to stop making an effort there and look for a new job. This then leads to a semi-discussion of ethics, and that's largely it. I guess I've never been put into a situation like this, so I'm having a hard time relating to this as more than a couple young guys shooting the breeze.

11. "Published in the Stars" - Another all narrative story? Please see my advice above. I'd almost suggest starting the story with Evarts having the hood pulled from his head and being confronted by his interrogators. You could get all the backstory in as they talk, and then advance the story from there. That might also make it easier to actually explain what happens in the story to those of us who know next to nothing about computer programs...

6. "The Cat in the Box" - My persnickety nature objects to the pronoun "their" being applied to a singular cat, but that's just me mostly. I'd like to see the internal author insert a few concrete details here and there--a name or a description of a place or something like that--in a self-acknowledged attempt to make the thing feel more "real." In other words--and I can't believe I'm saying this--make the thing more meta, external author. Do like Lovecraft did, hanging the impossible on a skeleton of plausibility, and it can only help.

4981025 (but it refers to a lot of other comments too)

Slight deviation from the reviews but I feel still on topic.

I've seen the criticism that they use narration applied both to Published in the Stars and High Above. While both the stories have their problems (like almost every story except a some gems that make me want to go burn the lawn of their authors or improve myself, and seeing the ocean between us I may have to resort to becoming a better writer) I strangely have really not a problem with them being being written that way.

I understand that this style really doesn't click with some people and that is a perfectly legitimate reason to score them lower, but is it, abstractly speaking, really such a bad form of storytelling? Is it only me that likes this style for some stories? Are there kinds of stories where you would use it or tolerate it?

One of my favorite stories ever is Day Million by Frederik Pohl. It is a marvelous story told all in a narrative style, where almost nothing happens and still it blew me away. OK, it did it twenty years ago, but it still holds up.

4981053
Personally, High Above's style didn't work for me because it's at odds with the character-centric focus of the piece. I think I'd be okay if it kept this style throughout, but the some of the things in the dialogue heavy 2nd scene didn't mesh well with it. I'll put more thoughts in my review.

4981053
4981142

The key for me:

Is "narrative voice." If I wanted to compare one of the stories I've read so far to "Day Million," for instance, I'd point to "The Cat in the Box." Both stories approach the idea of storytelling in the same way: quite literally by having a narrator tell the reader a story. In "Day Million," the narrator even loses his temper with the reader more than once because the narrator is sure that the reader isn't understanding what the narrator is saying. That works extremely well because the narrator is very much a character and has very much of a voice. But plain ol' dry narrative telling, well, that one of the few places where the hackneyed phrase "show, don't tell" is useful...

Mike

4981053 If you want examples of how using lots of narrative-style voicing can work, I'd suggest reading stuff by Alfred Bester. He seems to use this heavily in his short stories, from what I can remember, and he did it very well for the most part.

I experimented with this months ago in a pony round, writing 'This is Water'. The results were... less than amazing, by consensus. I'm still trying to come to grips with how a narrative-heavy story works, but I think it's key that that narration often reads like summary; the pacing needs to be carefully controlled, or it ends up just zipping by and skipping the parts which interest the reader.

By the way:

Here's a link to Pohl's classic short story "Day Million" if folks wanna see what we're talking about.

Mike Again

A couple of more reviews.

High Above: I've mentioned earlier that I didn't think the narration style of the story worked well with the themes. It's mainly because throughout the first section, we're simply being told about character development. So in the second scene, when Professor Rawls tells Patrick that he's too headstrong to be on the mission, it doesn't really click home, because we've never really seen what it's like when Patrick is being stubborn. Even just giving us one concrete example of how he talks or how he acts when he doesn't agree with authority would go a long way towards putting weight behind Rawl's assessment. In short, as a reader, I know traits about Patrick due to his lengthy backstory, but I still come away without a sense of knowing him as a character. The problem is a bit exacerbated by the shift in narration style during the pivotal second scene, which kind of highlights how little we know about Patrick's thought processes. In the end, I'm afraid that the characterization delivered by the extended backstory simply didn't work as intended for me, and as a result the following two scenes fell flat.

The Bone Dice: I found it difficult to keep track of exactly what is going on, especially across scene breaks. And I think too many of the premise's important plot points are kept obscured from the reader for too long. Having to play catch-up for so long makes it feel like all of the scenarios our hero gets into are kinda just rushing at us, since we're still reeling from trying to figure out what's really going on. What doesn't help is how little our hero actually does out of his own accord. Throughout the story, he's ordered around, told who to talk to, charged with exuberant fees, captured, and rescued. The fact that all the events seem to just be thrown at him rapid-fire with little action on his part makes the reader feel overwhelmed and detached from these events. The most interesting part of the story, by far, are the bone dice themselves, so I'm not sure if the right call was to give them minimal screen time. So in spite of the action-heavy conflict, this piece wasn't quite as engaging as it could have been.

Sorry for my silence. Reviews are coming soon. For now here are some lines I liked from each of the stories I read:

Stars on his Brow

In the distance, an axe could be heard; in a few hours, carts would set out to carry charcoal and wood down the narrow valley to the foothills, where Aludran merchants would trade it for local potatoes, salt from the bare shores of the Coatli peninsula to the south and grain that edged the Anansi plains in summer.

I just love world building lines like this.

High Above

bordering on the infinite where his bold imagination would lead him in fancy adventures: Monday he was climbing Mars’s Mount Olympus, the highest known volcano in the whole universe; Tuesday he spent exploring the icy moons of Jupiter; Wednesday landing his ship on the gauzy rings of Saturn; Thursday bathing in the chilly methane ocean of Neptune; Friday playing with the marbles that dwell in the gloom at the outer rim of our Solar system. And during the weekend, the galaxy was but a tiny splotch in the abyss through which his spacecraft darted.

Pact

That’s the thing about crazy people, they go from zero to spiders in their brain in nothing flat.

4981164
I see what you mean. As I said, the style not saying anything to someone is quite valid criticism. I was only curious about if it was possible to make it work for you.

4981211
I'll have to check again my copy of The Stars y Destination, although it is a translated version so maybe it won't really come through. I was also reminded about Galactic Patrol (read it a short time ago) and generally E.E: Smith's work. In those cases I think it has more to do with the time those stories were written than with a specific choice of style, which is also why I connected the way High Above is written with the rétro setting.

Another pair of reviews.

For the Love of Food: To be absolutely blunt, the gimmick overstays its welcome. I know it's tough to hear, but I might not have finished the story if it weren't for the fact that I knew I was going to review it. By the eighth entry, I still hadn't found any sort of meaningful connection between the reviews. I finally picked up that we're supposed to be reading reviews from the same boyfriend/girlfriend pair about halfway down, but by then I have to admit that I was reading it just to finish it. Eventually a sense of progression is built, but for me it came far too late. My advice would be to make the plot apparent within the first two or three entries. Even just including a username so that the reader knows that all these reviews are coming from the same person would help immensely. Other readers' mileages may vary, but I didn't get a solid sense of what was going on until I was 13 entries in. While there is a story that can be interesting and worthwhile in here, it might be asking too much of the reader (who, you have to remember, goes into this with absolutely no idea what's going on) to read more than ten fictional internet reviews before they can piece things together.

The Sisters Three: Great use of existing material; this really breathes life into the mythology with some excellent first-person narration. The imagery never fell flat, and the voicing was archaic-sounding enough to feel authentic without becoming dry. I really like the subject matter—the Greco-Roman deities are these big, magnified personalities that are still distinctly human in their desires, flaws, and strengths. Seeing one of the stranger deities encounter a very human thing like love is very interesting. To point out a weak point, though, I'd have to mention the middle scene (the one describing Bion's life). My interest stumbled here, just because this section comes across a bit like a flowery summary of a bunch of events. I'd suggest focusing on one or two pivotal moments in Bion's life, with perhaps just enough digression into his past and future to pique reader interest. This will help keep the story emotionally grounded, and it'll also help preserve the narrative flow from the scene before it. But relatively minor pacing issues aside, this is certainly a solid entry.

4982245 "The Stars My Destination" has some of it, I'd say, but I was more referring to his short fiction, where it's especially noticeable in the openings and how he uses his hooks. "Somebody Up There Likes Me" and "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" (probably my favorite or second favorite time-travel story ever, up there with "Ripples in the Dirac Sea" by Geoffry A. Landis) are prime examples, because they actually have narrator characters, but "The Four-Hour Fugue", and "5,271,009" have it noticeably, as well. As you said, likely an artifact of the time to some extent - but these stories still read very well, superbly in some cases, so I can't dismiss it as simply 'a bad idea we've left behind'.

Check it out, and see what you think, I guess. Read "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" here. (Warning - PDF link)

4982274

RE: For the Love of Food

I noted in the Skype chat that this gimmick was great in the minific round, when it was much shorter. But for a full-up short story round, there wasn't enough of a hook to keep me going.

4982297
During my reread, I found that the story was much easier to read when I already understood the premise. At least for me, it seems, the lack of introductory information was a bigger factor than the actual length of the story.

[Like] The World Is Ending from our minific event fully established the premise within two sentences, which helped me buy into the gimmick. On the other hand, For the Love of Food didn't even make it clear enough that the reviews were coming from the same person.

I think I might have enjoyed the story much more, even at its length, if I knew from the beginning what it was about. That being said, it undoubtedly does drag its feet, especially in the first 1/3 of it.

Okay, here are the stories which have only two reviews so far and that maybe crave for a little more attention:

10. Made in Heaven (3,128)
13. Quiet Boy and Moon Horse (5,517)
18. For the Love of Food (5,328)
20. The Travellers (7,376)
23. Making Contact (4,105)
26. The Ghost-Herald of Beansworth (7,916)
28. The Sisters Three (2,318)

10. Made in Heaven

This is supposed to be a horror story, but I have a hard time connecting to it. Part of that difficulty is directly linked to the rough English: grammar mishandling, missing or misplaced words/punctuation: the story needs to be pampered. Part of it is the mishmash of sundry elements it tries to shoehorn into a coherent framework, yet never achieves a solid basement: stars, dreams, rats, old ramshackle house (maybe your model here was Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch House?) make up for a bestiary, or a heap of rough quarries laid one upon the other in the hope of forming a wall, without any cement (somehow unrelated, this metaphor makes me think about a famous apophthegm by the French mathematician Raymond Poincaré: “A farrago of fact is no more science than a scree of stones is a house.”). I’m going to be blunt, and I apologise in advance because I’m sure what I’m going to write is invidious, and I beseech you pardon me for this, but I feel this piece is too slapdash to really catch the attention of the reader.

Now you can slap me, and then dash me.

More to come in a few minutes.

28. The Sisters Three

We have a nice opening there, and the idea of featuring the three Fates is a nice one, though I hardly imagine them dwelling in such a paradisal environment (but rather somewhere underground in the gloom—though there is no real reason for this. It’s like anybody represents Death as a gaunt figure or skeleton wielding a scythe, while Death maybe is a portly, paunchy little ruddy guy who drinks suds and leaves at the foot of the rainbow. Who knows?)

Maybe the cow scene is a bit too slow and extended, even though you take this animal case as a pretext to introduce us to the intimate feelings and the team work of the ominous three.

On to our friend Bion, “the life”. I reckon you chose the name intentionally, but it is a bit awkward to christen a mortal “life”. My main gripe here would be the contrast between an outstanding destiny, as predicted by his thread of life, and the relative pedestrian scenes you evoke in Atropos’s vision. I expected some higher feats or exceptional abilities from cradle on, given the way you describe the magnificence of his thread.

Which, at the end, leads me to the same conclusion as Lachesis: Atropos has a sweet spot for mortals, and she will probably feel the same thing for the next warrior her sister pulls out of her loom.

Genre: First Contact, Sci-Fi, Comedy

Humanity has spread throughout the galaxy. Colonizing other worlds – and developing advanced genetic engineering and hyperadvanced technology – has lead to humans diverging wildly, creating wildly divergent body types amongst themselves, ranging from relatively humanoid things, to androids, to gilled aquatic types, to floating gasbags with tentacles.

The heroes of this story head out beyond the edges of the Net – a future FTL communications interface – to help out some folks who are sending out a strange distress signal. The crew speculates about what they’ll be like – there are humans who, long ago, travelled out beyond the edges of known space and cut themselves off. So-called Fringers can be very strange indeed, and some of them were founded by Luddites who let their tech levels fall dramatically before reemerging into space.

So when they come across a group of rather cute avian-saurian types in an unknown ship, it doesn’t really surprise them at all. Sure, they don’t speak their language, but there are over 17 million known human languages, and it isn’t like they haven’t seen weirder.

Too bad that the aliens have no idea that humanity exists, or why these weirdos just boarded their ship and started repairing it.

This story was amusing. It is simultaneously a comedy as well as a slightly philosophical piece; if humans develop very advanced technology and begin wildly modifying themselves, does the term “alien” even have meaning at that point?

Unfortunately, the central twist of the piece was kind of given away by the title, which robbed the reveal at the end of some of its comedic impact, though on the other hand, I’m not sure if the earlier scenes would have been less funny if we hadn’t known all along that they were going to be making first contact with an alien species without realizing it.

4982908
Nice to have you back TD!

I, The Dreamer

The tension in the intro was going well during the description of the room, but I found myself flagging a bit at the Man in the Black Suit’s epiphany: it was silent, even though he was in a preschool.

I mean, really? Of all the weird shit, like complete and total amnesia, the thing that made him practice primal scream therapy was the fact that it’s quiet?

Still, good first scene, all in all. Let’s see where else it takes us.

Ah, we appear to be in an Inception fanfic. Perhaps that’s not fair -- invading people’s dreams is hardly a trope that was invented by Inception, but the terminology used here -- Drafter and Seeder -- are strikingly close to the roles used in the movie.

I don’t have much else to say about this, oddly. The remainder of the story sucked me in very well, and while I’m left with a lot more questions than answers, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. My biggest complaint is that, at 3,700 words, this story really could have used a better middle-arc, something that showed Pablo and Diaz at work in the course of their normal job, before this particular job that happens to be the end of the road for Diaz. That would keep us from having to settle with exposition like this:

The second step, now that Pablo had drafted the dream that Diaz had seeded, was finding Martino in it. At which point Pablo would jab him with the Anchor, another piece of dreamjack tech, Diaz would pop back to the world of the wakeful, flick a switch, and the tech there would do the rest of the work.

You had almost 4,000 more words to play with, author. I think they would’ve come in useful. Still, this fic easily settles near the top of my ballot.

In Living Color

I finally get my first space-based story! The rest of my slate so far has been rather earthbound for a prompt like this, so I’m excited.

There’s a surreal quality to this, I suppose stemming from the apparent far-future nature of this story. We’re told right away that Things are Different. People live a Lifetime; pens are so old people think they’re weapons! Incidentally, the part with the crew member freaking out over the pens felt overwrought – if he panics that easily, he probably shouldn't be crewing a spaceship.

And then, apropos, we get this line: The Asian man chuckled and leaned back in his seat. “Relax. No need to panic. Panic is for Earthlings.”

Well, Charlie’s a bit out of place on a spaceship. I’m not sure yet if that’s due to him being an unreliable narrator, or if he somehow slipped past all the sanity checks that go into deciding whether or not a person is a good fit for space.

It wasn’t that he was ungrateful; like he said, ever since they invented Reincarnation, loads of people were living better lives, were being given second chances to do the things they had always wanted to. But still, knowing that if he didn’t take these pills, his body would literally fall apart—it kept him awake at night, staring at the ceiling, waiting to feel his skin start to peel.

Hello, exposition.

Charlie couldn’t help but notice that no one was smiling.

Observations like this land like an anvil but lack any heft. The previous few lines already made it clear that this is a very utilitarian venture, there’s no need to punch the reader in the face with Charlie’s sudden Humanism.

I’m puzzled that Charlie’s role in life, writing, is apparently so devalued in this world, and yet the people who decide who gets to colonize Saturn apparently decided he deserved a spot on the spaceship. Do they enjoy reading? Has he ever met them? Maybe if he had, he’d have stayed on Earth?

And in the end the artist finally makes art, and the benighted people of the realm suddenly realize what they’ve been missing. I’m reminded strongly of an Ayn Rand novel, where the world suddenly discovers how much they need the protagonist.

I appreciate what this story is trying to do, to show a world where science and math and technology have successfully banished the Humanities, and our protagonist, the one ‘normal’ human we readers are supposed to be able to sympathize with, feels lost. But I’m confused by too many seeming oddities, most notably why Charlie is suddenly discovering that the scientists he joined on this flight don’t care about writing, when it seems that no one else in his life ever cared about it either. What motivated him to leave Earth? The story’s first line said Earth was getting too depressing, but surely it can’t be worse than Titan or the Hermes is. Too much about this story confuses me, I’m afraid. Either it has gaping holes, or I’m not smart enough to see what’s plugging them.

The Travelers

I really enjoyed this story. Now I’m going to list the things I didn’t like about it:

The language starts out straddling the line between evocative and purple. There’s no overuse of adverbs here, but phrases like “incessant bleatings,” “sigiled hands,” “discharge the bullet” all stink of the thesaurus. I mean, discharge the bullet? What’s wrong with just ‘fire’ or ‘shoot’?

I like the idea of a soldier so desperate he sacrifices his humanity to become a more perfect weapon, but when I see the still-human mages later in the fic, I wonder if this story wouldn’t have been more interesting from their perspective. They literally bleed with each spell, and then along comes a mage who surpasses their abilities in every conceivable way. The only cost, of course is his soul – maybe. I wonder what they must be thinking when they see him heal all these wounded people.

Gratitude, the story tells us. But I’ve never known humans to feel gratitude when they are shown up so decisively.

The part about the stars feels shoehorned in. I get the feeling the author had a great idea for this story, then realized at some point that he probably ought to get the prompt in there somewhere. As someone who tends to view the prompt as more a suggestion than anything else, I felt that it weakened the story more than it helped.

All that sounds critical. It is, I suppose, but it shouldn’t detract from the fact that there’s much to enjoy here. This world has depth to it, and I love the magic we see and it’s execution. On the other hand, some of this depth is rather forced – it seems like every few lines we get another reference to something amazing, like dragons or balefire or the plague or elves. But the sum of these things is miniscule, for they are never referenced again and come across blatantly as little nuggets the author thought of to tease the reader without any actual depth behind them. They provide the illusion of a more realized world.

Still, like I said, I enjoyed reading it, and that counts for a lot. So near the top of my ballot it goes.

11. Published in the Stars

Baal Bunny criticised this story for being all narrative, and compared it to 14. High Above in that regard. I want to shortly state that, while I certainly agree to Baal Bunny's criticism of High Above, this was no problem for me in Published in the Stars. I guess this comes down to the nature of the story at hand; while High Above is in all regards a character-centric piece, in which, especially to make the ending work, a reader-protagonist connection must be established, Published in the Stars was an event-centric story. The main meat of the story was not about the programer, but about the events that kicked off and escalated due to his program.

As such, I think the story worked very well. I had fun reading it and had no problem with having no connection to the programmer. I'd even say that the last scene laid too much emphasize on him, and that an ending that didn't digress from the previously established point of view might have worked better for me.

The harshest criticism I have to make though is that the gimmic of how the program managed to spew out text passages from an online database without any other programmers being able to pick up on it is not explained in terms that I can understand. My software engineering knowledge stops at doing some if/else/while stuff in Python and Papyrus, so I didn't get it at all. This made the story stop being fun from the point where there's a joke about the programmer needing much time to explain this... it comes off as arrogant, as in "haha, the fools," and as a reader, I feel both mocked and underappreciated for not getting explanation. I'm pretty sure that's not how it was meant to come accross, but that's the way it does to me.

Conclusion: Amusingly written with a fun concept, marred only by presupposing IT knowledge.

17. Navigation

I don't think I can add much to the previous reviews but say that I, too, was confused a great deal. At the end of the story, I didn't really know who the good guys and who the bad guys were, and there were a lot of names. Also, there were some time jumps that I only managed to pick up on in retrospective.

The idea with "shipgirls" was a nice one, but underexplained. I like opening scenes that begin with action, but doing it with a scene that hinges on the knowledge of a concept such as girls taking the form of humans or ships, or anything in between apparently, really leads to an immersion-breaking lack of knowing what to picture in my head.

Conclusion: Interesting ideas and possibly even a good story, but torpedoed by coarse storytelling craftsmanship.

Well, it's not quite the last minute, but I still think it's time to do a few reviews! So here we go!

22: Masquerade: My biggest problem with this story? It doesn't feel like a short story. It feels like the prologue, or maybe first chapter of a book. Which is a compliment in it's own way, since it would be a book I would happily read. The characters are interest5ing, the world building it well done, and without major info dumps and exposition. Yasuko has a fully developed personality and voice. And there are all these hints and tidbits and hooks that reflect a much deeper world, filled with a rich history. As I said, my biggest issue is that we only get a taste of that, which makes this feel unfinished. I really want to turn the page and read Chapter 2.

15: The Sun Goes Down: I don't get it? Grayson's parents died in an accident, and he's looking after his younger sister who... runs away and leaves a note with a vague clue? And so Grayson clums a mountain and waits for her? For 5 days? I'm assusming the sister is dead, and after 5 days on a mountaintop, he's dying as well and thus meeting her? Perhaps I'm just being dense, but I'm not not following along on this one...

19: The Burning of the Hanged Man: Ooooh! Another very good one! Fits the prompt quite well too! Mai is well written and fully fledged character, and her fight against 'fate' and 'destiny' is nicely done. (Also, kinda ironic since we're all here due to a show where the main characters get marks on their butts showing their destiny. ) In any case, the metaphor with the mouse and the minotaur representing her abusive father was quite well done too. Though the final scene left me a bit confused. I'm not 100% sure what happened there. Did she just verbally spar with her father / the minotaur? Or did she actually "Plant steel" and either injure, or possibly kill him? I half expected the final scene to be here in a court room or prison after that final metaphorical battle. Still, all in all very well done!

17: Navigation: Well, this was an odd one. I know there's a Japanese term for this sort of thing... Anthromorphic girls in the shape / form of inanimate objects. I can't recall the name, but I assume that's the source of this general idea? I'm afraid I'm not that familiar with thatgenre, or the age of sail, so a few bits and pieces escape me. It's pretty unique though, I'd say. One of my biggest issues however, was the change in time periods. We start with the present, and the rest of the story is the past leading up to it. But that's not really made clear. I had to read the story twice before I came to that realization. And I'm still a bit fuzzy on some of the details of how shipgirls come to be. Besides the obvious fact that it requires death and the destruction of the ship. And that the British Admiralty have begun destroying their own ships and crews to make more of them.

20: The Travelers: Hmmmmm. It's an interesting idea, and world building, but for some reason it just didn't quite pull me in. And I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why. There's a lot of interesting ideas and world building here, but somehow it just doesn't feel all that organic to me. Maybe it's the characters themselves? No one seems to have much fire, or passion. The mental image this story paints in my mind is of a dull, ground down desert world. Filled with people mechanically going through the motions of life because that's the way the world is. Mind you, that's just my impression. And maybe that was your intention? To highlight the feeling of Galain, and the detachment he feels from the world? I'd really like to give more constructive criticism than this, but that's really the best I can do. The writing is fine, and the ideas and world building are interesting, but something about it just doesn't quite 'click' for me.

4: Dinner in Thebes: Wow. Just wow. Now that was a powerful story. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I didn't predict that twist at the end, despite the fact that the title should have been a clue. Whoever wrote this did an excellent job of conveying a sense and feeling of the people and places being described. The whole thing was very moving and the progression of the 'psychotic break' was excellently done. Really, I don't know what else to say about this, except "Excellent job," Definitely at the top of my ballot, and I hope to the top of many other's ballots as well.

And all done my ballot! With hours to spare no less!

Recap written and ready!
See you all tomorrow morning.

The last of the stories on my slate.

The Cat in the Box: I'm sorry to say that this one kind of struck an anti-sweet spot for me. I found it a little frustrating to read, because while meta stories in general have a certain telly-ness to them, this story had this thematic and narrative vagueness that didn't mesh well with it. I mean, if we treat the narrator as a character (as I am assuming we should), it becomes almost antagonizing in that our entire experience with the story depends entirely on what he tells us, and he chooses to tell us everything in a very vague and roundabout way. He promises to address certain points with deeper meaning, but then he discusses other topics that even in hindsight feel tangential at best. In the end, it fails to engage me, because as a result of the meta elements the reader knows that they're being railroaded, and as a result of the narrator's convoluted digressions the reader becomes easily annoyed at the lack of clarity.

Siren Starlight: I really liked this story. It's an excellent character study that develops Dr. O'Mally for a relatively long period of time without feeling off-paced. Great strategic use of short but concrete vignettes that don't break the tone of the surrounding narration. They really give the story a spoken feeling that meshes well with the narrator's storytelling style. You've done a great job of getting us all wrapped up in the mystery of Siren's Song by showing us how invested in it O'Mally is. If I had to lodge a complaint, it'd be that the narrator's characterization feels a bit thin, but this isn't a big problem at all since you make it clear from the beginning that the story is really about O'Mally. Overall, this is really good stuff, and I'm scoring it very highly.

Completing my original ballot:

Plus one even though I haven't got a story in this time...

Mike

5. "Asteris Anima" - I'll agree with the others and say that this one just gets started when it abruptly ends. If you do want to make a fatalistic point, author--that the people in this world are completely in thrall to the stars--then I'd suggest hitting it even harder to make the links between the sky and the earth even thicker. Make it clearer that Reg and the other du Equu have been suffering for quite a while because Equuleus is under siege. Maybe make Gavol be du Tetsu or something since it's Tetsudo who's coming to aid Ursus against Aquilae after Equuleus has fallen--oh, and has Aquilae taken in the stars that used to form Equuleus to make itself larger or brighter? That'd be a fine image... Or conversely, continue the story and have Reg triumph against overwhelming oddities in order to prove that people's fates aren't controlled by the stars. Pick a direction and go further.

13. "Quiet Boy and Moon Horse" - Here's an example of a very typical story very well told. There's nothing really new here, but the voice, the pacing, the writing, it all works so well. To the top of my ballot with it.

26. "The Ghost-Herald of Beansworth" - I haven't read any of Lackey's stuff in years--I never much cared for it, to be completely honest--but this is a nice piece of Valdemar fanfiction. Not being overly familiar with the setting, I'm sure I missed some of the finer details, and the fight at the end seemed a little unclear--something's keeping the bloodmage from seeing them, but I don't get any idea of what that something is. Still, the writing puts this in my number two slot.

Genre: Fantasy, Adventure

A mage and a girl are travelling together in search of the girl’s family after the war. As the story unfolds, we come to realize that the mage is, in fact, a golem, and was one of the rebels fighting against the girl’s brother. But the golem has renounced violence, and seeks only to make things better.

This was a decent little piece, but I have to admit that the bits about the stars didn’t really do much for me. The worldbuilding was nice, and the adventure goes on at the end, but it felt more like a piece of a larger story than a complete short story to me. Then again, I might have just felt distant from the whole piece; I was left with a sense of vague dissatisfaction at the end, even though I wanted to like it. It ultimately felt like it didn’t really go anywhere.

That’s not to say I disliked it so much as that I wanted to like it more than I actually did.

Genre: Historical Fiction, Adventure

This story was kind of difficult to read. The thing is, this whole story tried to transcribe an oral accent, but it isn’t an oral story – it is a written story. While doing this in dialogue makes sense, when you read something like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you see something like this:

You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece—all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round—more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.

What you don’t see are things like ’bout or comin’. The reason is that, when you’re writing something down, you don’t transcribe your accent – you just spell it normally. You might write in the vernacular, but when someone pronounces “about” as “’bout”, they’re the same word with the same spelling – the only reason we misspell it when transcribing it in dialogue is to communicate pronunciation as it was said.

But when someone is writing something like this, it doesn’t really make sense to do it that way. By all means, use the vernacular, but don’t write it like that, as it makes it more difficult to read.

Anyway…

This is a story told by a slave about another slave named John Peter, who offers to help them all get free. But the story is also just as obviously steeped in superstition. The story starts out with the protagonist talking about some black man with an ever-changing name who some people say was leading people to slavery, and other say was leading folks straight to hell. His daughter, Addie, gets beaten into a coma by their overseer, and the day their overseer dies, she wakes up after having a nightmare about a man and stars. And then John Peter shows up, whistling Dixie by a fire and reading the stars. There’s obviously something off about him, but it quickly becomes clear that there is something magical about him – and Addie is terrified of him, because of her dream.

But he seems affable enough, even if he is disconcerting, and even if it at times seems that he’s a magical thing. The protagonist thinks John Peter might be working for the devil, but at the same time, he wants his freedom, and knows that’s what’s most important for him and his family. What did Jesus ever do for him, anyway?

I actually liked this story a lot; it was heavily steeped in religious undertones, and the protagonist’s struggle with dealing with John Peter, his struggle with Jesus, and his struggle with making his world the best it could be was pretty solid.

If I had a complaint, it would be that the protagonist’s family – particularly his daughter – seemed a bit undercooked. The story was really about John Peter and the protagonist, but Addie’s dream seemed significant but never really seemed to pay off in the end, and that bothered me throughout the piece as it just kept never really mattering beyond Addie being afraid of John Peter.

That said, I really did like this – the flow was decent enough, it had strong voicing, the protagonist’s superstitious nature and willingness to keep his head down to avoid trouble worked well, and on the whole, it worked quite well. Good job.

I think my favorite bit of this was:

He whooped that lil’ gal so bad she slept for three whole days after. We ain’t think she ever wake up. On the first day, we got down on our knees on that dusty cabin floor, and did some more hooping and hollering. We prayed and prayed for her to wake on up. We promised the baby Jesus we be good pickers, neva ask questions, neva make fun ‘bout Miss Daisy nose when she riding by in her buggy, neva cause trouble again. On the second day, when we see’d all them ‘nevas’ weren’t doing nothing we start getting mad. We start supposing that maybe we ain’t gon’ be so nice after all. Start getting it in our heads that maybe that baby Jesus ain’t the one to ask when you need to get something done in a hurry.

Genre: Fantasy, Adventure

Essi is the “wonder-woman” of her village, a woman who knows the ways of the woods, and whose role it is to lead a Hero on their way. Heroes are marked, by their weapons, their musical instruments, and the stars on their brows. But this hero, Aster, he’s different. Sure, he’s got a harp, but it isn’t quite right. He’s got a weapon, but it is tarnished, no magical hero’s blade. And he has those stars on his brow, but they don’t seem quite right, either.

But the Huldrek, the monster of the woods that Aster has come to slay, wants Essi to lead the Hero in anyway, even though in truth, he is no hero at all, just a pretentious fool playing at one. It is not as if he hasn’t had Essi lead other Heroes to their doom; this one will be no different.

Or will he?

I liked this. I liked how the story started out with us seeing things from Essi’s point of view, and seeing the pompous, pretentious, fake hero from the outside, and how we were meant to think of him as a fake and a fool, and how by the end, our perspective has flipped, as we know that Essi is the fake and the fool, and Aster truly is a hero, just without the capital letter. The gradual transformation of our view of the characters worked very well, and I liked the overall flow of the story, as we come to understand what is really going on.

Genre: Fantasy, Adventure, Lesbians

Someone has been reading bat’s userpage again:

Anyway, this is the story of an alchemist and a swordswoman, thrown together by circumstance (and the swordswoman saving the alchemist’s life from a golem and some goblins) and having to make their way through an ancient temple full of traps.

This seemed very D&D, and frankly, it ended up coming off as a little shallow – it felt kind of generic, except with “I can’t like a lady” instead of “I can’t like that brute”, and the underlying adventure and worldbuilding didn’t do much for me.

That’s not to say it wasn’t mildly entertaining – it wasn’t bad – but it didn’t really seem to aim for the stars so much as try to scoop one of a puddle.

Genre: Sci-Fi, Drama

TJ is a doctor seeing a celebrity, Jessica Burgess King, about a severe injury. But as the story rapidly makes clear, Jessa King is an android, not the actress, and is a duplicate who has been serving as Jessa King in movies for many years.

But after a terrible attack, she thinks she is the original actress, not just a copy. And TJ has to fix her; if he can’t, then they’ll scrap her and replace her with a new model.

I liked this story a fair bit, but I feel like there is a big underlying implication in the story that I couldn’t quite grasp. What is the deal with TJ? There is something wrong with him as well. Is he, too, an android? He seems like he might well be one – there are implications that he is, in some way, a fake. But is he? Is he a different kind of fake? What is going on there?

I feel like there’s a ton of subtext in this story, but I’m not quite sure what the deal with it is, and I’d really like to.

EDIT: Okay, after reading another review about this, I think you made the reveal a bit too subtle here at the end. Moreover, as Horizon noted, I was left thinking that the protagonist might be a mech themselves, and was focused on that rather than the idea that they might be transgendered. I think that the dual theme - and what it meant for the protagonist - was very clever, and I think this thing could be really awesome, but I think it needs some love to get there. It is a great idea, though.

Genre: Internet, Experimental, Romance, Contemporary

Okay, I’m going to say this straight up: this was a clever idea, but reading through this story bored me. Reviews for restaurants and other services just aren’t that interesting to read through, and while the idea of showing the reviewer’s relationship evolve via their Yelp reviews was a cute conceit, by a third of the way or so through the story I was wanting to skip forward to see if there was some sort of twist or something, or if I should just give up.

While the reference to #WeDoNotNegotiateWithYelpers was mildly amusing, and the story at least did have some more development-by-implication at the end (the best part of it was the Jewelery store review, noting their 60 day return policy), frankly, I was left cold by this story; it was long on the clever, but short on character, but the real problem was that while it was clever, it wore out its welcome.

Genre: Drama, Contemporary

Two men walk home together. One of them has been demoted, but it wasn’t a “real” demotion – rather, he had never realized that he even had the boss he had, because the company was run poorly. As it turns out, his boss is actually really incompetent, but now he’s okay with that, because it isn’t his responsibility that his boss is doing terrible things, and hey, the guy is paying him to run a worthless project and for him to jump ship as soon as possible.

His friend points out that he is selling his integrity, and not for a very high price.

He decides he’s okay with that, ultimately, but it is rather disquieting.

I think this was a decent-enough idea and an interesting representation of someone “selling out”, and why people can be okay with bad things happening by pretending it isn’t their responsibility anymore, but I never really cared about the protagonist, and he was pretty unsympathetic, ultimately, because I never really got a good sense of who he was before, and thus I never really got to sympathize with him before he changed, which I think somewhat undercut the story, and the moral of how “easy it is” to fall to the dark side of the work force.

Genre: Mythology, Fantasy

The three sisters of Fate spin out the life’s threads of mortals. In one, a boring cow; in another, a hero. But while it is easy to cut the thread of a cow, the latter, so full of life, is much harder to cut short when there is so much more to the life they seem they could have lived.

I thought this was very decent, but unfortunately, it felt a little bit like a fragment; why is this life so much more important than all the others that Atropos would have cut in the past? It is full of life, sure, but it didn’t seem unique.

This bothered me a little, and I think hurt my connection with the story, because I’m not sure why that thread in particular should matter more than others in history.

Genre: Dark

A crazed man has nightmares and observes the stars. He follows the beating of his heart to a new home – a final home – where he dies.

I never was quite sure what was going on here, and the descriptive prose here, rather than entertaining me, actually ended up wearing on me. I couldn’t really bring myself to care, and I couldn’t understand the protagonist’s motivations, so the whole thing just felt kind of pointless to me, like it was missing some greater context.

Genre: Fantasy, Alternate History

This story was very confusing. I’m just going to put that right out there. The premise was already very, very strange, and I was confused throughout the story about what exactly I was supposed to be seeing. My mind’s eye NEVER could tell me what I was seeing – could not give me one visual throughout the story. And that hurt it, because it is such a weird story, and I really needed to see this to understand what was going on, physically.

The core of the story was that, for some strange reason, when ships are irrevocably destroyed, a shipgirl – the spirit of the ship made flesh – is born, rising from the ashes or the wreckage. These shipgirls appeared at some point in the early 1700s, and lead the English to victory over the French. By the end, though, we find out that something very shady is going on, and then we’re put back at the beginning, which is, apparently, last temporally, despite the fact that it is not clear at all until the end.

Starting out the story with a flashback when it is already so confusing is problematic, and the central conflict of the piece – intentionally making shipgirls – doesn’t appear until the end. I think that the idea behind it was possibly clever, but this story was so muddled it was impossible for me to really get into it.

Story reviews! Note: I'm using the HORSE rating system and story tiers described in this blog post.

2. Pact
I'm going to back up Cold in Gardez here: opening with the 10 codes is going to put readers off. It's not something that most readers will know, it's in a context that makes it sound narratively important, it's not given sufficient context to explain them (and you shouldn't, because adding exposition slows it down and wrecks the feel of the scene being between two cops), and worst of all, even if the reader goes to google and looks the codes up, it's ambiguous. Is the 10-15 that they're talking about "Civil Disturbance", "Message Delivered" or "Prisoner in Custody"?
Beyond that, I've got mixed feelings about this one; it had its share of cool moments and protagonist smarts, especially the experiment with the coin, and I dig the underlying subtle horror here. But it seems like it's also trying to tell a slice-of-life story about the swear-happy protagonist and his mundane life and his relationship, and that doesn't seem to fit for me: there's an interesting conflict in the tussle over bank account access, but it's pulling in very different directions from the core story of Things Man Wasn't Meant To Know From Beyond The Stars. I guess that works on the level of establishing contrast with the weirdness of the core story, but if it's pulling its thematic weight, it's still not pulling its narrative weight: we learn about the main character from those moments, but there's no character development (no choices he makes during the story in response to his problems) and no parallelism that links the character details with what we're learning about the titular pact, so it feels like it bounces back and forth between the mundane and the supernatural in ways that distract from each other. Even the core plot seems to come to no conclusion — which seems like a good move in terms of leaving a lingering Lovecraftian sense of uneasiness behind the status quo, but then we get conflicting hints as to whether the protagonist intends to delve further into this mystery or to discard it and return to ignorance, which leaves the theme unsettled. Is this a story about peeling back the surface, flinching back, and trying to smooth it back down, or is this a story about the initial unearthing of a hidden truth? For that matter, the early radio conversations mention crazy cultists, but David seems surprised by all of the cult elements; what does he already know and what does he first discover on this trip?
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Tier: Almost There

4. Dinner in Thebes
This does a lot of things right — the prose is smooth, the character work is well-realized, and the war flashbacks are vivid and gripping — but it ultimately doesn't fully work for me, and I think there are two (related) factors to that.
1) The story throws some strong signals from the beginning that this is about PTSD — a soldier at a stateside dinner having flashbacks to events from the war. Then, late in the story, suddenly it isn't about that at all, because this is all a shock hallucination as he dies. That stinger recontextualization appears to be the effect you were going for, but that raises some questions for me: are we seeing flashbacks within flashbacks? Although the twist makes thematic sense, it upends your established structure and replaces it with "everything you read was all a dream", which is rarely satisfying in the modern age. And if this is just a hallucination, and the reunion scene never happened, what is he actually regretting? That forces interpretation of everything we read into a more symbolic realm.
2) Because of #1, I end up disappointed in, and disconnected from, the main character. Our introduction to him is to see him lying without remorse to his girlfriend in order to avoid a conversation about his feelings. When it seemed like this was a PTSD story, then it felt like the point of the story was to explore that behavior as one of the traumas inflicted on him by the war, but the ending calls that into serious question, and his dodging becomes a background part of his character rather than a central trait on which we're called to reflect. Fair enough, but when the central tragedy is apparently his regret over not popping the question to her, and he doesn't seem to love her enough to build their relationship on honesty …
To be fair, that might not be the only reading here (and I could still see it as metacommentary on the tragedy, or the regret being exactly what I'm complaining about), but for me, when I reached the end my reaction was pretty much "Oh. Well then." I got a lot more invested in all of the other characters we saw in flashbacks, who made a single mistake of judgment or a single bad decision or were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don't know, maybe there's a meta-narrative here implying everyone dies with regrets, that this is peeling back the curtain on all the deaths we witnessed from the outside? Again it comes back to the twist introducing an unnecessary layer of thematic obfuscation into themes that were perfectly clear beforehand. Ehhh … This is going to end up in the "well written, made me think, but I didn't like it" bin. Another case where my rating is going to have to reflect that this is a potential top contender but with flaws.
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Tier: Solid

15. The Sun Goes Down
I'm going to welcome you to the Writeoffs, author, on the educated guess that none of the writers whose name I recognize from previous competitions would submit a fic that's so heavily reliant (within the prose itself) on song lyrics. I refer you back to 4974608's previous review on the difficulty of songfics: you are including the lyrics in the story because you have a strong emotional engagement with the song, but unless a reader happens to enjoy the same song for the same reasons that you do, all we get are a bunch of words on a page repetitively discussing sunsets and relationships. It's up to you to imbue those words with the emotional meaning that makes the fic connect with us — but you were going to have to do that anyway, and so including the lyrics adds very little except for the inherent poetry of the words. (Poetry which you didn't even write yourself, so it's hard for us to give you credit for any sensations they evoke.)
This is also an Undertale crossover, although I wouldn't have realized it if not for the name "Frisk" and the reference to determination. There's very little Undertaley about this. (As context for the rest of you: this story is to Undertale what writing a story about Twilight Sparkle's older brother would have been like in MLP season 1.) You do get credit for the backstory of the jacket and why "determination" was important to Frisk, which is a nice fanwork extension of the source material, but it's not really presented in a way that makes any sense to people unfamiliar with the game itself.
So the biggest takeaway here is: know your audience. It's cool that you want to share with us the things that you really appreciate, but unless you're confident that your readers share that appreciation already (such as writing a My Little Pony fanfic in one of the MLP rounds, in which you can assume that all your readers watch and like the show), then you have to go into your writing assuming that you're building up that relationship from scratch. Based on what I've seen in other reviews, there are a few stories this round that are similarly doing fan remixes of other settings (such as Ghost-Herald and the Valdemar series) — you might get something out of specifically reading those stories, and seeing the way they present their source settings, because the way that you have to pick everything up from scratch when you run across unfamiliar terms is the same way that your readers are going to react when you, say, name-drop Frisk. This is why writing fanfic for a general-fiction round is a risky proposition.
(Another good reference, if you'd like to see a positive example of how to work in references to other works without forcing readers to have preknowledge of the series you're referencing, is my own The Iridescent Iron Rat, which is a crossover between the Stainless Steel Rat series and MLP. It won a previous Writeoff despite only one or two reviewers having heard of SSR. In story comments I link the original Stainless Steel Rat short story, so you can compare and contrast my work with the original story I referenced. The best balance I've found is to reference themes, aesthetics, and mechanics from the original while interpreting them in a way that makes them your own. I thought the "determination jacket" was actually a good stab at that, but merely name-dropping determination isn't enough to show your audience how much of a power it has: this is a theme you want to weave in much more strongly if you're trying to produce a standalone work, maybe making it more central to your story and showing us its magical effects firsthand. I'm not sure Frisk's appearance counts, because it's never established as anything more than a hallucination.)
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Tier: Needs Work

26. The Ghost-Herald of Beansworth

Since Baal Bunny reffered to this as fanfiction, I assume there's a whole lot I'm missing out on here. However, the story worked well on its own merits: all concepts, such as the companions and mind-speak, were easy to pick up on.

I liked the characterisation of the valley as a sort of neutral ground, where noone really ruled but also didn't bother to conquer since the payoff wouldn't be worth the hassle. The politics got a bit more confusing though when I learned that the main protagonist (Gerald the Herald, easy enough to remember) is working for one of those countries and in fact not neutral. I'm also not really sure if the blood mages are part of that opposing nation, or if they are just some other bad guys.

Speaking of blood mages, I didn't really get why they are the bad guys, other than that their recruitment methods are supposedly less diplomatic. It also sounded like they didn't really want to recruit, but absorb the untrained mages power in some other form. A bit more characterisation of what they're really about could have helped.

Writing-wise, this was a bit of a change of pace for me. I really had to wait for the weekend because I just couldn't slow down enough to get into this story during weekdays. This was most prevalent in the beginning, which included a 11-line paragraph, which, I would argue, is too long for any pacing. Other than that, no complaints about the writing.

I'd want to add that I don't think the title of this story is well-chosen. I don't think the picture of the companion riding up and down the valley on her own, and the people of the farm giving her that name, had enough importance to warrant that title. A title more closely related to the very peculiar boy Gerald's there to pick up, or maybe hinting at his habit of looking into the night sky to find himself there and see evidence of him being a good person, or even hinting at the theme of the story that in order to save good people you'll need to fight bad people would've had more of an impact IMO.

Conclusion: A well written, although too slowly paced for my preferences, fantasy tale, which, although complete in a way, hints at a world too vast to explore in a single short story.

23. Making Contact
spreadsheet

First things first, I thoroughly enjoyed this fic.

The tone was colorful and lighthearted. Right off the bat, that the dialog was very casual and engaging. I liked the inclusion of the backup; that also helped de-escalate the stakes.

The premise, that they so completely dismiss the possibility that the ship might be alien, is clever and amusing. Unfortunately, given all the hints, I did occasionally have trouble maintaining my suspension of disbelief. It would've helped reinforce it a bit if you'd woven in some more of their civilization's backstory; I'm presuming something along the lines of 'to date, humanity has explored a very large number of starsystems, and hasn't found any signs of life/civilization/etc whatsoever'.

Along those lines, they did enough biomedical scans to notice that they're non-augmented, but didn't peg that these folks are non-human?. Alyssia's doubt at the beginning also undermines it. I'd suggest either cutting her suspicions out, or using them as the opportunity to say just exactly why they are so certain it must be human.

There were a couple of mechanical hiccups, but nothing major. The answer to 'what happens if they get hostile' confused me, though. I get that they have backups, but I'm not sure how the 'twenty passengers' fit into it.

The characters all had decently-established voices, and I enjoyed the dribs and drabs of worldbuilding you fed us. The conclusion of the human section was amusing, and set up the next viewpoint nicely.

The alien section delivered on the ultimate payoff of the fic. My only suggestion would be to make them even more alien. Maybe use some made up ranks and I would have loved to see more alien body language, especially at the beginning when they are trying to compose themselves. One thing I've come to appreciate from reading pony fic is just how intriguing and immersive well done xeno body language can be.

Still, my quibbles were minor and didn't keep me from reading the whole story with a big grin on my face. Good job.

13. Quiet Boy and Moon Horse
Thank you for the writing this author. My brain has been feeling like goop for the last couple of days and this was one of the only stories to make it work again. You painted the love between Moon Horse and Quiet Boy beautifully, even capturing some of Quiet Boy’s selfishness (in the part before Moon Horse disappears forever) that reminded me a bit of The Giving Tree (and I hate a love/hate relationship with that book).
I also like the

But, um, I don’t have any advice to give you.

I think there was only one line there that made me go “why is that here?”

Then he left positive feedback on the seller's eBay page, moved some money from his savings account to his credit card, and took the book upstairs to his daughter's bedroom.

It’s a small nitpick, but took me out of the story. Anyway, wonderful job.

19. The Burning of the Hanged Man
Japanese teenagers in drama school. Most people think of this. But I usually think of this.

This was an enjoyable piece, albeit a bit clichéd.

The happenings at the drama school were fun but predictable. Perhaps this is because of how you painted Kevin and Suzume (or as one review said, as Mai paints them). Of course both of them get the part. And of course, Suzume is part of the drama club as well.

I think what intrigued me most was the dynamic you had going between Mai and her parents, though to be honest, I didn’t understand the symbolism going on the between the Mouse and the Minotaur. And the end confused me to. The red fingerprint must have had something to do with the fight between the Mouse and the Minotaur, but I don’t know. The Hanged Man too is a confusing card.)

Now, some mashups!

For the Love of Dinner in Thebes: A man eating dinner is about to propose to his girlfriend, but writes a yelp review instead. It never sends.

The Moon Horse in the Box: Quiet Boy questions the reality of Moon Horse but doesn’t want to open the box.

A Winning Pact: An officer is called in after two women sacrifice a goat and accidentally end up married.

Sorry, I suck at these.

4985893

Published in the Dark: Our protagonists fight for good in a world ruled by a caste of programmers that claims to have the source code to the celestial writ. In truth though, all that does is generate random advertisements until it produces a stack overflow. The resulting blue screen is known as "daytime".

Ooo, crossovers while waiting for the finals. I can do that.

The Pact of Quiet Boy and Moon Horse - A police officer finds a riding club with a particularly weird and creepy young boy who likes to ride at night.
I, The Dreamer, and the Ghost Herald - A Dreamwalker strides through the land of dreams in search of a young Dreamer who is very good at hiding. Too good, in fact.
Siren Starlight the Cat - A researcher discovers a new star in the sky which then proceeds to keep him awake at nights by yowling outside his window.
The Traveler's Masquerade - A magical golem and a masked noblewoman meet at a masquerade. Nothing much happens.
Dinner in Heaven - Rat. It's what's for dinner on the battlefield. Or the restaurant. Or both.