This story is a sequel to Snowbound
It's a bad old time to be human. About half the world is gone thanks to Celestia's Barrier, the only options are 'fight and die' or 'get turned into newfoals,' and everything's falling apart. The greatest menace to America as they wait for the Barrier to touch down is not, paradoxically, PER, but restless Human Liberation Front terrorists that dream of taking control of the fight from the brave PHL. One of the worst HLF men is Viktor Marius Kraber, a traumatized Afrikaner, former father, and former surgeon with an appetite for destruction and big guns. But one day, wracked by guilt at an HLF checkpoint, he lets a lost filly and her mother live. From that point on, his life goes to hell (more than usual, anyway) as he tries to make his way and cast aside hatreds in a world gone mad, and maybe, just maybe, become a good person.
Forced to deal with irritating hallucinations, self-hatred, enemies on all sides, and developing a conscience in a world gone mad, will he manage to survive in this world? Will he ever become a good person? Will he join the PHL and befriend the freakishly huge earth pony stallion named Aegis seen in the cover image, and shoot Queen Celestia's spine out?! Can he? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, CAN HE?!
Of course he can! It's a fokkin' prequel.
(Well, actually, considering the emphasis on the development of a character from before the beginning of a game and the fact that it takes place between stories, it's actually more of a presequel. Or presidequel?)
Part of the Conversion Bureau: The Other Side Of The Spectrum continuity.
You know what? I'm going to give you an upvote from just how much words there in the initial submission...
5278850 Ooh, thanks!
5278854 Keep up the good work bruh, but you may have actually been better off splitting the chapter into smaller sections then use those to post a new chapter once or twice a week, eh. That should allow you to write another 40k words worth of story without having to worry much of anything...
5278874 Eh, the next couple chapters probably won't be this long.
...I hope.
5278877 let's hope for the sake of your fingers and brain...
A chapter should never be over 6,000-8,000 words long.
Let alone, 40,000.
That is actually a fatal flaw with this story. There is a reason you split your story into chapters, because people can read, then stop if they want to take a break, which they often do, and see where they left off by looking at which chapters they have read.
If anyone would want to stop reading in the middle of your 40,000 word chapter, they would instead have to continuously scroll down tediously to find the one paragraph that they haven't seen yet.
This is an instant turn off, and I would actually like to read a story with a pretty nicely drawn pencil and paper cover art (though the pony looks very off with his head).
My advice, take the effort to split up your monster chapter into individual ones, or most people won't even bother with your story and read the potentially great content within.
5278912 ...I'll do that later tonight.
Or perhaps I'm not aware the the Conversation Bureau stories posted such monster chapters.
Not to sound contrary ShadowFall, but I usually get excited when I see lengthy chapters (in my mind I consider 10,000 words a moderately short chapter), especially if I'm invested in the story.
Also, is it fair to say what length a chapter should be - I doubt there are hard and fast rules and it that varies from author to author and reader to reader. Michael Critchon for example in some books rarely had a chapter longer than a page or two, whereas the majority Terry Pratchet's books have no chapters at all.
Now admitedly I've got a stake in this story so can't be considered to have an unbiased opinion.
I also do not intend in any way for this to be an attack on your tastes.
5278923 Actually, Spectrum ALWAYS has chapters of 15k words or more. It's like a tradition.
5278912 I drew the cover art by the way.
All of that was chapter one?
5279024 Yup. Split it in half... ish.
5279028 More like thirds man
5278974 I could tell, and I'm very impressed with the human.
Also, I wasn't aware of the monster sized chapter being an actual format of a series. Sorry for that.
5279145 Apology accepted. Don't worry about it
5278946 I take no offense, as each reader/author has their own tastes. But that's the thing. There are pages that can be bookmarked in books. This is a single large webpage, of which someone must scroll down.
Actually, come to think of it, they added in bookmarking paragraphs. So therefore, my objections have been relinquished.
Good to see this up :-) I was particularly impressed with the use of present tense. That's a bugger to pull off and not sound like a muppet, and yet here it seems appropriate. Well done. :-)
And that "may"? Yeah, that's a "did", no question. :-D
(Btw, to weigh in on the chapter length debate: frankly, I have no idea how someone finds 40,000 words for a Chapter, so more power to anyone that can. I struggle sometimes to meet my personal minimum limit of 4,000 for AOA. Having said that, I do occasionally find super-lengthy chapters a slog, but I think it's sometimes a matter of the delicate balance between time one has/one's mood/one's current attention span. When I'm caught in the right mood I find long Chapters to be a blessing. When I'm not, I don't read them. Just my personal opinion.)
5280153 It was not easy to do it without slipping into past tense.
Honestly, I just kept writing and writing cause I didn't know where to end. Well, I knew where to end - there was just so much to cover!
I said I'd review this before New Year, and even though I'm often iffy with punctuality, keeping promises is something I strive for.
Chapter 1
I'm afraid there's no way I can slice it. This chapter simply takes forever to get to the point, with more than a third of it taken up by an overly verbose setting of the scene. Perhaps the impact is lost a little on me, due to the fact I'm already familiar with the grim future world of Spectrum, but after being told for thirty paragraphs how badly screwed Earth and New Hampshire are, I honestly start wanting to leave them to their sorry fate.
These are the kind of details which work better when they're woven into the background over the course of the narrative, rather than delivered in an infodump. Not that purple prose is necessarily a story's downfall, though – Mieville raised a good point saying it could be part of the fabric of the story, something which Peter Watts recently described as "stained-glass writing".
On the plus side, Viktor Kraber stole the spotlight during his brief appearance in the main story, and the raw energy of his characterisation transfers well here once we finally get to see him in action. This is a man who comes across to me less as a full-blown psycho than a geek playing a psycho (half the time). Can't say I've seen many characters like that in fiction lately. It's fun to read.
I should also commend the ballsy move of writing a scene where he kills a family of prisoners. Right from the first chapter, this brings back home the reality of what he's doing, regardless of "pet the dog" instances such as letting two other potential victims go in an earlier scene. Here's the moment that would be a moral event horizon if the culprit didn't feel so guilty over it...
Chapter 2
You're not fooling anyone, y'know.
Beyond that, I appreciated the inclusion of some pre-war silliness and light-heartedness to the narrative. Mood shifts are hard to pull off without provoking whiplash, nor can I truthfully state that Spectrum has always done it well, yet this one somehow worked for me, probably because of how believably it felt like what drunken students would get up to.
... Then more of the good old Spectrumverse nightmare fuel serves to effectively evoke the horror of the Conversion War. Only thing to be said there is to express gratitude at how one does not live in Kraber's world, whether inside or outside...
Providing further insight into Viktor's past and psyche makes this, I believe, the best of the three chapters published so far.
Chapter 3
Negative part first; this chapter needed more polish. I realise it may seem hypocritical of me to say that when I'm listed as an editor, and it's true, I could have done more, but I was busy writing Joy to the Worlds at the time.
If I can make up for it by offering some useful advice, here it is. Tone down the all-caps. Writers have many other, often better ways of conveying anger. A description of the character's body language, for example. Personally, I prefer to cap only one or two words for special emphasis.
But overall, this did a fine job of showing rather than telling the reader the extent of the HLF's hypocrisy in their treatment of their fellow man. And although human!Verity is less interesting than her pony incarnation, I still felt for her when she got disowned by her father after the change.
While the risk looms of the plot getting lost under all the shifts in times and places, we haven't yet reached the point where it's unmanageable. Kraber is what keeps this story together; if you stay focused on his varying stages of intensity based on what point of his life he's at, you'll be on the right track.
Happy New Year!
~Vox
5443607 Thanks so much for telling me all this
- I'll make sure to implement it later. And possibly rewrite chapter 1... it is a lot of exposition, after all.
EDIT: Not counting stuff with Johnny C, the exposition comes out to 6 pages, (which = 12 in the average paperback, I think) which would be too much for even the biggest China Mieville fan. Which would be me. So - gonna work on that laters.
5443607 Also, thanks for the high praise of chapter 2.
...Jesus, why do I feel like I got punched in the gut?
I'm guessing that's Verity Carter's ultimate fate?
5488931 Eeeyup, it is.
It was a real pleasure getting to work with you on this :-)
5507464 Thank you so much! For the edits, for the encouragement, everything.
I take it we'll see the attack on Defiance soon? There's a whole lot of talk about the decline/craziness of the HLF here...
5520703 It'll happen in about....2, maybe 3 chapters.
5520703 And since the next chapter is pretty close to done, that'll be very, VERY soon.
5520728
Happened to be passing by, and was heartened to see you've taken the advice to divide up the chapters into a more manageable length.
I don't think I've had the opportunity to read your latest draft yet, though.
5520752 I'm gonna try and avoid chapters with more than 20k words now, though. However, I'm completely stumped on how to divide up Self-Defense Catastrophe and Philistine. The first cause I'm not really sure enough happens in there for me to justify dividing it (A problem on my part) and in Philistine because it just.... I don't know, it just seems to fit that way. Can't rightly say why.
5520769
People generally don't mind chapters that are over 20,000 words long if they only happen intermittently, which is why the main Spectrum story could get away with doing them for a while, though I do think the last Month (with a capital M) of "Training Days" will need to be split up to provide a satisfyingly paced denouement to some of the storylines.
... Huh, now future readers looking over my New Year's review will be confused as to what I meant by Chapters "1", "2" and so forth.
5520785 Huh. I didn't think about that XD
5520785 Say, how does saving the big chapters for finales (or something) sound to you?
5520815
It's the only thing that makes sense to me in this mad world!
Um... What happened to the bombardment and Krabers mission to bring the shield back up?
...
What the hell did I just read?!
5523050 Actually, he just went into the city to help out - not put the shield back up. He wouldn't know how to do that, after all.
As for the bombardment, PHL were already coming...
5523057 Sweet, sweet cameo-magic.
Wait, Twilight doesn't buy the Proto-Pretty-Private thing?
Okay, I just have to say it.
"Ah yes, 'Reaper.' The Newfoal who shows intelligence, cunning, initiative, and the ability to swear like a sailor. We have dismissed this claim."
5530383 PFFFT
BAAAAAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHA... Okay, that's getting an entry under Stealth Pun.
There's a brief, throwaway line in Zero Punctuation's review of The Evil Within which, though I use it out of context (since Yahtzee's opinion of that game was more negative than usual), I often find myself reminded of when reading Spectrum.
It's like writing for this universe makes one pathologically incapable of being content with highlighting the disturbing implications of Chatoyance's ponification agenda. If even the slightest drop of grand guignol depravity can be squeezed from the idea, chances are it will be used.
Any loving parent would get mad over that stunt Michelson and Morely performed with the piñata? Let's up and turn them into a borderline psychopath with an astronomically high bodycount!
The Newfoals show just how little regard TCB!Equestria holds for a person's right to their body? How about we melt down the crystal ponies into weird surveillance devices, and create a new breed of militarised super-Newfoal?
What TCB!Celestia offers is actually genocide and no true happiness? The logical conclusion is obviously for her to order the extermination of the reindeer people, who in this verse are the keepers of Friendship is Magic's Season To Be Jolly.
... Even though I'm the one writing the review, I was hoping you could tell me what exactly makes all of this stuff so bizarrely compelling, because I sure can't. All I can do is try.
I think what I like best about this story is how it expands upon Kraber's motives to change his human-supremacist ways, which during his introduction in the main story boiled down to "I got saved by this really nice Equestrian, turns out they're not all bad". It's actually intriguing to see how Aegis isn't the first pony Kraber has had meaningful interaction with, and that he still feels in two minds about his actions, despite realising the Human Liberation Front's evil.
(Although, while Kraber may not be a sociopath, that doesn't change the worryingly childlike glee at which he goes about slaughtering enemies, both during and after his stint in the HLF.)
The boss fight with Reaper goes on for a bit too long, nor did it do as much for Kraber's character development as could be hoped, but I really enjoyed the buildup towards it with the characters of Caduceus and Sylvia, who are some of the most interesting minor characters I've come across for a while in the Spectrumverse. I was honestly surprised when one of them turned out to be PER (when I was expecting neither to be) and felt bad for Caduceus getting betrayed like that.
And of course, my favourite part was when the story temporarily gave up on any pretense of sanity, opting instead to send Viktor into a maelstrom of visions and could-have-beens. Madness is something I will always find much scarier than any bucketloads of gore, an assertion which this scene did nothing to alter my opinion about. A human mind can learn to cope with the sight of limbs taken apart in ways they shouldn't, but nothing can bear the feeling of reality itself breaking down.
5536375
That was the idea! :)
Agreed. Gorn may shock you in the short term - but psychological horror will stay with you longer. I can scare people with random blood, but there's only so long I can do that.
My feed just told me that this fic had updated... Then dumped me in chapter 3.
Explanation?
5624010 Ah, sorry about that. I cut up that chapters a bit so it'd easier to read - I was with my girlfriend, I read it all out loud, and it was a bit of a slog. So I cut it in half!
For what it's worth, this is the last time that'll happen.
5625120
Explanation: Acceptable.
Orbital Killsat: Deactivating.
Have a nice day.
5627580 For what it's worth, chapter 9... well, 10... is pretty close to being done.
Sorry bout how this looked.
Very engaging! You, sir, have won yourself a fave.
5972781 thanks! :)