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Ivan Villarreal's picture

RB-T04212035

By Ivan Villarreal in Teleport Us

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Description

A short story about how we might conduct ourselves in a future war setting and how appearences are always deceiving.

Comments

Liam Hogan's picture
Liam Hogan from Earth is reading Hugo Nominations March 1, 2013 - 2:32pm

Hi Ivan,

Your story doesn't quite work for me, I'm afraid. I think you have the usual problem with Sci-Fi in trying to describe your world, but too often here it comes across as tell rather than show - perhaps you could slow down the pace, and use some more of the word limit!

The sentence structure is staccato - deliberately so, I expect, but if this is because it is from Robert's POV then you need to be careful not to slip into Nathan's mind. It makes it difficult to read, really!

And even though we are dealing with a mechanical being, we want I think to know more on why he (it) does the things it does. What command is behind the actions he takes? Does the lockdown (say) triggere a search and destroy for any "unregistered occupants"? This becomes more interesting than just a "bug".

Also, I kind of want to know the battle-lines. is nathan and his crew "on the same side" as the colonists, and of the creators of the base, and programmers of Robert?

All things that I hope can be resolved by fleshing it out some, but do keep at it! I do like the idea of people accidentally triggering programs they didn't even know existed, though perhaps we want them more obviously people we don't mind being victims of their own plans...

Liam

mattymillard's picture
mattymillard from Wolverhampton, England is reading Curse of the Wolf Girl - Martin Millar March 4, 2013 - 11:57am

Hey Ivan. I thought that with a bit more work this would have quite a bit of potential. A few suggestions which might help. I though the wording was a bit clunky at times, especially in the dialogue - it didn't always sound very natural. I also thought you could describe the action more - the shootings happened too quickly for me. I liked the world you had created though, some of the descriptions were quite believable. I agree with the above comment that this would benefit from being longer. Nice start though, good luck :-)

Matt

EdVaughn's picture
EdVaughn from Louisville, Ky is reading a whole bunch of different stuff March 10, 2013 - 8:15am

Hey Ivan. To be honest I had a hard time following this story. I think it needs more detail and description. There seems to be a lot of telling and not showing. I'd like a little more description of the setting and characters. More character development. Also I felt the dialogue was very robotic even when the human character spoke. The idea of the story is good and you have about 2000 words to work with for additions. So, overall I just think the story needs more.

Adam Jenkins's picture
Adam Jenkins from Bracknell, England is reading RCX Magazine (Issue 1 coming soon) March 25, 2013 - 2:54am

The two things this needs more of is clarity and flow. It's not clear what is happening for much of the story. You don't need to spell everything out for the reader, but there aren't enough hints here to decipher motive or even exactly what is happening at times. Robert needs to be fleshed out, and the humans in this are just cannon-fodder, and it makes it hard to care one way or the other about their fate. We don't necessarily need to know more about what is going on outside the complex, but we do need more on what happens inside.

ArlaneEnalra's picture
ArlaneEnalra from Texas is reading Right now I'm editing . . .. March 28, 2013 - 6:26pm

The flow of events in this story was not all that difficult to follow.  Where I had trouble was in figuring out what this story was actually about.  It seems you have a killer robot, an artificial building, and a small group of soldiers.  Then the robot kills them.  We have no indication that he's malicious or otherwise until we're told, in the course of two sentences, one of the soldiers is dead.  That should be where the bulk of your story starts!  That's where things get interesting!

There's a lot of potential here and I really wanted to like this, but couldn't give it a thumbs up. Still, Keep at it!