To read this story or to participate in this writing event, you only need a free account.
You can
To find out what this event is about click here
Humanity's Echo
How It Rates
Description
The Planet Asimov. Utopia? Experiment? Hell...
Home to a lone survivor and the mutated feral remnants of what were once the colonists. Light years from a distant Earth, all Adam can do is try to survive as his world changes around him. Messages asking for help will take decades to reach human ears, but will there be anything left should humanity once again journey to Asimov? Can Adam survive, or will the last vestiges of humanity have faded to nothing more than an echo circling a far distant star?
Comments
I like the world you've created here, but the story was almost all descriptions. I realize that the guy was the only one left, so there is nobody for him to have dialogue with, but maybe you could find a way to break up the descriptive, inner thoughts, and make them more dynamic? I do like a story with mutants!
Aye, I guess it's a little introspective in some ways perhaps. Thanks for the feedback, I'll have a look at that. Cheers, Gav
SPOILERS
It sounds like your narrator finally realized the Zeoth law (now If I can remember which of Asimov's books that showed up in). The story could use a good editing pass to it up. My meager attempt at an LBL is attached below. You had quite a few single sentence paragraphs in there. I *think* most of them were massive run-ons, but I may be wrong on that. Either way, those sentences should probably be broken up into smaller chunks. Of course, take everything I put in there with a grain of salt.
I do have to say that this was one of the few stories I've read so far that has a clearly discernable beginning, middle, and ending. Which is a big plus in my mind.
Something I had meant to write earlier and just remembered in the shower. I think you have the wrong meaning for evolution. As I remember evolution being described, it would require many generations of the mutants to produce changes. Since your mutants can't reproduce, the mechanism of their change would not be evolution.
Great story!
Hi Arlane, thanks for the cool comment and for taking the time to critique.
I'll have to have a look at the paragraphs, I've never been quite sure whether the single paragraph sentence is a cardinal sin or just a "try not to".
The evolution point is a good one. I guess I was looking for a synonym to 'mutate', but I guess in the realms of SF things can evolve and change without the need for reproduction, even if it's only the cells that reproduce. Will give that one some thought.
Glad you enjoyed the story, and thanks for the input, it's much appreciated.
Gav
Fun story! I have no serious problems with anything (sure you need some editing, revisions, etc., and I will agree that there's a way to replace some of the more descriptive passages with something more dynamic/interesting).
Seriously, I was genuinely interested to see where the story was going throughout. I love the concept of the technology race vs. evolution/mutation. And I really apprecaite how you revealed the main characters secret. Very deflty handled. It felt totally natural.
Well done. Make sure you get 3-4 drafts in before you show it to the world. Then your brilliant ideas can shine without distraction.
Thanks Ethan. Looks like it needs a little work, I've had some useful feedback now. I actually had this one in an American magazine a wee while ago, shows that they didn't look at it too hard before they bought it =]
Thanks for the cool comment, glad you enjoyed the story. Cheers, Gav
While not having much action beyond the opening, the story held my attention and added interesting detail along the way. I think it was brave to use that setting for a reflective piece; unexpected and pretty successful, I thought. The command of language was very strong throughout, with only of couple of moments [for me] where I felt drifted a bit to the floral side. :)
The only real element that interrupted the flow was the sense of time. I wasn't sure when the event was happening sometimes, or it's relation to other events in time. There's a group of paragraphs that start "Months before...," "A few weeks on...," "Yet decades later...," and "The following morning...." I'm sure there aren't logical inconsistencies there [I haven't taken the time to parse it all out], but I had to work a bit harder to try to keep up with the When.
Overall, a good story, well told. Thanks for this. Thumbs up!
This was a strong opening that immediately grabbed the attention. It’s perhaps a strange choice to let it go off the boil, but it works well. A lot of the story seems to occur under the surface, and while having the mutant learn in that way was a bit Jurassic Park, it still adds a good layer of intrigue. There is little sense of time, but again that works in the context of your story. The twist is so well done, I had to skim read back through it again to see if I’d missed something obvious. I liked the way it ended not with resolution, but with a glimmer of hope. The guitar playing was a nice touch at humanising a lonely character, who otherwise would just fill the time with routine.
The only things that took some of the shine away for me were the names. Your nods to Asimov and Galileo strike me as being a little too knowing and clever. G-Town by comparison is fine. Naming the protagonist Adam is just too obvious given how subtle the rest of the piece is. It’s a name I see pop up in sci-fi a lot, though of course I may just be over-sensitive to seeing my own name. It took me out of the story. Mind you nobody else has mentioned it, so maybe it is just me.
Hi There, thanks for sharing your story. It was an entertaining read. I really liked the mutants. I liked that they were mutating and getting smarter. I liked the slow reveal that main character wasn't human. I truly felt scared for him. My only suggestion is that since a great majority of the story is told as back story, I think it would help to make the scenes a little fuller by using all the senses. Less telling, more showing. I know he's not human (did you ever give us his name?)--but he can still process all this info and give the reader a fuller read.
Other than those suggestions, great job on the story. ~Sam
Gavin,
I'm sorry to say your piece didn't quite work for me. After a promising beginning is seemed as though the work stagnated and while there were things happening it seemed as though I was in a perpetual state of waiting for a payoff to the tension established in the first bit of action. But it never came. You were focusing more on world building than getting your character to interact with that world.
The twist didn't resonate with me either. It didn't change my opinion of the character or raise the stakes in an already dangerous environment.
Overall I think you have a good command of writing and with some editing and rewrite you could have a very nice story.One thing to watch for is overuse of the word 'that' in the work. There are quite a few.
Keep working and writing!
C.