Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.
adriand: I read your story.  Here are my thoughts.The good: you actually wrote it (well, the first half of it).  It flows well from a plot perspective (something happens, then something else happens, with good pacing).  And you asked for criticism, which is important.Which brings me to the bad: the grammar is poor (see tsestrich's comment).  The setting is not realistic or believable.  One thousand years have passed since the present day, but the only obvious difference between then and now is that there are pretty capable robots.  Your character is still downloading web pages, putting them in a database, and processing them with Lisp.  In an era with AI computers so advanced battles have been fought and won over civil rights for them, how does that make sense?You also tend to explain things a lot - there are a lot of sentences in parentheses with explanatory information.  Good sci-fi tends to leave a lot for the reader to figure out, because otherwise the world does not feel like a natural place that the characters are inhabiting.  In other words, it feels like you are writing the setting for a play, rather than immersing the reader in a novel.Your metaphors also need work.  Your character has a nightmare where he is lost in a grid of big, black machines.  He "ran and ran and ran like a race horse" to try and escape the grid.  This does not strike me as an appropriate metaphor for this particular nightmare (not to mention that it is debatable whether horse-racing will be a popular sport in 3065).I think you need to read a lot more fiction, and keep practising your writing.  I think it's great that you've asked for criticism and I can't fault you for your courage!