Ask HN:Review my science fiction story.
tsestrich: It's very difficult to critique specifics without handing you back a physical paper with redlines on it. Generally, the grammar needs a lot of work, as does the tense (jumping back and forth between past and present), and the flow from paragraph to paragraph. A lot of sentences are actually sentence fragments, and a lot of times I feel like you're instant messaging me your thoughts rather than writing a story about them.The content itself is entirely vague as well. Sentences such as "OK if you eliminate the fact that he was a researcher of math at
the age of 25, but what do you know, he was actually _the_ math genius." just confuse me and make it difficult to read. Saying "OK" as if I just called you out on something just does not seem right for anything except dialog (OK, maybe not all the time, but pick your places).Saying "It wasn't just numbers, same was true for logic, innovation,
ability to ask the awkward question, and then solving the hell out of them." is such an awkward way of introducing someone. You're building this person up so much in such a short amount of time, I have a hard time believing any of it (it's not true, but you need to be able to suspend disbelief). I've always learned that you should never ever ever tell your reader an opinion about something... that's "meta-story". Let your reader determine that he is a super genius if that's what he is, but don't tell them all these super-human things he can do... it sounds like a kid describing his action heroes. What you need to do is build up the character's credibility as the story flows, not wind up the character like a toy and let him run through the story.The first few paragraphs of the story really need to pull a reader in to make them want to read more, and what I see in the first few is "another story about the future". I don't really see a character at first, and that's a big minus to me. I don't really want to read about a list of things that are true in your future, I want to read about the people in that future, and let the way they interact with their world describe what the world is like."He used a lisp program for all this stuff.He had read in school that it
was one of the most oldest languages around but never belived that,it had the most advanced
features." -- This contains detail that is not really pertinent to the story... not sure why it's really in there. In stark contrast to that specific technical detail, it seems odd that among all the other "future-y" stuff, it still takes long enough to collate some Google search results into a database that he is able to read a book (about more things that are too technically detailed).Adding to this... "By this time the database was over with indexing and he was presented with a
nice command prompt on his DataBaseLinux machine." is like saying "he raced to his car and drove to the store. his car was blue. he was sad to discover that the store was closed, however, so he could not buy the Sony 42" LCD TV with support for Dolby 5.1 surround sound built in that he was looking for". The key here is not that detail is bad, but you need to be consistent, and it has to be relevant detail. You need to expand on the parts that make the story human, and really cut down on the parts that make it technical.Stylistically, I personally would not go into a story attempting to point out "this is like this in the future!" every chance I got. Specifically, it seems irrelevant that DRM is not an issue in the future, and it would confuse the hell out of a reader that was not familiar with the subject.More comments to come likely, as I get some time to dig deeper.EDIT: Sorry... if this is indeed a language barrier issue, that would explain a lot about the style comments I had. I then agree with khafra's comment. Otherwise there is a lot to discuss here. However, sentences such as "He didn't really
thought about robots , but he did knew that his secretary robot was a good talk." makes me think the former is the case.