aeromancer

@Snakenaps I'll throw in a few of my own book recommendations, as long as we're doing this: Leviathan Trilogy, Scott Westerfeld - Technically, only one of the two protagonists is female, and given that this is set in an alternate history + steampunk WWI, 1) she's very British, not upper-class British mind you, but British all the same, and 2) she dresses as a boy for the vast majority of the series because she wants to fight in the war and given that this is the late 1910s, women were not allowed to fight and certainly not allowed to become crewmen aboard the airship Leviathan. It's still one of my favorite steampunk series (mostly for the setting, not the story) and I will recommend it all the same. Suitable for YA. The Hungry City Chronicles or Mortal Engines Quintet, Phillip Reeve - The first book does have a male protagonist, but the true protagonist of the series as a whole is, in my opinion, Hester Shaw. It's a very good steampunk series (one of the first ones), and do not let the movie mislead you - that isn't how Hester Shaw looks. Her face is hideously scarred and she's repeatedly described in the books as being awful to look at, so the movie casting decided to just recast her to look appealing to audiences. A shame, really - the vast majority of the human population isn't as photogenic as your average protagonist. I think we should have more ugly protagonists. Suitable for YA. Footnote: Same author also wrote the Fever Crumb series, which also features a female protagonist (the titular Fever Crumb) but it's not as good as Mortal Engines. Consequently, I'd never start off recommending it, I'd just recommend Mortal Engines and if I was asked for more like it, than I'd direct to Fever Crumb. Animorphs, K. A. Applegate - Has no one mentioned this yet? True, the main leader is your standard white male lead, but the rest of the supporting cast isn't, and given that the books are written from a different member's perspective every time, there are a fair number of books from the perspective of Cassie and Rachel. As far as plot goes, it's kind of like Gregor the Overlander in that it's a war story in disguise. Suitable for younger readers. A Winkle In Time, Madeline L'Engle - The original book doesn't have quite the same representation the movie does, and it's somewhat dated to modern readers, but it's still a masterpiece and I will brook no arguments otherwise. Suitable for young readers, but it's also a good read so everyone should just read it. I, Robot, Isaac Asimov - Dr. Susan Calvin, the original robopsychologist, is the protagonist of some, but not all, of Asimov's robot short stories and she's a hard-as-nails scientist who has no problem constantly scrapping her wits and understanding against whatever robot challenge has been presented. Great for YA readers interested in sci-fi, though not suitable for anyone else. Running With The Demon, Terry Brooks. - This is part of a larger series called The Word and the Void, but it can be read as a standalone. Or you can read the rest of the series which ties it into Shannara and then the greater Shannara series as a whole. Running With The Demon is YA fantasy which hearkens back to classic chaos vs order fantasy staples and features protagonist (and witch) Nest Freemark in her attempt to get away from both Demons and Knights of the Word. Suitable for those who love classic fantasy.

So ... anyone want a potentially bad detective short? I love mystery fiction but I'm not so good at the whole 'writing' it component, as evidenced by the one mystery submission that I did submit to this site which wasn't good. At all. I tried writing something else, but I got distracted so I had this half finished short story on my computer for a while and I finally ended up finishing it when I got inspired after watching Knives Out. (On that note, Knives Out is a really good whodunnit movie that only makes a few ridiculous leaps of logic and if you like whodunnits, I cannot recommend it enough.) Instead of a proper whodunnit, though, it's a lot closer to a Holmes & Watson type mystery, with the detective, the sidekick, and the mystery isn't fully explained to the reader or expected that the readers have the ability to solve it themselves, with two additional twists thrown on. The first twist is that the detective doesn't have the mentality of the stereotypical Sherlock-type detective - while she can solve crimes, she doesn't do it 'for the thrill of the chase', dislikes being forced to do so, and actively takes out her frustration on everyone else in the vicinity. The second twist is I started with a convoluted premise (it's a locked room mystery except the entire room is made of glass) and then I thought to myself 'Hmm. Is there any way I can make this more convoluted?' And there was! In summary, it's a weird detective short which is slightly over the writing limit, and I'm doing an interest check because 1) last time I submitted a mystery short it was horrible and 2) I have no intention of actually going anywhere with it, it's just a piece of fiction I wrote for fun.

Thoughts As I Go: Pg.1 – So, the MC can see the Fae because her father could, her father abandoned her presumably to keep her safe when it became too dangerous for him to be around, the mom is a muggle and no one told her anything. Okay. I can live with this backstory. Pg. 2 – I don’t know how big this troll is, and I wish I did. Pg. 3 – So the father left because the mother is a willfully ignorant muggle. Hmm. Pg. 4 – Oh, horror of horrors. A little girl’s coat is dirty and/or torn. Clearly a sign of parental neglect, said people who have absolutely no knowledge of little girls. Pg. 5 – A changeling? Overall: I’m not enamored with the title or with the name ‘troll’. True, the lore on fairies and fae and all that is muddled up in myth beyond the fact that its subject to heavy interpretation and re-interpretation. But I really like the stereotype of a ‘bridge-guarding troll’ and I love riddles. This isn’t anything functionally different than a goblin, really. Given its abilities actually, (including the fact that it has a human form which can be seen by other humans) I would have pegged this one as a changeling if you hadn’t specified it to be a troll. That aside, the story is perfectly fine, it’s written a lot more clearly than your last submission. That said, I’m not really sure what the moral of the story was. It is a fairy tale, after all, but it doesn’t feel like there were any stakes involved (i.e. threatened dismemberment and/or consumption of humans) or that any characters went through development – S comes of as kind of a whimsical girl in the narrative who just took something, realized stealing was wrong, and gave it back. If you added some stakes and fleshed out the character’s emotions, I think this story could go from decent to a very good fairy tale.

Public service announcement for all of RE - run ad block extensions if you don't want to deal with pop-ups. I run a few of them and consequently, I don't get pop-ups. I don't even get ads on YouTube, which is how I prefer watching them. My preferred extension is AdBlock Plus, which is suitable for basically every browser, though there are plenty of others like if you want to look around. And if you feel guilty about the fifty cents per year that you're no longer funding to the content creator through dodging said advertisements, just toss 'em the money using Patreon or GoFundMe or something.

@Robinski I don't know, I like the robot sidekick (8/80) better. I'm not even sure why, but I have this massive soft spot for robot sidekicks. (TARS was literally the only part of Interstellar that I liked.) There's something great about a fully automated robot sidekick - they can just snark everyone present and always play the straight man role perfectly which makes them able to balance more (ahem) quirky characters. And they have a built-in excuse to avoid character development and thus get to remain in the perfect sidekick zone forever. I never get tired of a good robot sidekick. And, seeing as this is the Craft Nook where we discuss writing mechanics, I'm going to use that alongside my mention of robots as an excuse to go on a rant about robot characters in writing. Specifically why I dislike robot protagonists, but love them as sidekicks. (Thanks for the segue, by the way.) I might be alone on this, but I cannot, and probably will never, sympathize with robot protagonists. This is mostly because I have a background in programming, but also because I very much do not ascribe to determinism. Robots, to me, are completely boring and static characters, because, in essence, that's just what software is. Software is predictable. If you break down software enough, you can predict the outcome of the software to any given 'choice' - whether this is a calculator deciding the answer to a basic math problem or Deep Blue deciding the next move against Kasparov. (Granted, Deep Blue is sufficiently complex that you can't actually figure it out realistically, but my point stands.) A robot character is always going to be a very rule-oriented character which perfectly follows the rules that it has been given. Not necessarily a logical character - after all, you don't have to program a robot to be logical - but it will follow the rules that you've established for it. There's never an instance where a robot can make a meaningful choice because it doesn't have the option of 'choosing'. Contrast that with a more human protagonist, and said protagonists can make meaningful choices because human can do that. The contrast to humans, though, is exactly what makes them such good sidekicks. There's nothing to highlight the complexity and chaos found within a human protagonist who struggles with internal feelings than having a robot standing next to them which will never do anything of the sort. The gold standard of this, naturally, is Isaac Asimov. Take the I, Robot short story collection - the robots are all either sidekicks or antagonists, and it's the human's job to interact with them to figure out the irrationality of the human behavior. (Except for the QT series, which is just satire of Cartesian philosophy.) The best example of this is Elijah Bailey and R. Daneel - they're a detective team consisting of Elijah the human and R. Daneel the robot. They have a great dichotomy as fictional characters because, while R. Daneel is a genuinely intelligent and caring character, ultimately he's a robot and this follows the Three Laws. Contrast that with Elijah, who has to undergo various struggles throughout the books that he knows R. Daneel would never have problems with because R. Daneel is a robot - such as the emotional trauma of being exposed to sunlight in The Naked Sun. They also make for great antagonists for the same reason - they highlight human flaws by contrast. A robot will either have an unfixable flaw or no flaw at all - contrast that to a human who has flaws that can be improved on. Take Matrix, for instance - the major theme of human free will is highlighted because the main antagonist has no free will at all and follows a strict internal set of rules that it will always obey no matter what. They aren't suited for all types of stories, but they do make for very good antagonists for certain kinds of stories. Given all this, you then have the type of robot protagonist that I'm just not interested in at all - the 'gaining free will' type of robot protagonist, or the type of story which tries its hardest to affirm to you that robots are somehow equal to humans and should have the same rights as them. Basically, the entire plot of Detroit: Become Human or Westworld, or any other one of these types of stories. And, for the most part, I think I'm pretty alone here - there does seem to be a receptive audience towards these stories. But I just can't buy into the premise. That's not how programming functions - the concept of 'grow beyond its own programming' is basically magic. It's like putting a finite amount of energy in a close system and somehow walking away with twice that energy. I'm alright with it if you use magic to accomplish it, I guess, or if you're operating in very loose sci-fi terms. Tron, for instance, is fine (also Tron isn't really the protagonist of Tron, Flynn is). The point that I'm trying to make is that if you're establishing a hard science fiction setting and then you say 'Oh, by the way, these are sentient robots with free will that somehow grew beyond their programming to the point where they're relatable protagonists because they actually have free will and why don't you sympathize with them?", I'm just going to lose my suspension of disbelief and resent you for trying to make me sympathize with characters I don't care about. In essence, what you're doing is violating the setting. I don't read science fiction because I want thinly-veiled fantasy, I want science, and science comes with laws built into it. And that why, to me anyway, robots are best served as static character which function as a contrast to the non-static characters. That's not to say that robots can't have character depth - the best ones do (R2-D2, anyone?) - but their character just won't develop. And that's a good thing for robot sidekicks. (I still love Isaac Asimov's Bicentennial Man, but only the short story, not the full novel or the movie, and in my mind it isn't a story about a robot becoming a human, it's about a robot trying to become a human and the closest Andrew can come is by choosing to die. Though I possibly wouldn't like it as much if I read it for the first time now.)

Confession: I haven't seen The Mandalorian either. I've heard from a lot of people it's really good, and I honestly can't bring myself to watch it. I'm not a fan of ... basically everything that D*sney has done. Here's a good example: For Clone Wars, I saw the original 'Bad Batch' arc. When Clone Wars got canceled way back when, someone leaked a whole bunch of mockups of Season 7. Nothing more than stilted character models and the very barest of bones when it came to voice acting - and it only really covered two arcs, and one of them was the 'Bad Batch' arc. And I would rather watch that mostly un-animated mess than watch the actual Bad Batch arc in the newly released Clone Wars Season 7. The only thing I liked was Rogue One, and that was in spite of myself trying to hate it. Rogue One was really good because it's a movie starting the B-plot characters which was allowed to tell it's own story and had an authentic feel to it. Everything else feels like they're just mucking around with characters that they really don't understand and shoveling consumerism at us. I know The Mandalorian is supposed to be really good and be completely clean of all these issues, but I honestly can't watch anything Star Wars these days, pretty much ever since I saw Last Jedi. I like Ahsoka Tano, but only when the writers actually know what they're doing with her. And her showing up in Mandalorian isn't going to make me want to watch it. If she was an organic character in the story, maybe, but I don't think she's an organic character in the story, I think she's shoehorned in to make people want to watch it. It's the same stupid gimmick they keep pulling with Darth Maul. We get it. Darth Maul was a cool villain. Now stop treating him like a comic book villain with a revolving afterlife door, please! (Given that I haven't seen The Mandalorian, it's possible that Ahsoka Tano is actually going to show up as a natural outgrowth in the story and be very good in it. In that case, I apologize for badmouthing it. But I doubt that's going to happen, given that my skepticism is completely earned and justified at this point.)

I mean, the same could be said for cheese. Not that I'm saying it, mind you, I would never be so base as to accuse cheese of being nothing more than glorified fermented and spoiled milk which has been exposed to bacteria cultures and then repeatedly wrung out and allowed to just sit there and age so that the applied flavors to the milk by the means of said fermenting and spoiling by microorganism cultures can be allowed to become even stronger. No, I would never do that. I'm just going to point out that there's a form of socially acceptable cheese with live insects in it. Pickles, on the other hand, are amazing and every pickle variant of any conceivable food is completely edible and there are never any problems. All jokes aside, I'm firmly on @Robinski's side when it comes to pickles - they're amazing. The vanilla cucumber variant is delicious, and I happen to be a partial to pickled onions myself, but the real benefit comes from the variety - dill pickles, half-sours, garlic sours, sweet gherkins, bread-and-butter style. And, naturally, the true potential of pickles can only be expressed via sandwich (something they have in common which cheese).

@Ace of Hearts Thanks for responding. This is a good point, but it's also a tricky one. It would go against one of my purposes to explicitly state his motivation - my intention is that the reader draw it out from the text. Not to mention that he has very little motivation at this point in the story - he's a Seeker, yes, but for what's happened so far, him being a Seeker isn't really that relevant to most of the choices he's made. His motivation isn't that complex either, a simple version of it might be 'I want to help', but it's the how he helps that makes him unique. I can do that easily enough. Z doesn't have a very high opinion of magic, though. Respect for its power, yes; opinion of it, not as much. The song lifts mental exhaustion - a feeling you might get if you do a mental task repeatedly. Say, something like study intensely for six hours straight or be preoccupied with various decisions and dilemmas. The 'twelve hours of sleep' was slight hyperbole. It was more in reference to what twelve hours of unneeded sleep could do for you. There are songs which help for drowsiness too, by the way. The weak ones are just magic caffeine, but the stronger ones can remove the need for sleep almost entirely with no ill effects, albeit only for a few days. It will also not help for physical exhaustion, as you've noted, but most of the physical exhaustion you feel from a lack of sleep is psychosomatic anyway. Yes for the sharing, no for creating and most certainly no for suppressing. He is a tempter after all - all he can do is inflame emotions. (Similar to a Rioter from Mistborn, actually.) He can 'create' emotion in someone if he's sharing an emotion from somewhere else, but Tempter is incapable of organically generating emotion to put into people. He has to draw them from somewhere. Yes! This is one of the main themes. (It makes me happy to know I've written cohesively.) Seeker are nomadic, although for the most part it's not a choice on their part, it's just how things work for them. The 'banding together' theme wasn't intended as much, though. (Also, Z and R getting along is the exception rather than the rule. Generally, Seekers and Witches hate each.) The main sense I'm getting from you is that you'd really like for Zasha to be fleshed out more as a character, also that the exposition needs some work. I should be able to do that. Thank you for your comments.

First things first, I apologize in advance for making you all read the song on page 11. I know it's terrible, and that's because I'm an author, not a lyricist, but I really needed a song there. So, for the time being, just ignore the song and pretend it's mediocre. It is meant to be slightly campy, but ... well, not that campy. Background: This submission is the first part of a short story I've cautiously entitled 'From Depths, I Call". It takes place on the world of C, where all the humans are nocturnal and thus the language and habits have been adjusted accordingly. The world itself is low fantasy, and the story follows the protagonist ZG, and his emotion manipulating companion, a one-of-a-kind creature named Tempter. This submission doesn't have any actual violence, however, given that the story deals with suicidal impulses, I applied the tag. Depending on how well this is received, there might be more submissions of later parts of the story. Reading Notes: This is the second Z&T story I've submitted to RE. The first one got mixed reviews (in the sense that part of it was liked and part of it wasn't). This one shouldn't require any previous knowledge of the first story, but I might have botched that, so feel free to ask for clarification if you need details. Additionally, if you, at any point, decide to stop reading this, I'm fine with that decision - this isn't exactly suitable for all tastes. What I'm looking for is twofold: I want first impressions of all the material, and I also want to know what themes you picked up in the story. And, as mentioned on RE, there are some minor mystery elements, though the real goal here isn't to figure out whodunit, but more of the how at this point in the story.

This is a cool idea. I think it works really well. It's a big part of where the first Q---- and M--- novel came from, or certainly Q's character. This is going to sound weird - I use the dialogue technique when I'm working out a character's skillset. For instance, I came up with a character who had the power to manipulate density - except really scientific - so I had to work through all the various applications of doing something as simple as making an object half it's original size by condensing it via magic. The gimmick behind the system is that all the rest of the object's properties change to reflect the new density, so basically I had the character who could do it going on a lecture about it to a secondary character. Obviously, two pages of dry exposition, calculations, and formulas aren't going to make into the final cut of any story I write (despite the fact that I would very much like to), but I found it helped me to calculate everything via the form of the two characters talking and demonstrating the powers, rather than just doing the dry calculations. It helped me to envision when the character would likely use the powers, and also what parts of the explanation to condense. I also get to write exchanges of dialogue like this: Which is just fun to write! (I ended up having to nerf this character, as it happens, because the ability to move something up 8 Mohs is ... slightly overpowered, to put it mildly. As an example, said character would be able to turn Nerf objects into basically being made of concrete. Changing sizes while keeping the same mass cough Antman cough would be really problematic.) But I can't put long lectures about the more arcane aspects of violating the laws of physics without glazing the eyes of everyone in a fifty-foot radius. (And if you think this isn't bad, this is actually a condensed version of the actual dialogue I wrote, which is twice as bad. On a strictly ordinal scale, of course.)

@kais As I said in my post, I'm perfectly content waiting an extra week to submit, so if you have something urgent, but not quite as urgent as Mandamon, you can sub in place of me instead. If you're equally fine with either one of us submitting, I'll go ahead and submit.

This seems like a good group of discussions questions. I'll tackle them easiest to hardest, I think. Something has to happen. Either the plot is advanced, characters are developed, or even just exposition is delivered to the reader. But the only fundamental prerequisite for a scene is 'something has to happen in it'. Otherwise, what's the point? FDIC, the short story I'm working on right now, is projected at around 16,000 words. It has a total of ... 11 scenes? (I think.) I should clarify - right now, if I include all the scenes I've written and the ones I've sketched out, it adds up to 11, though it depends on how you divide the scenes and where you draw the lines. That's about 1,500 words to a scene. (Hmm. I thought it'd be more, honestly.) This is a matter of preference, so I'll tell you how I do it. I build a narrative and then systematically work my way through it, point by point, and figure out how that narrative works by creating the scenes. In FDIC, for instance, there's a single central theme to the narrative and a single conflict, so I sketched out the arcs that would make the conflict and I sketched out the scenes in those arc. Then I moved between the scenes and worked to fill out those scenes as well. That amounts to about 9 of the 11 scenes. The other 2 were organically produced as I was writing - it just seemed like a natural outgrowth of the story at the time. From my understanding, this approach is a modified version of the Snowflake Writing Method. That said, occasionally I'll just come up with a great scene and build the entire story around that. I wrote a short story called 'Self-Referential Loop' which was entirely based on the one scene at the end, though that's a 5,000 short story. I have another short story - 'Fault Tolerant' - which is also the same length and based on the same creation method, but that story is very likely never actually going to be written.

As long as we're dropping stories about critical research failure, I'm going to echo @Snakenaps point - authors do not do research. And here's something else that I'd like to point out - 'common knowledge' is wrong occasionally. Nothing major, but it's wrong at least a solid 1% of the time. And if you think that's not a problem, then 1) you've clearly never played XCOM and 2) if you insert 100 pieces of 'common knowledge' into your book, than at least 1 of those pieces will be wrong and it will be sad and bad. So, in addition to doing basic research about whatever you're writing, just do basic research about things you're sure you know. Just in case you aren't. Here's an example. I was reading a YA book as a favor to someone (long story as to why and I don't remember the book's title), which was set in New York in the 1920s. As it happens, this is something I'm familiar with. Now, the book wasn't researched well and compensated for it by using crude parody versions of every notable name at the time instead of the actual people, but then there was a scene when it didn't. It used an actual person who was alive in 1920, and I was laughing for minutes after I read it. In the book, there's a scene where a female mentor of one of the characters sneaks into Polo Grounds to spy on the Yankees, and identifies that the new player they have - one George Herman 'Babe' Ruth - isn't really anything more than a good pitcher, but if the Yankees really wanted to make him shine, they should put him in the outfield and let him be a slugger. For the non-American and non-baseball members of RE, I'll sum up the 'common knowledge' here. George Ruth, better known by his moniker 'Babe' Ruth, was traded to the Yankees in 1919 from the Red Sox and became the greatest slugger in his time. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived, if not the greatest. He has a monstrous lifetime slugging percentage of .690, which not only is still the record to this day, the next closest is at .634. And, yes, he was originally a pitcher on the Red Sox before he was traded to the Yankees. All this stuff is pretty well known even to the more casual fans of baseball. The intention behind this scene was to demonstrate that the female mentor knows baseball, despite it being 1920s New York and thus baseball is a societal taboo for women to be interested in, and said mentor character (and the author by extension) is therefore progressive beyond her time. That's fine with me, I have nothing against female mentors being baseball nerds. And, in theory, being able to tell that a mediocre pitcher would make a fantastic slugger is an ability that even professional scouts would be jealous of, so it's not a bad idea. The thing is that I happen to be somewhat of a baseball nerd myself and I know something the author doesn't - in reality, Babe Ruth was a fantastic pitcher. He pitched almost 30 consecutive innings of shutout in the World Series (including one full game which was a shutout), had a total of 89 wins in the six years he pitched for Boston, and has a lifetime ERA of 2.28. (For the non-baseball fans, those are Hall of Fame numbers we're talking about here.) Thus, having said character declare Babe Ruth 'not a good pitcher' isn't revealing that she knows a lot about baseball - it reveals she has no idea what she's talking about and doesn't understand how the sport works. Saying that he would be a good slugger isn't a redeeming factor either, considering, again, in reality, the Yankees never signed him on as a pitcher in the first place, they always intended to have him in the outfield and use him as a slugger. Not to mention he literally tied the league in home runs the previous year. Not to mention that he batted .300. As a pitcher. Remember when I said he was considered to be the greatest baseball player of all time? This is why. But, unfortunately, his skill as a pitcher is sadly forgotten, for the most part, and hence this mistake. This is your one and only warning. Sports nerds takes their statistics seriously. Take it from someone who understands sabermetrics: If you screw up by doing no research into the reality and just use your perception of sports filtered through popular culture, you will be wrong, we nerds will find you and we will correct you. If you ever say something through the mouth of an expert in your book, do yourself a favor and ask someone who actually knows a few things before screwing up. Do not trust your 'common knowledge' when writing a book.

No, I said what I meant and meant what I said.

This made me giggle. I'd just like to clarify my intentions here. It's not '100%-less dead-witches', as in there will be a lack of dead witches and that lack will be equally proportionate to the number of dead witches from the first submission; I mean '100%-less-dead witches' as in the witches that are present will be 100% less dead than the witches in the first submission. The difference between the two is mostly a matter of semantics, but I do think it's important to avoid miscommunication when at all possible.

If there's a slot available next Monday, I'd like to submit. If there isn't one, or if there's a crowd, I'm fine backing out - I'm not in any particular rush for this submission. If anyone's curious, this is going to be another short story, featuring Tempter (and his human sidekick Z that no one cares about). The first story is being rewritten, but since abut 80% of the edits are focused towards the back end of the draft, I didn't feel like resubmitting basically the same first two parts, and only then springing out the rewritten third part. Similarly, just submitting the rewritten third part would have it's own problem. On the other hand, a new story will have three fresh new sections, all ripe for feedback, in my opinion, a much better value. (That said, I do estimate there's a ~10% chance that it'll never reach the third submissions for, shall we say, reasons.*) Now featuring 100% less dead witches, very minor mystery elements, and some heavy and dark themes deserved of the low fantasy setting. *It's not something that I'm trying to make happen, but seeing as I want to try working in dark themes, if the general consensus of the community is that I'm doing it badly, then it's back to the drawing board.

It would look like a comically oversized handgun with lines trailing everywhere and it would also be relatively useless. Also, was it the monster that Holmes was fighting? Because S identifies 'Victor Frankenstein, Father of Monsters', which I understood to mean the titular character. (I'm not sure it actually makes a difference, just wondering.)

I'm aware, that particular moniker is a bit of modesty on my part. But just a bit - I prefer only being modest in small doses.

Thoughts As I Go: Pg. 1 – We have an AI as a narrator. Interesting choice. At the very least, I can be assured that it’s not going to be an unreliable narrator. (Unless it’s been programmed to be that way, of course.) Pg. 1 – And crossover fanfiction has survived into the far future. Unfortunate, but then I supposed utopias aren’t impossible. (That was a joke, don’t get mad at me!) Pg. 2 – ‘Semi-automatic harpoon gun’? Did you mean 'semi-automatic spear gun'? (That's not a thing either, by the way, but spear guns at least have multiple barrels.) Pg. 2 – A proximity alarm – how does this ship work exactly? Ramjet, hyperspace, FTL? Pg. 4 – I’m finally realizing that S’s job is basically ‘glorified babysitter’, and I feel that could be thrown into the exposition paragraph on page 2. Pg. 5 – Ah, the ‘heavy world’ and ‘I’m from Australia where everything is deadlier’ tropes, and now we’re applying them to human. Pg. 5 – How’d they get on the ship? Pg. 5 – Teeth, yes. Waving, I don’t think as much. There’s not much which is inherently threatening about a moving limb. Pg. 6 – ‘Legal issues would be worse than letting all your cargo get stolen’ – I can totally buy that. Pg. 6 – Oh, goody. Humans are basically Wookies in this universe. An interesting choice to make the ship’s babysitter then, but Chewie was a pretty good caretaker in Legends. Pg. 8 – He is a Wookie! Except instead of arms, it’s half a body. Pg. 8 – I call shenanigans on the physics here. Also on the wisdom of having boots with individual gravity settings. Pg. 9 – So, is the narrator the alien thing? Or is the narrator yet to be introduced? Overall: I enjoyed this submission. I like sci-fi a lot, and while this isn’t the hard science fiction I prefer, it’s perfectly acceptable soft sci-fi, and I enjoyed reading it. That said, I have a few comments. First off, I have no idea who the narrator is – you might want to add a paragraph or two introducing the narrator and why this short story is relevant if it isn’t the alien. And if it is, the opening monologue doesn’t really imply that. Second – the sci-fi. It’s kind of slapdash. I got the sense that you just tossed on a dozen alien species without assigning specifics to them as to what they did. It kind of feels cheap if you do that – you’re better off just using a handful, say three or four, and developing them so the audience can get a better sense of how exactly the aliens differ from the humans. Also, I don’t get how this ship works – multiple alien race implies some kind of FTL travel, but you can’t board a ship going FTL, at least under traditional circumstances. (I can discuss what kind of FTL travel is best for you if you want.) Also, the physics at the end is a bit wonky. If you stumble because you’re moving backwards and one foot is heavier than the other, you have to be a klutz savant to stomp on the foot of something in front of you with that heavier foot. Second also – if the foot is pinned and the body is split in half, that means that the leg is sturdier and better connected to the lower body than the lower body is to the upper body, same goes for the suit of armor. That’s not a great design. Answering the Questions: 1. A light sci-fi with a focus on comedic elements rather than an in-depth discussion on the economics of asteroid mining based on metal extraction methods. 2. Dejarik, or some other version of space chess. 3. S failing in some epic faction because of general clumsiness and/or no one had humans in mind when designing things. Though I will accept in driving an AI insane by accidentally plunging it into some form of a logical paradox. Whichever event, given his love for cheap fanfiction, I'm also expecting some kind of stolen catchphrase during this sequence which is already wrong - i.e. some corrupted version of 'Beam me up, Scotty' or 'Elementary, my dear Watson'. (Both of which are never actually said in their respective series.)

Unfortunately, you’ve given me nothing to go on for reviewing this, I don’t know what kind of story you’re trying to write, and I’m generally not the type of person to read a book before reading the back, inside jacket, and possibly a few reviews online. And, as it turns out, I really could have used the context. Thoughts As I Go: Pg.1 – This appears to be a philosophical discussion on whether or not robots can be good or bad? I sense dwarves and constructs in my immediate future. Pg. 2 – I count six capitalized words in the first two paragraphs without much context behind them. Not necessarily bad for a prologue, but still… Pg. 4-5 – I have no idea what’s going on, except there’s a giant monster involved and someone burned down a city. Pg. 6 – I’m assuming ‘heliophysicist’ is just an astrophysicist? Pg. 8 – I need more context! I love scientific jargon, but that’s because I can usually understand said jargon. I have no idea what’s being discussed, and I want to. Pg. 9 – Hey, it’s a fantasy platypus! I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of those. Overall: It’s very clear that there’s a story here, but I’m not sure what the story is. There are two scientists (or magicians) having a discussion in the first chapter and because they know what they’re talking about and the reader doesn’t, the reader doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. I’m sure you do, as the writer, but as the reader, all I have are guesses and half my guesses don’t make sense here. It would be helpful if I knew the genre here – magic, sci-fi, low fantasy, steampunk, etc. – or the influences that you’re drawing from, but I don’t, so I can’t. The prologue isn’t helpful either, it doesn’t connect to the first chapter (which isn’t necessarily a problem) so I can’t use either for context on the other. I also can’t figure out if the prologue’s character D is supposed to be a tragic hero, a villain, or something in between. This is a rough first draft, and a lot of things are unexplained, though I should caution you to be careful for the pitfalls of droning exposition (something I have a tendency to be guilty of). I’d advise you to look this over and try and approach it from the standpoint of a fresh reader so that they can understand what’s happening. This would serve best to be rewritten and resubmitted again. I look forward to that.

Judaism doesn't have 'minor gods', it's a strictly monotheistic religion. If that's the exact text used, something got lost in translation. No doubt a lot of things got lost in translation, given how Ancient Hebrew works.

I've heard that Orthodox Jews very much believe in heaven, though. Actually, I've seen this idea around a few place of 'Jews don't believe in heaven' (last time I saw it was a discussion around the morality of cryonics, of all things), except, like I said, I thought this was completely wrong. It's very interesting to hear you say that, then. Do you know whether or not this is a Reform-specific belief, or does it apply to Judaism as a whole?

Intermarriage is also considered offensive to modern groups of religious Jews. I do see your point about how it would serve to drive the MC to a different place, but it addition to that, the Christian community of NYC would also do the same. Intermarriage is also heavily frowned upon by religious Christians, or at least it is for the vast majority of the sects. Obviously, both sides are fine with it if conversion has taken place, but each side is also annoyed at one of their own converting to the other side. I mean, that's really functionally the same thing as a rogue AI because you've given the AI instructions to go rogue. At that point, it's more of a question of 'What where you thinking when you gave the orders?', although I suppose things could be said for misunderstanding orders. (Actually, that's the whole point of Nightblood from Warbreaker - the sword was instructed to destroy evil, but given that he's a sword and can't handle abstract concepts like 'evil' too well, he just assumes everyone is evil.) Also, yes, this is what I was referring to. There seems to be a common belief that the way you create a golem is finalized by writing words on the forehead, and can be destroyed by changing the word. That works great from a literary perspective, I just don't know how authentic that is, given the lack of historical accounts of actual golems. I hesitate to ask this, but what exactly are you reading, and far more importantly, what language is it in? If it's a translation, then be aware you're limited to the translator's understanding of the original text. Pretty sure that Judaism doesn't believe that, given John the Baptist was a Christian. (Unless you want to count Christianity as a sub-sect of Judaism, which it technically is, or at the very least, it used to be. But that's a complex discussion probably best served elsewhere.) This seems to be a better path than reincarnation, but be aware that it's my understanding that raising the dead only works under exceptional circumstances as dictated by God. And, well, given that, there's not really a set of circumstances you can check off in order to make it work, it's not merely a 'making-the-correct-percentile-die-roll' skill check. Alright. In that case, I'll keep telling you all I can, then. Glad to have this discussion.

@Snakenaps I know a bit about Judaism myself, let me share some of that knowledge. Jewish mysticism is definitely in the running for the most misunderstood series of concepts because authors and creators have a tendency to grab them for whatever given work they're working on and twisting them to match, whereupon people who consume those works then walk away with a whole set of misunderstandings and then the cycle just repeats itself. (I'm not even going to pretend that I understand it to any significant degree, but I'm quite content in my knowledge that I don't know anything about it.) This isn't even including the times that Christian influences were inserted into certain aspects of the mysticisms which where then portrayed as 'Judeo-Christian', and is then shortened back down to just 'Judeo' during cultural osmosis, which also lead to a whole lot of misunderstandings. Long story short, unless you actually talk to someone with firsthand knowledge of everything and a willingness to explain to you, it's very likely you'll get a lot of important concepts somewhat muddled. I've also heard it said that the general rule of thumb about these kinds of things is 'those who know don't say and those who say don't know', so finding someone with firsthand knowledge who's actually willing to share it with you for the sake of a work of fiction is going to be difficult. Also, it's considered a very serious taboo among Orthodox sects of Judaism to marry outside the faith. The Reform movements did begin in the 1800s, but it's my understanding (I may be wrong, @kais might know more) that they also had a taboo against intermarriage at that point in time. I'm not saying intermarriage didn't happen, but it would definitely be considered offensive in the 1800s to any group of religious Jews. Furthermore, I can't say much on the concept of reincarnation in Judaism except I'm pretty sure that there isn't a concept of a human being able to do it. Finally, and bear with me here - golems can't be evil. (At least, I'm pretty sure they can't.) There's this weird pervasive myth that was popularized that golems, specifically, the golem of Prague, turned evil, except if you try to look at the basis of those legends, they're all from unrepudiated sources, generally secular novels that decided to do it for the sake of shock during a story. (It's my, granted limited, understanding that Golems functioned similar to automatons and didn't have free will of their own.) Given that was precisely the type of cultural mistake you're trying to avoid, I'd really recommend taking a good step back and trying to do some heavy research on the subject or possibly switching to an alternate form of mysticism.

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com and https://writing.stackexchange.com Worldbuilding is a Q&A site devoted to worldbuilding, mostly sci-fi and fantasy worlds, but a few other ones as well. The Writing one focuses on writing and story crating, which Wolrdbuilding explicitly does not do. Both of those are good resources for writing stories, and assuming you ask a well-written and thought out question, you should get a plethora of good answers. Plus, I'm pretty active on World Building myself, so if you need help navigating the site or anything of that nature, just ask. I can't help so much on Writing, though.