Genesis

Ridiculous... farfetched situations even for fantasy... used wholly for plot manipulations... and the ending was just stupid... this read like science fiction written in the days before any real science was actually known... I think this is the first truly negative review I've given here... but this was just bad...

-jaye-

I putzed with a.story a.couple of years ago. The plot.was pretty darn close to yours. The sky was orange. However, the protagonist was all alone. I really liked your story. Thanks for sharing.

To everybody that contributed their generous time and great comments. Truly appreciated, as they will undoubtedly contribute to my writing better stories.

I would like to specifically address Over_Red, as he truly commented like a champion. And all that from one of my super-favourite writers here, and editor to sycksycko, another one of my favourites.

First of all, thank you for your time and mind effort to write such a rich and useful comment. It really helps a great deal.

All literary comments taken, and thank you, very appreciated.

The physics is a little bit shaky, admittedly. More than a little bit actually. Let me explain.

First of all, nobody can guarantee that the laws of physics don't work the same everywhere, at least inside our own Universe. Actually, most believe that they do, although that is also shaky. They probably don't work the same in the multiverse, if it exists, but people expect them to work in the same way across our universe at least. Of course, they don't have to abide by what we expect from them, but they don't have to NOT do so either. We try to deduce what happens just from looking at a small portion of it. So the different time rate, and especially faster time on a larger planet, now that is super, super shaky. Admittedly. This can only hold under the premise that the laws of physics do NOT hold the same everywhere. Double shaky, since larger planet mass accounts for slower time, not faster, anyway!

Second, there is a pretty zero chance of them landing on a planet, and not simply anywhere inside the universe. Inside a star, or on the accretion disk of another, sister black hole somewhere in the Universe, or even buried inside the soil of a rocky planet, or inside a gas giant, or a black-hole geyser, or, most likely, in the immeasurably huge interstellar void - fates that would probably result in many deaths who would compete who would kill first. If it were a directed thing by some alien civ, then ok. However, it was a chance thing by a artificial black hole gone rogue. Pretty zero chance of that happening, I agree for sure.

Of course, the whole deal with the magnetic lenses would be half-way ok if the gamma-ray burst wasn't as strong as it really is, which means that it would be very difficult for the sun's magnetic fields, much more so the Earth's, to act as lenses. Add to that that magnets of the accelerators , which often are superconductors (!!!) usually are shielded like crazy. If they weren't, there would be hell to pay for the workers there, as the electromagnetic fields created are extreme. But still, nothing compared to a gamma burst, which wipes out the life on a planet like it is nothing. Usually one can't compare the force of the Sun or the Earth to a hypernova explosion.

Actually, the 1.5 G is the only thing I find halfway plausible, in the sense that if you weigh 100kg and then you weigh 150 kg in an instant, your bones will suffer incredibly. And it is not fat, but everything inside you weighs half its weight more. You have to build muscle tone to get accustomed to that. One can withstand great G's but usually seating and only momentarily. 2 G's means that a 100kg guy would end-up weighing 200 kg, which he probably wouldn't even be able to lift. And probably internal things would start to come apart over time . Maybe 1.8G's would be more appropriate than 1.5 G's for the kind of torment I tried to portray. Remember, over time, and getting to one in an instant. Like, one second 1 G, the very next the heavy G. Like someone throws on one more than half one's weight instantaneously.

I actually did measure Earth's curvature as a kid, as a part of a physics lab thing! We did it like the ancient Greeks, timing ships over a known distance, etc. Then we measure the elevation of the horizon on the centre, etc. Very exciting actually. It was so relatively recently, only T-Rexes were the problem back then.

The speed of sweat, if you don't have wind, is a good way to find G. Try for a meter, and keep the time - that is the actual problem, since our character has no clock to begin with, but one may do with a sense of a metronomic second, if all else fails, for such small-scale measurements. You can deduce a not-so accurate measurement of G that way, if your time measurement is good enough. Now, if you have a higher gravity, the time that the droplet travels the same distance drops by the same ratio as the G's. Again, a metronomic sense of time can provide a half-bad measurement, just to give an idea.

All these to show you that unfortunately I knew of the shortcomings as I wrote. But I went on to write it anyway. Hence my name.

On the techniques that you mention, you are obviously right. But it is not an easy thing to edit your own story, maybe I should find an editor.

Anyway, thanks for the great and super constructive comments. One can only be humbled, even if a proverbial asshole like yours truly!

Thanx!

That was a shitty ending having her die. But still it's nice to know that they would be together again in the end.

First, the positives. I really liked the ideas and the plot progression. I didn't expect the ending; it was sharp and striking.

You stretched my suspension of disbelief very thin in a few spots. I found it somewhat ridiculous that the protagonist deduces the strength of gravity from the flow speed of sweat. Equally improbable was when he eyeballed the curvature of the horizon while struggling to breathe on the ground like a fish out of water. I'd also add he roughly estimates the gravity is 50% stronger on their new planet. 1.5Gs is not really that big of a deal. I'd expect it to be debilitating over a long period, but the nastier roller coasters subject people to 5 or 6 Gs. They'd be able to stand up without too much trouble.

Like one of the above commenters said, I think a major problem was that there was a forgone conclusion to which the characters were being steered. This stunted the dialogue and the inner character development. When you're editing, try reading your dialogue out loud and ask yourself if this is how people would talk in a real conversation. Act out their parts; capture their body language in your mind's eye and translate this into natural breaks in speech. I also highly recommend that you look up the mechanics of writing dialogue, as you include a few things that aren't standard; for example, dashes beginning the lines of dialogue, and spaces after ellipses (the '...').

You never used speech attributions. Don't know if that was intentional, but they can be incredibly helpful. Body language and attributions are much more useful for conveying a pause than the word 'pause', which sounds very injected and takes the reader out of the story. It reminds us we're reading something, rather than experiencing an adventure, which is not what you want to do.

I think the worst part of the story were the first-person segments that attempted to convey a direct experience of the main character. It's a very difficult technique to pull off, and you overdid it, especially at the beginning. You can't drop the reader into the middle of a semi-conscious character's experience and expect him/her to stay for the remainder of the story. You have to build empathy, give us a reason to care and to stay, to invest ourselves in the story's conclusion. When that's done first, I'm more willing to trudge through the pain and the lights and the dizzy darkness because there's a sense of fighting in the trenches alongside the friend you're rooting for, as opposed to floating above and apathetically watching a stranger roll about on the floor. I went back and read it before composing this comment, but in my first pass of the story I actually skipped right over that stuff and went right to the -real- beginning of your story.

I really liked the premise and the world they found themselves on was strangely captivating. Great work there.

Keep writing. Practice makes perfect!