All Comments on 'The 144th Ep. 01'

I know the idea is to have sex in these stories, but the premise here is too much for me. If there were only five living men left on earth, they wouldn't be allowed outside a bubble, let alone into bed with scores of women every month. Their sperm would be harvested daily and artificially inseminated into as many women as possible. But even though I can't bite on the story, your writing seems okay, so I abstained from voting.

Your premise is interesting. Nice writing style. Would love to see where you take this idea. Thanks

Unfortunately, while there aren't any really "bad" points to this story, there's hardly anything good either.

The core plot feels overused and implausible. With half the population dead within a short timespan, collapse of civilization is almost inevitable, especially when the die-off primarily affects the hardier blue-collar workforce. The treatment of the surviving males as told here is unrealistic at best; frequent sperm donations and in-vitro fertilization would be much, much more plausible, but I guess the idea of having hundreds of willing, physically perfect women paraded through some guys' bedrooms makes for better self-insert material. Unfortunately, it also makes the story cheap and banal.

Further, the science is dubious. Bacteria do not produce viruses. Bacteria produce more bacteria, kill other cells, eat them and break them down into nutrients, or simply compete for nutrients and emit toxins. And viruses do not produce anything, they rely on their ability to infect and reprogram other cells by way of injecting their own DNA into the cell's genes. Of course, in fiction these things matter tangentially at best, but your story is set, presumably, on this Earth in a not too distant future year. This means that I come into the story having certain expectations about reality, and it is your job to tell me when to suspend my disbelief. A simple phrase, such as "defying everything what we had thought we knew about biology", would have been sufficient - but without it? Immediate fridge logic moment.

The icing on the cake of mediocrity then is the spelling, grammar and uninspired choice of words and phrases.