All Comments on 'F6: Sing a Dirge in Heaven'

What a passionate appeal for humanity, full of love and rage and the desperation of hope for a better future.

My new favourite in the FAWC.

Words so seamlessly included that I didn't even notice 'yearn'.

Typos and spelling errors galore and needs some polishing - there are passages of backstory explanation which are as clear as mud - but the real class of this gem of a story shines through.

yearn is used in the sex scene

What an interesting mix of fluid this story is (pun intended). There's blood and cum and piss and...it's kind of beautiful in this warped sort of way.

I was impressed, truthfully. The secondary world is well-realized, particularly for such a short story. I never felt overwhelmed by its creation or explanation. That's often the death knell of such stories, particularly here on Lit.

There's such a marriage of contrasting sentences and ideals here. The dialogue is understated at points, subtle and worthwhile, and overblown with vulgarity at others. And it works, at least for me, to create this realistic mush of life, a thousand light-years away, but uncomfortably close to home.

Ursula K. Le Guin once said something about Sci-fi that simply stopped me in my tracks. It will always stay with me and guide my writing.

She said it far better than I will here, of course, but I will paraphrase to the best of my meager ability. It basically amounts to, "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive." Meaning, basically, that science fiction writers are not telling you about the future: ever. That is the territory of prophets and soothsayers. No, sci-fi writers are telling you about what is going on RIGHT NOW.

This piece really embodies that concept for me. Like all good sci-fi stories, it's not about far away places and future events. It's about pain, and frustration, and the growing fear that the world is becoming hopelessly fucked up, but still clinging, stubbornly and whole-heartedly, to the idea that there is good left, hope remaining. That as bad as humanity can be, we still have this potential, under all our layers of shit and grime, to be simply beautiful.

I thought this was beautiful where it counts.

A word of criticism: the sentences can be a bit dense with piled words and thick, syrupy descriptions. I'm guilty of this myself. Your words give you power, but too much paint on the canvas dulls your lines, and, at points, turns what would have been a beautiful image into a glob of paint. Never let your construction materials outweigh your delivery.

As a side note, this tale reminds me a little of Slyc's story in the last FAWC. Not derivative, mind you, but parallel, what with the gypsy and the secondary world and such. Was that intentional, I wonder? If so, very nice. If not, that tale is one worth reading if you are into the style.

This is excellent. I didn't feel so much like I was reading Sci fi. I was feeling the pain of a bully's victim, a victim of racism, a victim of circumstances. Someone living in his head while working with his hands. It reminded me very much of someone I know in my real life, to the point it made me squirm because I felt his anguish. Excellent story FAWCKER. This score should be higher.

Your writing is so well crafted that I felt many things in reading this story, unfortunately having the power to make people feel can sometimes be a double edged sword particularly in such a depressingly, dark story, The one spot of sunshine i found there was soon coloured red, dark red. I have come away from this with an urgent need to seek the sunshine and pick beautiful wild flowers that smell delicious.

Fawcking well done!

I really loved this story. It's a little rough around the edges, but the crafted world surrounded me easily. I love the hope in the darkness, and I'm always a sucker for sci-fi. I'd love to see a slower build to the end, and a little more fullness around the details. And I want him to figure out what that smell is!

The author who wrote this story is MSTarot. Thanks for FAWCking!