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Garden [SciFi Short 1209 Words]
Wank
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey guys, just finished tightening this up. Tear it to shreds, please.
*retracted for publication*
*retracted for publication*
Wank on
Posts
To start, and I doubt I'm alone here, I'm not a huge fan of the biblical stories retold in sci-fi ways. Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark especially get played out (possibly because you don't have to read very far into the Bible to get to them), with Cain and Abel or Isaac and Ishmael as honorable mentions. Because of that, I felt let down by the end. I appreciate the playful way you've approached it, and the specific elements are somewhat fresh, but it's hard to escape the general groan of another biblical rehash.
Otherwise, I've read some of your stuff before (albeit two years ago) and you're a very strong line-by-line writer. This is generally true here as well, but there are a few things that popped out to me while reading:
I don't love the sentence fragments in this paragraph. I think sentence fragments should be used sparingly for effect, and it just reads strangely going back and forth between full sentences and fragments in this paragraph. This is especially true with "For old times' sake." There's really no reason you needed to put a period at the end of 'twenty-four' instead of a comma. This might be a preference thing, but with the exception of the sentence beginning "Seven days clinging," I think they would be better served with a subject and a verb.
This sentence reads very strangely. It's a fragment again, which feels unnecessarily jarring, but more importantly, you list two very specific accents, and then just seem to say "fuck it, there are a bunch of others too." Listing the first two adds nothing, and doesn't help me hear the voice in my head at all. Even if I can come up with some conception of what "Eurasian female" is, the dozen other accents just throw that away. You might as well just say it was an amalgam of diverse voices, and leave it at that.
Mother never struck me as the type who would say this. She never otherwise seems angry, or crude. She seems only very playful in a malevolent way - a trickster type god. Maybe it's just my reading of it, but this line didn't seem to fit at all with the rest of her dialogue.
The Grendel reference doesn't do anything here, and it feels out of place. By this point, the biblical themes are clear, and throwing in the monster from an Old English Norse epic doesn't fit at all. You have nothing else that analogizes to that story, so far as I can tell. No reason not to just end with "A monster." As a side note, this is where I think using a fragment is the right choice.
Overall, good writing as usual, but I just can't get into the concept of this story.
I finished off Eighteen Revenges, by the way! I'll drop you feedback when I have one less Spanish presentation on my plate.
The main critique and problem I have with this story is just that it feels extremely distant. No emotion is coming through to me and it makes it hard to develop any kind of tension. I think as a result of these things the pacing also just seems kind of tedious.