Review: Andromeda Spaceways #48

written by David Steffen

As I mentioned in my review of ASIM #47 last month, I enjoyed that first issue enough that I decided it was well worth my money to get a subscription. Well, my family’s money anyway. I was having trouble thinking of items for my Christmas list, and put a digital subscription to ASIM on there. So I got to celebrate Christmas a bit early.

One thing that I was very interested to see was whether or not the quality of the magazine would feel consistent from issue to issue. ASIM, you see, has a rotating set of editors who each take turns in the captain’s chair. #47 was edited by Patty Jansen. #48 featured Juliet Bathory. I’m quite happy to say that the quality between the two was consistently high. I very much enjoyed most of the stories–a much higher portion than I enjoy in a typical magazine. Not only that, but there are just so many stories–plenty of meat here to keep you entertained.

Now, on to the stories!

A Bag Full of Arrows by Mark Farrugia

This story focuses on a dragon-hunter’s wife and son. It’s an odd sort of dragon, who generally only eats those already dead. When the story begins the dragon-hunter has gathered a group of men to attack the dragon, but this is not his tale. This is the tale of the family he left behind, dealing with the aftermath of the attack.

Well titled, well written. A bit distant at times, and is a good complex character in a good complex problem. I really cared about what happened to the characters. She faces a difficult choice that defines the story, and which I found very interesting and well conveyed by the writing.

To Stand and Stare by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy–Venu is a professional slacker, avoiding getting a job however he can. He comes up with an ingenius idea to make a fake cell phone, which he uses to pretend that he is busy working, so that people will stop pressuring him to find a job. The trick works remarkably well… until the day his fake phone rings.

I loved the idea of this story, and though I’m not sure I really relate to his unyielding desire to do nothing at all, I still found him very likable. It kept me very interesting through these beginning stages, but later on it seemed to lose momentum and just tied everything up with a too-neat ending. I’d still recommend it for the first half.

The Number Made Flesh by Ross Murray–A tale of Death and his daughter, his heir. Death is fascinated with modern desensitization to death caused by media saturation, and the meanings attached to otherwise unimportant things like the number 13.

This was an interesting idea, and I usually like a good anthropomorphic personification, and I like see different interpretations of Death as a character. But I just found this one impossible to get into. It was very hard to get a handle on the setting and time period that the story occurs in, and it wasn’t until nearly the end when I was finally certain that this was Death. Rather than enhancing my enjoyment, this mystery just distracted me from other aspects of the story I might have enjoyed. Although I think the metaphor of Death watching death-saturated media and commenting on its affect on people, in the story it ends up being mostly about a guy watching TV.

Hobbit Query Letter by Peter Cooper. A hypothetical rejection letter that young writer upstart Mr. Tolkien might have received for his little-known manuscript Lord of the Rings.

Besides just being funny on the surface, it also makes an interesting commentary about yardsticks of equality shifting over time, and how one man’s trash can be another man’s treasure. As a writer I found this quite hilarious, and at least a little bit reassuring. As with other writers I’ve received many a rejection that blames this or that aspect of a story as though those qualities are universally undesirable by all editors, when in reality they just reflect a particular editor’s world view. I’m not sure how well this one will translate to someone without writing aspirations, but as a writer I found it quite entertaining.

Joey Blue and the Gutterbreed by Marty Young. Joey Blue lives on the streets, and every night lives in fear of the nasty and powerful creatures called the Gutterbreed that lurk in the shadows of night. Normally he would try to drink himself into a stupor to avoid the Gutterbreed, but on this particular night he finds a young girl, lost and alone and not in the best of health. To save her he must face his fears and avoid the temptations of alcohol and pass through the alleys where the Gutterbreed gather the thickest.

Throughout this story I was constantly trying to decide whether or not the Gutterbreed actually existed. In the end I decided it doesn’t really matter, especially once the stakes are raised with the introduction of the little girl. The Gutterbreed are clearly very real to Joey’s mind, and therefore they become a very real obstacle to saving the girl’s life, whether they are entities that exist outside of his fogged mind or not.

I wasn’t sure what I thought in the first half of the story, partially because I was trying to decide how much of it was real. In the end, this turned out to be my favorite story in this issue of ASIM. I liked Joey Blue. I wanted him to save the girl. And from his point of view the Gutterbreed were a terrifying and very real threat. All of this came together for a really great tale.

Halcyon by A. Dale Triplett The end of the world is nigh! Scientists have spotted an asteroid on a collision course with earth, and we only have four days to live. As if that’s not bad enough, global war breaks out in these final days. A last ditch effort is put together, a space mission to save the remnants of humanity. Most of the story takes place as the crew of this last ditch effort is visiting a bar for the very last time.

This story is just unrelentlessly depressing. I’m not saying it’s unrealistic but it is bleak as bleak can be about the nature of humanity, but is bleak without offering me any new insight to human nature or offering me any characters that I could at least root for. Among other things, the people who have been chosen to try to continue the species are spending their last day drinking heavily when they know darn well that they might need to emergency launch at any time if someone launches missiles at them. As if this story wasn’t bad enough, the last vestiges of humanity are at the mercy of drunk drivers.

The Whim of My Enemy by Amanda J. Spedding–An all out battle for survival on a train. It started with dozens, but the order has come that when the train stops, only 10 can be allowed to live.

Very action packed, non-stop happening, obviously lots of death. Shows in a very compact way how different personalities might react under extreme pressure. It kept me very interested to the end, and the author used the anticipation implicit in the setup very well. Very well done.

Radioactive Gumshoe Blues by Jamie Shanks–a 1920’s private detective story, with aliens! Benson Sterenko has taken over his brother’s P.I. business a few months after his brother’s disappearance. Benson’s sworn to find out what happened to his brother. One day, an FBI comes in, and starts talking about Sterenko’s brother, and an invasion of shapeshifting aliens, and it goes on from there.

It’s certainly an interesting idea, but I found it too slow and too exaggerated at the same time. I found the “goon” manner of speech distracting, especially constant verb number mismatches, and mispronounced words like “districk”, “crockydile”, and “precautionarial” that did nothing to enhance the story. They just set off copyediting alarms in my brain every few sentences (I know they were intentional, but without an actual purpose they were just a distraction to me). Also, I was put off by constant overblown self-descriptionsuch as “I was coiling my considerable muscles under me to spring at him like a Bengalese tiger”.

Ash by C.S. Cole A wartorn future where everyone takes a vaccine to help them breathe ash that is ever-present in the atmosphere, the ash of the enemy. Those who choose not to breathe ash are criminals and deviants.

Very interesting idea, very interesting setting, but I didn’t really feel like it was a full story.

Free Falling by Mark Welker–A future where pop media saturation has reached new lows, where suicides are covered extensively and from every angle, with up to the millisecond coverage and live footage. This is the tale of one such suicide.

Well told, very cool idea. The perfect length.

Holding by Melanie Rees–God calling tech support, trying to get a new atmosphere for the earth because this one is defective.

Very funny. Anyone who’s had to deal with phone tech supports will empathize, and the escalation to atmosphere replacement was a fun idea.

High Bidder by David C. Pinnt–South Dakota resident buys what someone claims to be the holy grail in an online auction site. It turns out that drinking from it turns people into zombies.

I spent the first 22 years of my life in South Dakota, and this story did not ring true in the slightest. It struck me as someone who has only barely heard of the state:
-The characters ALL talk with a stereotypical “back woods southern” kind of accent that I’ve never heard in SD before.
-The story takes place in relatively modern day, because there is a Brokeback Mountain joke. Yet everyone is still using party lines , the old fashioned phone setup where a whole neighborhood shares one common line, which have not been common for decades.
-Not only that, but he has internet access, which makes no sense to mix with a location that has party lines.
-A rural South Dakotan who has ever handled a gun is going to be pretty familiar with general gun terms, but this story constantly mixed up the details. A single gun switches characteristics from a rifle to a shotgun and back again. The ammunition is referred to as shells in the same sentence that it is referred to as a rifle. It sometimes makes a small hole like a rifle, and sometimes a big blast like a shotgun. The writer really ought to have checked his gun details to get them straight, and someone else should’ve double-checked it.

Beyond all the South Dakota and gun inaccuracies, the story was an unremarkable zombie story. The only thing that really struck me as original is that the holy grail is the thing that spawns zombies, for no apparent reason. The story might’ve been fair-to-middlin’ if not for the inaccurate portrayal of South Dakota and the complete botch of gun details.

Review: Daily Science Fiction – Sept 1, 2010 to Sept 30, 2010

written by Frank Dutkiewicz

Daily Science Fiction is the ambitious project of Clarion alumni and Writers of the Future author, Jonathan Laden, and King Arthur fanatic, Michele Barasso. The duo jumped feet first into the growing SF & F industry with an idea that is innovative and ideal with the ever-changing information age. The pair have dedicated getting the best of what today’s writers have to offer, and bringing it right into the laps of the most devote readers of speculative fiction, delivering it as easy (daily email) and as cheap (free) as a lover of fantasy and science fiction could hope for. To insure they’ll have only the best for the cliental, they have offered an attractive pay rate (8 cents a word) to entice the best authors out there.

Why have they embarked on this crazy idea, you may ask?

“Our kids refuse to let us read them Harry Potter, so we needed another outlet for our love of SF” is the answer they offer. Whether their real reason is noble or they really are greedy to read new and fresh fiction before anyone else has a chance to view it, publishing good speculative fiction requires more than a nice pay rate as bait. They need to be able to pick out gems that will make readers want to come back for more. Do Jon and Michele have the ability make DSF a success? I read the first month to find out for myself.

The Stories

“An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade” (debut 9/1/10) by Jeff Hecht is the perfect themed piece to open a mass email project like Daily Science Fiction. The story involves two collectors, and is set in the mid to late 21st century. The protagonist presents a correspondence to a Mr. James, one written on an old manual typewriter in the mid 20th century, when such things were still done on paper. The correspondence tells the tale of a clerk in Nigeria that has uncovered a scheme by the trading company he is working for. The company is bilking the Nigerian government and hiding the profits in a Swiss bank account. The clerk has asked a random American for his bank account so he can transfer 43 million, and promises a 10% kick back as a reward (sound familiar?).

I found “An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade” to be a clever and crisp story. Although it was a bit short, and the twist ending predictable, it was fitting as a debut story for a science fiction magazine looking for a unique way to stand out.

“Mark and ,S-h-e-l-l-y-‘-s-“ (debut 9/2/10) by Steven R Stewart is a story of a pizza shop owner named Mark and his one time romantic interest and former partner, Shelly. Shelly suddenly appears at the spaceport stand, not looking a day older, after a ten-year absence. The sign out front is still the same but her name has been crossed out. The bitter Mark feels cheated, abandoned, and is not interested in any excuse his former partner has to offer. Shelly regrets leaving in a huff all those years ago and admits in making a wrong turn, a turn that may have cost her everything but her youth.

“Mark and ,S-h-e-l-l-y-‘-s-” is a science fiction twist on the old ‘bitter lovers reuniting’ premise. The story is Mr. Stewart’s first publication (nice catch). I found the brief tale to be a cute idea but the present tense narration was a big negative for me. It was unnecessary and lent to a disconnection with the characters and plot.

Butterfly gets her first tattoo on her 13th birthday and receives a gift she didn’t ask for in “Butterfly and the Blight at the Heart of the World” (debut 09/03/10) by Lavie Tidhar. The young granddaughter of the Head of the Council can hear the Rogon, long dead aliens cocooned in the trees of the forest. At first, the incomprehensible murmurs are nothing more than idle chit-chat in Butterfly’s ears, than one day their tone changes. Butterfly believes they are calling her, and they need her help.

At over 9000 words, “Butterfly and the Blight at the Heart of the World” is one of the longest stories you’ll find in Daily Science Fiction. I couldn’t help thinking while reading it that it didn’t need to be so. An awful lot was thrown into the story that had little to do with the overall plot. Much was made about Butterfly’s relationships with other characters when they had little to do with the solution to the story. All the extra material slowed the pacing to a crawl. Another problem I had was the age of the cocoons. The aliens were supposed to be dead for a quarter of a million years, wouldn’t they be fossils by now? What I did like was the unexpected reveal of the nature of the voices Butterfly hears. Unfortunately you had to get through two-thirds of the story to get to it.

“Butterfly and the Blight at the Heart of the World” would make a nice sci-fi mystery if it were shorter. The author took great pains to show Butterfly as a normal girl with a unique problem. Lavie Tidhar made the story mundane in the process.

“Fiddle” (debut 09/06/10) by Tim Pratt opens with a small history lesson on the Roman Emperor Nero, told by a mysterious guide. The guide speaks of the legend of Nero playing a fiddle while Rome burned in the first century AD and offers a unique explanation of how it may have come to life.

“Fiddle” is more like a tease than a story. Its short size limits what I can say about it without ruining it for the reader. Hard for me to recommend it. I found it not attractive enough to call it cute, but I did like that last line.

In “Ezra’s Prophecy” (debut 09/07/10) by Debs Walker, Ezra is a hermit living in a cave. She studies the book of God’s Prophesies with only a weekly visit from a young village woman to look forward to. Then one day the Gods grace her with a vision. Ezra is eager to write her own book of prophesy but takes advantage of her brief gift of premonition to see what effect her holy book will have in the future.

I had two different impressions of “Ezra’s Prophecy”. The first two thirds I found slow and I worried that the plot was headed nowhere. The last third, however, was a making of a classic tale. I found it deep,an outstanding concept on religion and of the people who founded it. Ezra is granted a great gift from the God’s and makes a choice that proves to be an even greater one to her people.

The first half of “Ezra’s Prophecy” is dull, but the end made the pay off worth it.

The protagonist in “Hobo Signs” (debut 09/08/10) by Ree Young is an elderly lady who finds a hobo on her porch. The man has alcohol on his breath and a tale of aliens on his mind.

“Hobo Signs” is almost cute. The story is told from an old woman’s perspective and done well, but I wanted to scream ‘get on with it!’ at her at one point. The story doesn’t have much to it, at least not enough to satisfy me.

“Tag, You’re It” by Melissa Mead (debut 09/09/10) is a tale of a lost soul and a devil playing a childhood game with the playing field Earth. The hider hides as an ordinary person (and other things) while the seeking player hunts them down.

If character growth defines what makes a good story for you than “Tag, You’re It” is your kind of piece. The devil learns much about life as he takes on a trio of different personalities in the game. I rather liked the story. I found the ending fitting. A well done work of flash fiction.

“Seek Nothing” (debut 09/10/10) by Cat Rambo is the story of Sean Marksman, a clone psychologist who specializes in scent alterations. Sean is eager to escape his religious, puritan home. The planet he has escaped to is in need of a specialist like him, but his fellow humans are suspicious of his fundamentalist background. Sean has been raised to believe clones are beings without a soul. His fellow workers treat them as if they are machines , machines that can be abused. As time drags on, Sean begins to identify with the clones plight.

“Seek Nothing” is not a story for everyone. The plot drags and the protagonist is a hard one to like. The supporting characters are portrayed as unsympathetic and aloof , or worse – and the clones are nothing more than living mannequins. However, by the end of the story a realization of the depth of this masterpiece fell on me like a ton of bricks.

This story is one of repression. Sean tires of his purist early life and wants to be a normal man, one free of the guilt of sin his father weighed on him. However, young Sean hooks up with people that are anything but normal and as degenerate as could be imagined. He is like an Amish boy whose first experience with the outside world is with exiled men alone in the Arctic. Added to this jaded experience, details of Sean’s own past surfaces as the story progresses. What we witness in this tale is the disassembling of a man to the point where he feels on par with soulless machines. RECOMMENDED.

“Chameleon” (debut 09/13/10) by Colin Harvey is set in an America under attack by a race of aliens called Dragons and their Chinese allies. The Dragons have the ability to mimic humans, and have gotten good enough at it to make them indistinguishable from the person they are imitating. Major Emily Sparrow has been brought into the ruins of the Pentagon to help determine if her husband is really an alien in disguise.

“Chameleon” is an excellent example on how intriguing and thorough a short story can be. Mr. Harvey opened up a big world and introduced wonderful characters in a handful of words. The story was extra special for me because of its ending. I knew there was a twist coming yet was still caught off guard when the reveal hit me; so subtle and unexpected. It was the whipped cream on top of delicious sci-fi work of art. RECOMMENDED.

“On the Sweetness of Children” (debut 09/14/10) by Michelle Muenzler opens when the Green Fairy falls dead in the middle of blessing the infant princess. She drops at the word ‘hunger’ and the princess becomes a glutton as a result. The round royal is sensitive about her weight, and isn’t above devouring her critics, which isn’t good for her public image. But when you have a bottomless pit for a stomach, public image becomes secondary.

“On the Sweetness of Children” is a very cute story. It is a birth of a fairy tale, which I always find neat. Enjoyable but not “finger licking good.”

Dain talks the crew of the ‘Maidens Crescent’ into stopping at every satellite while traveling through the Sol System in “Mercury in Hand” (debut 09/15/10) by Amanda M Hayes. The Zero-rank magician wants a piece of every planet for a wealthy client to take with him.

I would like to delve deeper into the point of the story but it was completely lost on me. The who, what, and why of the tale is a mystery to me. I didn’t get it and still don’t after I read it three times in an attempt to understand it.

In “Azencer” (debut 09/16/10) by Rigel Ailur, two sisters with the gift of telekinesis battle for the right to be queen.

At a hundred words, Azencer is as short as a complete tale can get. The author did well with so few words.

“American Changeling” (debut 09/17/10) by Mary Robinette Kowal takes place in a quiet Oregon town on a planet called Earth. Kim is the daughter of two faerie changelings. She has been raised for the day to open the gate between the Faerie world and Earth. The key to unlock the gate has been hidden in iron (deadly to faeries) and protected by Catholic magic. Kim is the only one that can resist both, but the enemies to the queen are aware of her and are ready for the great event.

“American Changeling” is an adventure story. It is one of the longest stories in DSF but it reads quick. The characters stand out and the action is well done. The story is done quite well but the general plot is very familiar. Nevertheless, the reading experience is very enjoyable but I would expect nothing less from a pro like Ms. Kowal.

“Flint’s Folly” (debut 09/20/10) by J Chant is a story about a Nobel Prize winning scientist’s, Professor Flint, greatest discovery. His most trusted assistant, Mattius, attends the press conference where Antarctica’s most respected scientist unveils his faster-than-light machine. The demonstration is a success, making the already famous scientist a giant on the world stage. As a close associate, Mattius basks in the professor’s glory, but soon discovers it only takes one mistake to erase a legacy.

“Flint’s Folly” is my kind of story. The author introduced a complete world and set of circumstances that I could buy into. The premise of the story is one I could see happening one day, and circumstances of our not-too-distant past have proved this type of mistake has been made before. Mattius is successfully presented as a loyal comrade. He believes in his mentor and is proud of his past accomplishments. You can feel the validation he feels when the rest of the world cheers for the professor’s breakthrough discovery. Telling the story from his viewpoint was genius with the direction the author decided to take. At the risk of revealing too much, I particularly enjoyed Professor Flint’s attempt to salvage pride at the end, emotionally well done.

This story was great. RECOMMENDED.

Young Revka is ten and has yet to discover her talent in “Picture in Sand” (debut 09/21/10) by Susan A Shepherd. Her mother discovered her woodcarving gift right away, while her father had to search through all nine talents before finding his own. It can be a lot of work before your talent is discovered, or if you’re lucky, your talent may discover you.

Ms Shepherd put a lot of thought into creating her magical world in this story. Impressive considering she didit in so few words. Unfortunately I think the story needed more for it to work. This heartwarming piece came off as flat to me.

“The Man who said Good Morning” (debut 09/22/10) by Ralph Gamelli is set in a future where everyone reads minds and talking is considered taboo. That doesn’t stop Louis McKalty. He first works his voice on his wife, chasing her as if he were holding a dead mouse. He then proceeds to greet the world with his rediscovered gift of speech. The world isn’t prepared to listen to his primitive mode of communication, and if he doesn’t listen to reason, society will send his brand of ‘getting to know each other’ the way of the Neanderthal.

“The Man who said Good Morning” is a fun story about a man who is having some innocent fun. Louis is rediscovering himself and that makes others uncomfortable. I liked how Mr. Gamelli decided to introduce a society where only silent, psychic interaction is allowed. Nice story that could have used some expanding.

Annalisa begs her father to take her to an unsavory fair in “The Jug Game” (debut 09/23/10) by Jennifer Moore. While her father disappears in a beer tent, Annalisa is encouraged to play a jug game. The prize is she gets to keep the soul inside if she wins.

“The Jug Game” puzzles me. The stories ending left me unsatisfied and I wondered if I read the complete version.

“The Fosterling” (debut 09/24/10) by Therese Arkenberg starts off in a shack of a house that is the home of the future king, Hepastian IV. It has been seven years the young prince has lived in the slums and it is Jain Harley’s duty to retrieve the boy and take him to New Geneva to reunite him with his father the king. The foster mother is not ready to give up her ‘Jacky’ and the boy isn’t eager to leave the only home he has known. Jain is chosen for this duty because she does it well, even when crushing migraines afflict her without mercy.

“The Fosterling” is a good story that is written very well. Jain Harley is convincing as a duty bound Captain of the Guard who has a job that simply sucks. All the past kings have spent their first seven years living in the slums so they will learn compassion. Jain is mystified on why Jacky doesn’t want to leave the ghetto he was raised in and wonders at one point “Didn’t all kids dream of being princes?” Coupled with the stress of tearing a young child from the only home he knows, a recurring migraine inflicts Jain.

I could find little fault with this piece. Therese Arkenberg is a very skilled writer. The story is solid and quick but is thin with content. Nevertheless I enjoyed reading it very much.

“Long Pig” (debut 09/27/10) by Matthew Johnson, is the name of a new restaurant featuring a popular chef. The menu is unique and the food is delicious thanks to a chef with a unique past and a commitment to put all he has into his creations.

It wasn’t too difficult to figure out what “Long Pig” was all about. Too many clues made it obvious early on. The chef’s willingness to share his past to his customers made him more creepy than interesting to me.

The restaurant’s customers may have found “Long Pig” appetizing but it didn’t satisfy me.

“Sparks” (debut 09/28/10) by Mari Ness is about a man who has replaced his hands with wands. The protagonist is drawn to the mysterious man and the lovely sparks his wands create. She takes great effort to not stare at his wands and wants to learn why he would make such a trade.

“Sparks” is a story of desire. The protagonist clearly has fallen for the stranger. I however was not drawn into his spell and fail to see the appeal he has over her. The appeal didn’t translate to me.

Unlike the protagonist, I failed to fall under “Sparks” ‘spell.

Jack and Sarah share tea in their home, drinking it out of their favorite cup, just as they always did in “Small Differences” (debut 09/29/10) by Tim Patterson. The only problem is this is the first time they met.

“Small Differences” is a story set in a world where alternate universes have intersected. People are switched into a new one that is very similar to the one they originated in. Slight changes make it different. Sarah and Jack shared a life with their alternate selves and their not-quite-the-same past makes their meeting painful and hopeful.

Not a bad story but one that was too brief for me to enjoy. Not that it needs expanding. I think the author got as much as he could from the idea.

George Washington is about to attend his inaugural in “A Little-Known Historical Fact” (debut 09/30/10) by Tim McDaniel. He talks with his aide Billy and tells him what his mother said he could accomplished if he applied himself.

This short story is just plain silly. The premise relies on GW’s mother knowledge of a term that I believe didn’t exist in her era.

Overview

I asked an editor of a leading review outlet on why DSF is ignored. The answer I got back was there was too much to review and the editors must be nuts if they think they can keep up throwing so many stories, at the rate they pay, for essentially free. Maybe Mr. Laden and Ms Barasso have deep pockets, maybe they have a business model other publications should emulate. I don’t know. I do know, word count wise, they publish as much as Analog, F & SF, and Asimov do each month. Sure they’re putting out 20 plus new stories a month, but 80% are under 2000 words and most are flash fiction size; an easy to get through length if you’re looking for a daily outlet. The question is, does the quality match up to what other pro-rated magazines have to offer. The answer is yes.

I found almost all the stories of a high quality. Because they were so high, my standards for recommendation were raised. If Jon and Michele can continue to publish such thoughtful, creative, and outstanding fiction, I see no reason why Daily Science Fiction won’t be the next big thing in publishing today.

My personal favorite of the month was “Chameleon” by Colin Harvey. I just simply loved it.

I recommend that you all sign up to receive a daily hand-delivered story from Daily Science Fiction. You can sign up for them, and read these stories and other ones here.

Frank is lurking back around in Diabolical Plots again. Other places have throw him out on his ear but Dave is a sucker for people that have worn out their welcome elsewhere. So Dave has Frank review to keep him out of his hair.

Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

written by David Steffen

The Harry Potter movie series is almost complete. Just one more movie to go after this one, which will cover the second half of the 7th and final book in the series. If you haven’t read/seen the first six in the series, then you really ought to stop now–there’s no way to discuss this without major SPOILERS to the earlier books.

Premise

The Deathly Hallows as a whole takes on the final conflict between the forces of good led by Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix rebel organization, and the forces of evil led by He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (aka Voldemort) and his army of Death Eaters. The forces of good have recently taken a huge loss with the death of Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts and the only person Voldemort has ever feared. Not only that, but the death was at the hands of Severus Snape, who had been working undercover as a member of Voldemort’s Death Eaters. Dumbledore trusted Snape absolutely, despite many objections from other members of the Order.

The stakes in this tale are higher than ever. The protective charms protecting Harry while he lives at the Dursleys’ are still in place until his seventeenth birthday, but with that birthday fast approaching, the Order of the Phoenix has to set up drastic plans to ensure he can be safely moved from the Dursleys’ to a secure location. The story starts off full of action. Although the movie glosses over this, Harry, Hermione, and Ron decide to skip their seventh year at Hogwarts. Instead, they devote their entire attention to seeking out Voldemort’s four surviving Horcruxes on their quest to defeat him once and for all.

My Thoughts (and spoilers)

All in all, this movie was much more faithful to its book than Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Half-Blood Prince, movie 6, was particularly bad in this respect, cutting out many important scenes and replacing them with long drawn out scenes that were fluffy digressions and violate long-standing story rules (such as the hard and fast rule in the series that humans cannot apparate into or out of the Hogwarts grounds. This one was pretty much on-track all the way through, though I did see a few notable changes. Splitting this book into two movies was a very good move, because there is just too much ground to cover comfortably in two hours. Movies 4, 5, and 6 have each had to cut significant parts out to squeeze it into even a 2.5 hour movie, and because this is the last book in the series there’s not much that can be cut out that doesn’t seriously change the final effect of the series.

Unlike all of the other movies, this is not really a complete story arc, but that should come as no surprise with the “Part 1” in the title. It actually picks a very dark place to end the film with Voldemort laying hands on a powerful artifact that he has been seeking throughout the movie.

And the first half of this book was one of my least favorite parts of the series and not what I would call Rowling’s best work. The opening is good, action-packed, and the wedding of Bill and Fleurs is a nice touch before everything goes downhill, but then for several hundred pages I have two big peeves. Both of these are peeves I have with the book, so the fact that they are present in the movie just means that they were faithful in their reproduction:
1. Harry, Hermione, and Ron are on the run. Most of this time they seem to spend bitching at each other about whatever comes to mind. There is a reason for this bickering, but this gets old really fast.
2. The trio have a pretty much impossible task ahead of them, in the tradition of large scale fantasy plots, which is great. But the way they’re able to surmount most of this is simply wild coincidences. Three Ministry officials happen to pass by that they can capture and Polyjuice with no effort. They run into Umbridge in the elevator, who happens to be wearing the locket. Dumbledore’s gift of the Deluminator has a secondary purpose suddenly revealed that seems to be nothing but a Deus Ex Machina convenience.

Overall, though, I thought they did a very nice job with it, but I will be much more excited to see Part 2, and to see how they pull off the grand finale.

What was changed (Spoilers)

In case anyone’s curious what they changed, I only noticed a few things that really stood out, though I haven’t read it since the book was first released:
1. Hedwig died in a different manner. In the book, she was loaded in her cage on the back of Hagrid’s flying motorcycle. The motorcycle crashes into the ground at high velocity and Hedwig dies in the crash. In the movie, Harry lets her free before the chase, but she catches up to them and attacks the Death Eater who is chasing Harry. She’s killed by a green curse in retaliation, perhaps an Avada Kedavra.
2. Peter Pettigrew dies in a different manner. In the book, he actually shows mercy on Harry, but his silver hand, given to him by Voldemort, acts against his will and strangles himself. In the movie, Dobby strikes him down in some unexplained way, perhaps through his elf magic.
3. The opening scene with Hagrid and Harry on Hagrid’s motorcycle embellished way too much, having them driving on London freeways as the trailing Death Eater tosses curses that destroy innocent drivers.
4. Polyjuice potions in the movie only change appearances, but not voices. This is inconsistent with earlier movies, and also does not make sense–how can it make an effective disguise if the voice is all wrong.

Lucky Pig Studio: Grand Opening!

written by David Steffen

I have some very exciting news for you. Joey Jordan (our resident artist) and I are joining forces once again in a different webspace, this time to design and sell t-shirts (and other novelties) with designs of our own devising upon them. The name of our store is Lucky Pig Studio–just click on the name to go check out our wares. You can see a select few of our designs in this article, but we have many more available at the store, each of which can be printed on many types of goods, including t-shirts, tote bags, coffee mugs, baby clothes and more. If you order soon your order will hopefully arrive in time for Christmas, making a lovely stocking stuffer for your family or friends. We think there’s a little something there for everyone. We have 12 designs posted for now, to give you something to browse through.

Joey is the talented member of the duo. She is a fantastic artist and a truly nice person, and I’m happy to be working with her. In case you didn’t know, she’s the one who provided our awesome site art, as well as the pieces showcased in the Diabolical Art section of our site. She’s a professional illustrator, which is very clear from the quality of her work.

“What does David contribute?” I hear you wonder aloud.  Well, I just try to keep up, mostly. Some of the designs are created and perpetrated by my own hand. You can tell which ones they are because they’re the ones that look like they were not made by a professional artist. What I lack in skill, I try to make up for with humor and enthusiasm. I like to make designs that make me giggle, and I hope they make you giggle too.

We’re just getting started, so anything you can do to spread the word will be greatly appreciated. If you know someone who would enjoy our wares, please, please share a link with them. Post to your blog. Wear one of our t-shirts to a science fiction convention. Hire a sky writer plane to write our URL in the sky above New York City. Whatever you can do, thank you very much in advance.

We very much look forward to hearing from you, and we hope that you like what we’re putting together. And we’ll be feverishly working on new designs, so please stop back every once in a while to see what’s new. This shop is of the small, temporary variety. In the long run we plan to assemble a bigger shop with more products and more designs, but we are very excited about this and wanted to launch before Christmas. The homepage of the new improved store will be here.

Also, with the current kind of shop we’re working with, there’s no way to disallow certain unwise combinations, so you’ll want to avoid those yourself, particularly:
-If there is a caption with black font, you won’t be able to see it on black and some dark shirts.
-For light colored but non-white shirts, CafePress does not print white ink for white/gray parts of the image. So, the white part of a design printed on a yellow shirt will just be yellow instead.

Thank you so much for stopping by!

Other Tron-related media

written by David Steffen

Even after watching the original Tron movie, and playing the Tron 2.0 game, you’re still not satisfied and you just want more and more?

Tron (Arcade Game)

The same year the original Tron movie was released, a coin operated arcade game was released with the same title. It consisted of 4 mini-games based on the film:

Light Cycles: A top-down view of the famous light cycle game, where the player drives a motorcycle-like vehicle that leaves a solid wall behind it. The object is to make all of your opponents crash into walls.
MCP Cone: A simulation of the final battle of the movie against the MCP, trying to get past its protective plates to the MCP core.
Battle Tanks: Driving a tank, and destroying enemy tanks in a maze level.
I/O Tower: A simulation of the scene in the movie, trying to get into the I/O Tower.

I was too young to play this when it first came out, but I did play it in an arcade in the late 80s, and I thought it was fun. If you want to play it and you happen to have an Xbox 360, then you’re in luck, as you can download a demo for free or buy a full version at Xbox Marketplace.

Discs of Tron

The Tron arcade game was originally supposed to include 5 mini-games, but the fifth wasn’t included in time for the game’s release. The fifth game was released separately in 1983, titled “Discs of Tron”. In the game you face off against Sark playing a game shown in the movie, where two opponents on platforms made of concentric rings and throw energy pellets at each other, trying to destroy your opponent’s platform.

Again, I was too young to play this when it came out, and I didn’t see this in an arcade later. If you want to play this one, it is also available for download on Xbox Marketplace.

Tron:Â Ghost in the Machine

Tron also inspired a 6 part comic book series, released between 2006 and 2008. It is a direct sequel to the Tron 2.0 game. It takes place 6 months after the events of the game, following the same protagonist, Jet Bradley, who is still trying to get over the trauma he experience, after having been zapped into the game world.

I was unaware of this comic until I was looking up material for this article, but now I am looking forward to picking up a copy for myself. You can buy individual issues at Amazon or you can order the collection that combines the 6 issues into one volume.

Tron:Â Evolution

And with the release of the Tron Legacy movie next month, there’s a cross-console game tie-in. The game is released on December 7th, the movie on December 17th, so you can sort of get a sneak peak. It occurs before the events of the movie and provides some of the basis for the events of the movie. I have mixed feelings about this–the same thing was tried for the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movie. On the one hand, it was kind of neat to see some characters and hints of events before they’re revealed in the movie, but it came off as more of a marketing gimmick than actual value added.

You can’t get the game quite yet, but you can check out the official site. Once the game’s available, you should have no trouble whatsoever finding it.

Kingdom Hearts 2 level:Â Space Paranoids

You may have seen my review of Kingdom Hearts back in January. The second game was pretty much more of the same, but with more worlds to explore. One of the worlds was “Space Paranoids”, a Tron world. This was probably my favorite world of the game, especially since Sora and his friends Donald Duck and Goofy get dressed up in Tron fashion, which was pretty neat. Tron the character was available as a temporary companion to join the group as a fighter, and it was also fun to see the incarnations of the Heartless enemies.

You should be able to find the game used in a variety of places, and you can check out the game’s official website.

Southpark episode:Â You Have 0 Friends

This is one of my favorite episodes of Southpark, released earlier this year as part of season 14. Stan’s friends start a Facebook account for Stan as a surprise. Stan doesn’t want an account, because he doesn’t want to get “sucked in”, but one by one, his friends and relatives guilt trip him into adding them, as they take his lack of Facebook interaction as a sign that he isn’t a good friend. Before he knows it, he has a million friends, and the demands just get more and more. Finally he decides to just delete his account, but Facebook won’t let him do it, zapping him into the system Tron-style. Inside the system, he’s captured by guards similar to those in the movie, and everyone’s facebook account is dressed in Tron fashion. This episode was just awesome.

You can watch the whole episode for free on the Southpark Studios.

Review: Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #47

written by David Steffen

I apologize for being slow to get this out. I realize that issue #48 is already available, which I haven’t had a chance to read yet. But I feel strongly about issue #47 and I wanted to post a review of it, even if it is a bit tardy. I bought issue #47 because it includes a story by my friend Gary Cuba. I like his style and I like to buy copies of his published stories. This was the first issue I’ve read of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (ASIM) that I ever read, and I was very pleased with what I read. Pleased enough that I asked for an ASIM subscription for Christmas. Not only were my favorite stories from this issue extremely good, I liked almost all of them, and I don’t say that about many magazines. I’m letting my subscription on another magazine lap because I simply like too few of the stories, and the few stories I do like, are just not that good. This issue was so much better I am happy to send my money ASIM’s way.

One thing that I really like about Andromeda Spaceways is that their judging system works without the author’s name attached to the story. A lot of the big magazines claim that they choose their stories based on quality and not on the fame of the name, but when asked about judging without author name attached, they tend to get very defensive. With the name stripped off, the story has to stand for itself. If a big name’s story is really worthy, it will rise to the top even without the name attached, but this way second-rate rushed stories by the big names will be less likely to make it through.

I encourage you all to give ASIM a try, based on the issue that I have read, and I hope that the magazine as a whole is as consistent as this first issue was. This one was edited by Patty Jansen, one of a rotating set of editors, so I will be very interested to see how even the magazine feels from editor to editor as well.

Dig up the Vote by Patrick S. Tomlinson

The living dead have been given the right to vote. To take advantage of this, political candidates raise zombies just to collect votes. The protagonist of this story is a volunteer helping out with this process. The story begins as she’s meeting up with the pink-clad Necromancer bringing the walking dead up from the ground, and is the one in charge of feeding them and herding them to the polls and coaxing them into voting.

This story was hilarious from the beginning with the interactions with the Necromancer, to the very end.. Humor is a hard thing to pull off well, but this one had me rolling. I believe this was Patrick’s first published story, so I’m happy that ASIM took a chance on his story. It’s a great bit of comedy, well-deserving of having the coveted first story location, and it was just a lot of fun..

Dog by Stephen Watts

Dog tells of a spaceship-dwelling family living on a ship. Grandpa always insisted that they share the ship with a supernatural roommate that mostly doesn’t bother them… as long as it gets it’s scheduled tobacco offerings. The trouble is, tobacco has been illegalized and becomes harder and harder to obtain.  Grandpa always insisted on the tobacco offerings, but now that’s he’s passed away, none of the remaining family members believe in the necessity of the offerings.

This was a cool story, a nice mix of science fiction and fantasy, supernatural creatures in space. I really cared about what happened to these characters, and I was very anxious to see the story unroll. It was very good.

Killing Time by Felicity Pullman

This is the story of Jane Marshall, the widow of star football player known by everyone simply as “Bull.” Most of the story is told as a flashback, telling of their not-s0-wonderful relationship before his death. For most of the story, the speculative element isn’t very clear, but it is there soon or later.

This was the one story that I just strongly disliked. Both Jane and Bull were nasty individuals without any redeeming features whatsoever. I got the impression I was supposed to be horrified by the dark events of the story, but when bad things happened to these characters I just shrugged. The ending was a twist, but a too predictable one, and one that felt more gimmicky than natural to the story. I would’ve gotten over the ending if I’d cared at all about either character, but as it was I just wanted this one to be over.

The Ship’s Doctor by Charlotte Nash

This is another author for whom this issue is their first publication. Congratulations on that, Charlotte! The title does not refer to a doctor who happens to live on a ship; she is literally a doctor who treats ships. In this future, ships are bio-engineered creatures with real intelligence, and it is no longer just a mechanic-type job. Instead, it’s more something that’s a mix of psychiatry and medicine applied to an anthropmorphized mode of transpot.

This was a really cool idea, and well executed. It took me a little while to get into the head of the main character, but once I got the hang of her point of view, I really appreciated it. This story did a very nice job revealing a complicated setting as part of the story, instead of dumping the information all at once. Her drive, her lust to do what she does makes for a very interesting and unique character, and the other main characters were chosen to be different enough from her to allow some very interesting interplay and contrast between them. I really cared about the stakes in this story, and I was really rooting for it to turn out right.

The Machine Whisperer by Gary Cuba

This is the story of maintenance mechanic Joe, as told by his co-worker. Joe has an extraordinary knack to fix anything, almost verging on the supernatural; he seems to have an aura that alters probability wherever he goes.

I’ll be upfront and admit that I consider Gary a friend, but I do genuinely like to read his fiction. He has a distinctive style that is makes me smile, and this is a lighthearted story in Gary Cuba’s usual vein. This carries the usual lighthearted style of Gary’s work. It’s short but sweet, giving a premise, working with it, but not overstaying its welcome. I actually wouldn’t have minded if this story had been a bit longer, which is not something I say very often.

Hyu Khul and the Broth of Stone by Tam McDonald

A fable-like story, a myth telling of Hyu Khul, a man so respectful of the virtues of his wives that he would refuse to touch them. He takes on a quest to brew a potion he overhears described by the gods, which will render him invulnerable. And, in true fable fashion, it comes complete with a myth.

This one left me pretty lukewarm. The character was so far-fetched he was hard to relate to, and the moral was pretty obvious from the very first line based on that far-fetchedness. None of the people ever felt like real people, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a fable-style story, but I also didn’t really buy the situation, and I wasn’t surprised by the moral. If the moral is so blaringly obvious, it sort of defeats the purpose of telling a fable, no?

Acid by Debi Carroll

A story told by a mermaid-like creature, one of a race of such creatures fished out of the Dead Sea. Their saliva is highly corrosive, and they’re captured to use for cheap and efficient petroleum refining. The mermaids aren’t individuals in the usual sense of the word–they have a sort of race memory, where any one can draw upon memories of any of its ancestors.

I’d read this one over on Baen’s Bar–I liked it there and I liked it here. The race memory point of view was very interesting, and I really wanted to root for the mermaid collective. It takes a little while to understand the point of view at the beginning, but it is just a difficult point of view to convey. Once I understood the premise, I didn’t have any more problems following it. This was very well done.

Leeching Tinnitus by John Phillips

Tommy’s almost 17, and he’s going to live with his last living relative, Baxter, an old man living on a country estate. Tommy’s suffering a case of Tinnitus due to trauma (that’s ringing ears, for those who don’t know). Baxter goes out of his way to make Tommy’s life a living hell, especially his daily task of collecting leeches for Baxter to use as fish bait. Who will come out ahead in the end?

Baxter was a real bastard, but Tommy was such a nonentity that I didn’t really want to root for him either. The Tinnitus seemed to have no real function in the story, other than to give Tommy a distinguishing characteristic. And Tommy did need need something to make him feel more unique, but I needed something more than a medical condition to do it. Maybe I missed something. I mean, it has to be very important if it’s in the title right? The leeches were certainly central to the story, but really were nothing more to me than a grossout factor. Grossout is okay, if it’s just part of another story, but when grossout is all there is… it’s just enough for me.

The Backdated Romance by Ferrett Steinmetz

A time travel love story. Unexpectedly, David approaches Barbara, telling her deepest secrets she’d never told anyone. She knew him before this, but only as an acquaintance, and he goes on to explain he’s from the future after they’d been married. A very cool start, and in true time travel fashion, it gets more complicated as it goes on.

I loved this story. I love a good time travel story and this was a great one. The problems presented were unique and interesting, and the dynamic between David and Barbara was very interesting, with the early years of their history already in David’s past. There were some great twists and turns here, and the story was well done. I’m not surprised like I was such a fan of Ferret’s story–his story “Suicide Notes, Written by an Alien Mind” made #2 on my Best of Pseudopod list.

written by David Steffen

I apologize for being slow to get this out. I realize that issue #48 is already available, which I haven’t had a chance to read yet. But I feel strongly about issue #47 and I wanted to post a review of it, even if it is a bit tardy. I bought issue #47 because it includes a story by my friend Gary Cuba. I like his style and I like to buy copies of his published stories. This was the first issue I’ve read of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (ASIM) that I ever read, and I was very pleased with what I read. Pleased enough that I asked for an ASIM subscription for Christmas. Not only were my favorite stories from this issue extremely good, I liked almost all of them, and I don’t say that about many magazines. I’m letting my subscription on another magazine lap because I simply like too few of the stories, and the few stories I do like, are just not that good. This issue was so much better I am happy to send my money ASIM’s way.

One thing that I really like about Andromeda Spaceways is that their judging system works without the author’s name attached to the story. A lot of the big magazines claim that they choose their stories based on quality and not on the fame of the name, but when asked about judging without author name attached, they tend to get very defensive. With the name stripped off, the story has to stand for itself. If a big name’s story is really worthy, it will rise to the top even without the name attached, but this way second-rate rushed stories by the big names will be less likely to make it through.

I encourage you all to give ASIM a try, based on the issue that I have read, and I hope that the magazine as a whole is as consistent as this first issue was. This one was edited by Patty Jansen, one of a rotating set of editors, so I will be very interested to see how even the magazine feels from editor to editor as well.

Dig up the Vote by Patrick S. Tomlinson

The living dead have been given the right to vote. To take advantage of this, political candidates raise zombies just to collect votes. The protagonist of this story is a volunteer helping out with this process. The story begins as she’s meeting up with the pink-clad Necromancer bringing the walking dead up from the ground, and is the one in charge of feeding them and herding them to the polls and coaxing them into voting.

This story was hilarious from the beginning with the interactions with the Necromancer, to the very end.. Humor is a hard thing to pull off well, but this one had me rolling. I believe this was Patrick’s first published story, so I’m happy that ASIM took a chance on his story. It’s a great bit of comedy, well-deserving of having the coveted first story location, and it was just a lot of fun..

Dog by Stephen Watts

Dog tells of a spaceship-dwelling family living on a ship. Grandpa always insisted that they share the ship with a supernatural roommate that mostly doesn’t bother them… as long as it gets it’s scheduled tobacco offerings. The trouble is, tobacco has been illegalized and becomes harder and harder to obtain.  Grandpa always insisted on the tobacco offerings, but now that’s he’s passed away, none of the remaining family members believe in the necessity of the offerings.

This was a cool story, a nice mix of science fiction and fantasy, supernatural creatures in space. I really cared about what happened to these characters, and I was very anxious to see the story unroll. It was very good.

Killing Time by Felicity Pullman

This is the story of Jane Marshall, the widow of star football player known by everyone simply as “Bull.” Most of the story is told as a flashback, telling of their not-s0-wonderful relationship before his death. For most of the story, the speculative element isn’t very clear, but it is there soon or later.

This was the one story that I just strongly disliked. Both Jane and Bull were nasty individuals without any redeeming features whatsoever. I got the impression I was supposed to be horrified by the dark events of the story, but when bad things happened to these characters I just shrugged. The ending was a twist, but a too predictable one, and one that felt more gimmicky than natural to the story. I would’ve gotten over the ending if I’d cared at all about either character, but as it was I just wanted this one to be over.

The Ship’s Doctor by Charlotte Nash

This is another author for whom this issue is their first publication. Congratulations on that, Charlotte! The title does not refer to a doctor who happens to live on a ship; she is literally a doctor who treats ships. In this future, ships are bio-engineered creatures with real intelligence, and it is no longer just a mechanic-type job. Instead, it’s more something that’s a mix of psychiatry and medicine applied to an anthropmorphized mode of transpot.

This was a really cool idea, and well executed. It took me a little while to get into the head of the main character, but once I got the hang of her point of view, I really appreciated it. This story did a very nice job revealing a complicated setting as part of the story, instead of dumping the information all at once. Her drive, her lust to do what she does makes for a very interesting and unique character, and the other main characters were chosen to be different enough from her to allow some very interesting interplay and contrast between them. I really cared about the stakes in this story, and I was really rooting for it to turn out right.

The Machine Whisperer by Gary Cuba

Hyu Khul and the Broth of Stone by Tam McDonald

Acid by Debi Carroll

Leeching Tinnitus by John Phillips

The Backdated Romance by Ferrett Steinmetz


Tron 2.0 (Bygone Game Review)

written by David Steffen

And now for a Bygone Game Review, a new label I made up to avoid getting complaints about the age of the review material. Yes, I know this isn’t a new game, but it has aged well, and is still well worth playing.

In 2003, twenty-one years after the release of the Tron movie, Buena Vista Entertainment released a sequel. It’s not a movie–it’s a game, a first person shooter (FPS) to be exact). The game somehow seems to have slipped under many gamers’ radars. I hadn’t come across it until five years after its release. Fans of the original movie will enjoy the digital world setting, reminiscent of the original in many ways yet also new and shiny, like 20 years of system upgrades in one fell swoop, and there are plenty of nods to the original for the dedicated fan to catch. But playing the game does not require familiarity with the original movie, so it could draw in new fans of the Tron universe, just in time for the long-awaited of the Tron movie sequel due out next month: Tron Legacy.

Story

In the game setting, just like in real life, twenty-one years have passed since the events of the Tron movie. ENCOM has since been taken over by Future Control Industries (fCon). Alan Bradley (still voiced by Bruce Boxleitner) still works for the company. After the events of the original story, he married his then-girlfriend Lora, and together they had a son named Jet. Lora has died by the time of this game, and Alan has talked Jet into hiring on to fCon as a video game developer. Even though Lora is dead, actress Cindy Morgan still has a voice acting part, lending her voice to the program Ma3a.

The game starts off when Jet gets digitized by the same invention that had digitized Flynn in the movie. Really, guys, don’t you think it’s time to create some safety features for that thing? But then, I suppose, we wouldn’t have any more Tron stories, and that would be sad, so never mind. At this point in the game, Jet is unaware of the laser or any of the events of the movie, so this is all new to him. He is greeted by the program Ma3a , Alan’s computer system’s AI, who has chosen to digitize him to fight the corruption caused by Thorne, a virus that is running rampant in the company network. She refers to Jet as Alan 2, not understanding the difference between program versions and human generations, which is a cute touch.

Meanwhile, the Kernel, the leader of the ICP security programs, detects Jet’s intrusion into the system and incorrectly determines him to be the source of the corruption. So Jet is opposed by not only the virus-corrupted programs he comes across, but also by the ICP’s as he tries to make his way across the virtual world to stop the corruption. As he goes, a larger and more sinister plot reveals itself which I will leave for you to discover. It’s a good story to accompany a great game, well worth the time.

The Visuals

Wow is this game pretty! They perfected a really neat glowing light effect for this game so all the lighting has a bit of aura to give it a very neon look. The upgraded ICPs look awesome. The settings are very simplistically designed and are often just black with neon highlights, but the effect is very neat looking and otherworldly. At one point in the game you venture out into the Internet, and that was the coolest of all, it looks like a digital Las Vegas it was so lit up!

Gameplay

The controls are pretty much standard FPS controls, or can at least be configured that way. My preferred control system has mouse look on and uses the left and right arrows on the keyboard to strafe. This is how I play most any FPS, as it allows you to easily look in any direction, a necessary attribute in multi-elevation levels or with flying enemies.

You have two main attributes: health and energy. If your health runs out, you die. Your energy is an expendable and replenishable resource used for a variety of functions, including weapon ammunition, and downloading of new subroutines (I’ll explain that more later).

The weapon you start the game with, the base weapon, is the Disc Primitive, the Frisbee-like blue disc from the movie. It is the only weapon that takes zero energy to use, but it has a relatively slow rate of fire because you have to wait for the disc to return to you before you can throw it again. It’s surprisingly useful because it is fairly powerful, and the ICP’s armor does not protect very well against it. Not only that, but it doubles as a defense that is very effective against the ICP’s similar disc weapons. You can hold the disc in front of you to deflect an ICP-thrown disc. This will leave the ICP defenseless for a few moments while their disc bounces around, before they can retrieve it, so you can use the opportunity to get a couple blows in with your own disc. It’s not very useful, though, if faced with a crowd of enemies, because you can’t block everyone’s attacks, and the blocking only works against disc attacks, not the ball-based attacks of the viruses.

Most of the other weapons in the game behave in similar fashion to real-life weapons, so they should already be pretty familiar to FPS players. The Rod Primitive is like a stun prod. The Ball Primitive is like a grenade. Upgrades can be acquired for each of the primitives as well, such as the Suffuser, which makes the Rod behave like a shotgun, the LOL which makes the Rod behave like a sniper rifle, and the Ball Launcher, which makes the Ball behave like a rocket launcher.

Besides this, Jet has certain attributes that can be upgraded by increasing his version number, which he does by collecting a certain number of build points. The attributes you can enhance are things like your maximum health and maximum energy, which both start at 100, as well as your weapon efficiency for energy use. Build points can be acquired in two ways. First, you get build points automatically as you complete mission objectives, such as gaining access to a new area. Second, there are a limited number of collectible build points scattered here and there throughout each level, so it is worth your time to search thoroughly to find them all.

Instead of collecting keys to unlock doors, like you might do in a real world setting, you collect permission bits, each filling in one of 8 positions on your permission ring. Permissions are required for a variety of things, the most obvious being the opening of doors. Also, with certain permissions, you can deactivate security rezzing stations, which are alarm buttons that ICPs can press to call in reinforcements.

Okay, so that’s all pretty straightforward stuff, sort of cookie cutter FPS elements. Now this is where it gets really interesting, especially with archive bins and subroutines.

Archive bins appear as clear cubes in the world, with moving lights inside them, and if you can access one, you can download its contents. Its contents may include emails among people in the company, which help give background to the story, or other things like subroutines (which I will get into later). Once you have the permissions, you can see what is inside the archive bin at no cost, but downloading costs energy, the same energy that powers your weapons so you have to careful about what you download unless you have a handy energy source, or you could be backing yourself into a corner with no ammunition. The download costs varies from object to object, and is generally higher the more useful the object. Emails are usually a cheap 5 energy units, because they are really only for backstory, not helpful to the gameplay itself. Subroutines are generally more expensive, some significantly more expensive. Which brings us to subroutines.

Subroutines are the most unique part of Tron 2.0 gameplay. Each of them performs a particular function. For instance, the Fuzzy Signature subroutine makes your footsteps make less noise, which is important for sneaking up on guards. Any weapons besides the primitives (such as the Suffuser and the Ball Launcher) are subroutines. There are subroutines for a wide variety of uses, like protection from virus corruption, armor upgrades, and adding corrosive damage to your weapons. You gather subroutines as the game goes on by downloading from archive bins or from enemy core dumps (the remains after they die, er, de-rez). Once you collect a subroutine, then you can always equip it, but you can’t equip everything at once. As the game goes on, you travel from one computer to another, to a PDA, to the internet, and so on. Each system has different subroutine space configurations–some have ample memory so that you can trick yourself out with a bunch of subroutines, and others have only small amounts, so you have to be very careful what you choose. Is it more important to have that body armor, or the shotgun-like Suffuser weapon? You have to make that choice.

Here and there you will find an optimizer that you can use to upgrade just one of your subroutines. You’ll acquire most subroutines in an Alpha version, and they can be upgraded to Beta, then to Gold. The more upgraded a version, the less space it will take up in the system memory, and the more effective it will be. An Alpha routine requires three adjacent slots, while a Gold routine only requires one, and the gold version is also much better in some way or another (for instance, weapons will cause more damage, or virus protection will be more effective).

This may sound complicated, but it’s really not. The in-game tutorials are very well done, helping you learn how to play AS you play. Some of the subroutines are much more useful than others, and some are more useful against certain enemies than others. You can pause and swap in different subroutines at any time, so you can always try to pick the best ones for the current situation.

The Difficulty

I’m playing through the game again now, to get in the mood for the upcoming movie, and I’m having more trouble with it than I remember having the first time. Maybe I played the first time on Easy difficulty, this time I’m on Medium. Most of the time I can progress fine, and I try not to overuse the QuickSave function, but there are a few times when I was having difficulty and then QuickSaved in a bad place, where I was backed into a corner with low energy, surrounded by ICPs and no recent saves to fall back on. I saved in a momentarily safe place, but it was in a dead end surrounded by ICPs and I had to try to go through it a dozen times before I powered my way through using the disk weapon as efficiently as I could and zigzagging all over to make myself a hard target, and I just barely limped to the next energy source with only 3% health. After that point I tried to more meticulously make save files in a rotating fashion rather than relying on QuickSave as the primary restore method–since each QuickSave overwrites the previous QuickSave. I’m less than halfway through the game now, so we shall see how well I do when I run up against the big bad boss characters later in the game.

Light Cycles

And the light cycles are back from the first game, upgraded just like everything else. In case you’re not familiar with them, they look like motorcycles, but they are incapable of stopping and they leave a solid wall wherever they pass. The objective is to be the last one standing, and you do so by outmaneuvering your opponents, placing a wall in front of them and forcing them to run into it. This upgraded version adds powerups to the mix, such as a speed boost, and a one-shot missile which can destroy enemy bikes, or punch holes through a bike-wall to allow you to pass safely through, giving it both defensive and offensive uses.

The main FPS game has some light cycle segment as part of the progression, but there’s also a light cycle tournament accessible through the main menu, with escalating difficulty levels, novelty arenas, making that a worthwhile game in itself. I hear you can also play this online, though the game is so fast-paced that the slightest lag will doom you, so it would probably be better served over a LAN.

Overall

I highly recommend this game for everyone who likes FPS, whether they are fans of Tron or not. And if you are a fan, find the game and play it to get in the mood for the upcoming movie!

Classic Movie Spotlight: Tron

written by David Steffen

Okay, so most of you who follow Diabolical Plots have probably seen Tron, or at least are aware of it. But I wanted to do a quick overview in preparation for the Tron sequel movie coming out next month. Yes, after many years of rumors of a Tron sequel, it looks like it’s actually going to happen this time, with the name Tron Legacy. There have been full fledged previews, larger scale movie promos and the like. It really appears to be happening. I believe the release date planned is just before Christmas 2010. I’m excited to see Tron with modern special effects, and original cast members Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner are even in the sequel, which is amazing to get them involved in a sequel to a movie 28 years old.

The original movie was released in July 1982. Honestly, I didn’t have much interest in it at the time. This may have had something to do with the fact that I was 6 months old. My brother, however, took it upon himself to ensure that, when I was old enough to appreciate them, I would be well-versed in 80s SF/fantasy movies, including Tron, The Last Starfighter, Flight of the Navigator, and Labyrinth.

Tron was written and directed by Steven Lisberger and was one of the first major studio movies to make extensive use of computer graphics. The graphics are quite dated by now, of course, but when you watch it just keep in mind that these special effects were amazing in 1982. The previews for Tron Legacy, of course, have updated computer graphics, loads of shiny goodness.

Premise

Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is an ex-employee of software corporation ENCOM. Outside of work hours, he was spending his free time developing innovative video games. His fellow developer Ed Dillinger (David Warner) stole his programs and presented them to ENCOM as his own work. ENCOM released the games which rocketed into popularity, especially Flynn’s pride and joy, “Space Paranoids”, earning Dillinger promotion after promotion, all the way up to the head of the company. And eventually Dillinger fired Flynn.

Now Flynn is on the outside, trying to hack into ENCOM’s network to find evidence of Dillinger’s wrongdoing so that Flynn can prove he’s the real author. But ENCOM’s new super-program, the Master Control Program (MCP) finds the intrusion, and cuts off Flynn’s security clearance. In the process, it also temporarily cuts off clearance to a current employee, Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), who finds out from Dillinger about the Flynn intrusion. Alan and his girlfriend Lora (Cindy Morgan) go to Flynn and hear his story, and together they decide to sneak into the ENCOM building at night and try to find evidence of the theft.

Once inside, Lora logs into her workstation for Flynn to use, and this is where the main plot really takes off. Her workstation is placed right next to the testing station of her current research project: a new technology that, with a laser and liberal amounts of handwavium, can transport physical objects into a datastream and back out again. While Flynn is doing his thing at the keyboard, the MCP seizes control of the laser and zaps him into ENCOM’s digital universe.

In the digital space, all of the programs wear the faces of the users who wrote them, but they all wear uniforms that cover their hair and look sort of like body armor. The special effects of this are very interesting. The uniforms and even the faces of the programs are all grayscale, no flesh tones, but the uniforms have neon lines tracing over their contours. The environment is a very simple digitial enviro, much of it being wireframes or simple polygon.

Flynn is captured and, along with a group of rebel programs, asked to renounce their belief in the users, who the programs tend to think of as gods. Those who refuse are forced into a gaming arena to fight each other to the death in a variety of games. During a round of the now iconic light cycle game (where the players drive motorcycles that leave solid walls behind them, the objective is to force your opponent to crash into a wall before you do), Flynn escapes the arena along with two other programs. One of those programs is the title character Tron, a security program written by Alan Bradley (and thus also played by Bruce Boxleitner). They team together to try to take down the tyrant that is the MCP.

My Views

This movie deserves credit for being one of a number of successful science fiction movies of the 1980s that helped define science fiction movie fandom. It’s fun, it has Jeff Bridges (who I’ve always liked), and it had a lot of cool ideas. Some of the effects are still pretty cool, like the spinning splendor of the MCP, and much of the work here laid the groundwork for modern special effects. Modern special effects can be a blessing or a curse, as they look very shiny, but are too oftenÂused to replace plot instead of enhance it. But special effects can be a great thing.

That doesn’t meanÂthat Tron isÂwithout its faults. Mostly, the middle of the film just gets a little long, and seems to serve as a showcase for the graphics, but doesn’t provide much in the way of plot. Especially the long, drawn-out chase scene with the MCP’s tanks chasing after our heroes’ light cycles in a long canyon. And in scenes like that, what I really want to know is what part of the computer network that represents. They are supposed to exist inside of the network after all. When one of the tanks falls off a cliff, what does that mean in the structure of a computer: nothing, really. I wish a little more thought had been given to the settings so that they each corresponded to something meaningful in the hardware or software of a computer.

Similarly, even though the characters in the story are supposed to be programs, they’re never particularly convincing as programs. Keep in mind that I may only have this nitpick because I write programs for a living, but programs don’t work that way. These programs look like people, but more than that, they really are little people, only with a different world to live in. This doesn’t really make all that much sense with this world supposedly being a manifestation of a computer network’s interior. In reality, an accounting program can only do accounting, not work together with security programs to infiltrate the MCP. And some of the actions of the programs also don’t really make sense. At one point in the movie Flynn (in the computer) kisses a program written by Lora. His motivations in this are clear, as his love for her is forbidden in the real world because she is with Alan, but what does the exchange mean from her point of view? I could make an obvious joke here about “interfacing”, but I really am curious what a kiss would accomplish/represent/imply to a program’s thinking.

If you’re interested in the development of special effects, see this movie. If you are a hardcore geek, see this movie. It may not be something for everyone, and again, the special effects are very dated, but if you can look past that, you might enjoy this. And I hope that the new movie makes good use of modern special effects without using them as a crutch. I can hope!

“Green Room” Writing

written by Phil Brucato, reprinted from his LiveJournal page

Not everything in a story happens on the page. When an author writes material that occurs “offstage,” that so-called “green room writing” may inform the events that the audience sees. Giving foundations for the characters, their motivations, personalities and activities, green room writing may well feel like wasted effort. Trust me, though , it’s really not.

I coined the term green room writing when describing the many false starts I had with my short story “Ravenous.” An intense urban faerie tale inspired by my experiences in a heavy metal group, “Ravenous” featured the implosion of the narrator’s band in mid-gig. The story’s first few drafts began in the “green room” , the often-cramped backstage space where performers wait before a show. My original versions of the tale started with the bandmates sniping at one another while a warm-up group performs out front. By the time the first show ends, all five members of the narrator’s group are ready to blow†and soon do.

It didn’t work for me, though. The characters seemed realistic, the dialog zinged, the tension radiated in all directions†and yet, it didn’t work. I pounded through two or three drafts of the opening like this, wondering why my inner critic kept pouting at it.

Then it hit me: The action didn’t begin in the green room. It started as the band stepped onstage , tense, pissed off, surging with adrenaline and facing a drunk, voracious crowd.

“Ravenous” doesn’t kick in when the music does , that option seems too abrupt, and doesn’t give the reader time to care about the characters. (I know; I wrote that version, too.) The tale starts just before the lights go up, with five fiercely terrified young people ready to pounce and be pounced on in return. “I’ve got that just-before-the-cages-open feeling in my chest,” says our narrator, Nikita. The bomb’s just about to explode, and in the next few paragraphs, it does.

By the time I wrote the band’s detonation, I knew every character on stage. Each one spoke with a distinctive voice; each had a unique personality. I knew how the bandmates looked, what they wanted, why they blew up in the ways they did. That scene essentially wrote itself. From first draft to final, I changed hardly a word of it.

I was able to write that scene the way I did because of the various passes I’d run through in that green room. Although they didn’t appear in the final story , nor should they have appeared , those literally offstage brainstorming sessions informed all that followed afterward.

Green room writing can feel frustrating. Personally, I get annoyed when my Muse dictates something that probably won’t make it to the final draft. I often feel like I’m wasting my time, and that goes double if I actually like what I’ve written and know at the time that no one but me (and possibly my editorial first-readers) will see it. That said, I realize that green room writing is helpful†even, sometimes, essential to a good story.

Sure, I’ve written many tales that leapt full-force from my imagination, with engaging characters and fascinating action intact. It CAN happen that way†but it doesn’t always. More often than not, especially with long or complicated storylines, I need to “waste” time and words figuring out what happens in the green room. As frustrating as it might be to throw scenes out or re-write that damned first hook yet AGAIN (yes, Holy Creatures To and Fro, I’m looking at you!), those secret stories we tell in the green room can make the ones seen in the spotlights sing.

Author, dancer, hypercreative malcontent and more, “Satyr”Phil Brucato has been a professional writer for 20 years. His work spans from game design with White Wolf Game Studio, West End Games, Laughing Pan Productions, and Silver Satyr Studios; to interviews and articles for BBI Media and Realms of Fantasy Magazine; essays in Disinformation Press; and fiction in various venues. Oh, yeah – and a webcomic called Arpeggio, too. Also, check out his Facebook Author page, and Steampunk Tales.

Not everything in a story happens on the page. When an author writes material that occurs “offstage,” that so-called “green room writing” may inform the events that the audience sees. Giving foundations for the characters, their motivations, personalities and activities, green room writing may well feel like wasted effort. Trust me, though , it’s really not.

I coined the term green room writing when describing the many false starts I had with my short story “Ravenous.” An intense urban faerie tale inspired by my experiences in a heavy metal group, “Ravenous” featured the implosion of the narrator’s band in mid-gig. The story’s first few drafts began in the “green room” , the often-cramped backstage space where performers wait before a show. My original versions of the tale started with the bandmates sniping at one another while a warm-up group performs out front. By the time the first show ends, all five members of the narrator’s group are ready to blow†and soon do.

It didn’t work for me, though. The characters seemed realistic, the dialog zinged, the tension radiated in all directions†and yet, it didn’t work. I pounded through two or three drafts of the opening like this, wondering why my inner critic kept pouting at it.

Then it hit me: The action didn’t begin in the green room. It started as the band stepped onstage , tense, pissed off, surging with adrenaline and facing a drunk, voracious crowd.

“Ravenous” doesn’t kick in when the music does , that option seems too abrupt, and doesn’t give the reader time to care about the characters. (I know; I wrote that version, too.) The tale starts just before the lights go up, with five fiercely terrified young people ready to pounce and be pounced on in return. “I’ve got that just-before-the-cages-open feeling in my chest,” says our narrator, Nikita. The bomb’s just about to explode, and in the next few paragraphs, it does.

By the time I wrote the band’s detonation, I knew every character on stage. Each one spoke with a distinctive voice; each had a unique personality. I knew how the bandmates looked, what they wanted, why they blew up in the ways they did. That scene essentially wrote itself. From first draft to final, I changed hardly a word of it.

I was able to write that scene the way I did because of the various passes I’d run through in that green room. Although they didn’t appear in the final story , nor should they have appeared , those literally offstage brainstorming sessions informed all that followed afterward.

Green room writing can feel frustrating. Personally, I get annoyed when my Muse dictates something that probably won’t make it to the final draft. I often feel like I’m wasting my time, and that goes double if I actually like what I’ve written and know at the time that no one but me (and possibly my editorial first-readers) will see it. That said, I realize that green room writing is helpful†even, sometimes, essential to a good story.

Sure, I’ve written many tales that leapt full-force from my imagination, with engaging characters and fascinating action intact. It CAN happen that way†but it doesn’t always. More often than not, especially with long or complicated storylines, I need to “waste” time and words figuring out what happens in the green room. As frustrating as it might be to throw scenes out or re-write that damned first hook yet AGAIN (yes, Holy Creatures To and Fro, I’m looking at you!), those secret stories we tell in the green room can make the ones seen in the spotlights sing.

The Skill of Critiquing Part One: Guidelines for Etiquette

written by David Steffen

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, the number one way to improve your own writing is to read and critically evaluate other people’s writing. You don’t have an emotional attachment to their work as you do to your own. By learning to examine their work with a cold eye, you can learn what you like and don’t like in a story. Critiquing is a skill which is just as much based on social interaction as it is with prose examination. I’ve read critiquing advice elsewhere, which includes such statements as “don’t critique the critiquer” and “don’t rewrite the story for the author”, but here I have categorized and prioritized critiquing advice into larger categories, and split it between “how to critique” and “how to be critiqued”, as well as a couple of general statements.

I list them as rules here, but of course no one will be enforcing them but yourself. You can think of them as guidelines, if you like, but I do think that your critiquing will be more happy and productive, both for giving and receiving critiques, if you follow these guidelines.

How to critique

6 simple “rules”. Of course, there’s no one enforcing these, so there’s not really rules, but more guidelines of etiquette. I think your critiquing relationships will be much happier and more productive if you keep these in mind.

1. A Critique Should Help the Author

Bottom line, and without exception, the primary purpose of writing a critique should be to help the author. Anything that interferes with this should be avoided. I know, I suggested above that you should critique to improve your own skills, and that’s good too, but you can do that part while reading only, not writing critiques. When you write the critiques themselves, that is where these guidelines come into play. All of the other rules tie into this, the most important of all.

2. Don’t be a Dick

Resist the urge to compose nasty, antagonistic responses to a story, no matter how clever you think you are. If you feel a snark coming on, write a quick blog post to get it out of your system. No matter how little you liked the story, a real person wrote it. If you get your jollies off of trying to crush newbie writers’ fledgling hopes, you are in the wrong place. Writers have enough negativity to deal with, bearing the weight of all the rejections piled on them by editors (I’m not complaining about editors, they reject most submissions because they can’t buy everything, it’s just the way the system has to work), and they need anything but another source of negativity.

This ties into Rule #1, because a nasty, abusive response to a story does not help the author. By all means, tell the author, in detail, what you didn’t like about their story, but take a moment to consider how you want to say it. Keep your comments about the story itself, not about the author.

3. This is Not Your Story

Your objective as a critiquer is not to rewrite the story based on your own vision. Remember that this is not your story. Do NOT tell them to write a different story. Do NOT try to rewrite the story for them–I’ve actually received some critiques which literally rewrote a story from beginning to end for me, which is the farthest thing from helpful. Do NOT try to make their style fit your style. Your job is not to make it the best story you can write, but to make it the best story THAT story can be.

This ties into Rule #1, because if you try to rewrite the story yourself, then it is no longer the author’s story. Trying to do the author’s job for them is not helping the author.

4. Don’t be Afraid to Say What You Think

For a worthwhile critiquing relationship, it is your responsibility as a critiquer to express how you actually feel about the story. If you don’t feel comfortable with this, then you’re not ready for critiquing. The way I figure it, if I want to be certain of positive comments, I’ll share a story with my mom. If I want to get feedback that will help me improve the story, I’ll ask someone for a critique. Now, that doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to express positive comments, only that all of your positive comments should be sincere. And always keep in mind Rule #2.

This ties into Rule #1, because a critiquer who is afraid to point out what they see as flaws in a story is not of much use. If the author asks for a critique, then they are asking for honest feedback, even if it is not positive.

5. Explain

Positive or negative, whatever you do, be specific, explain what you mean. “This story was great” or “This story was terrible”, neither one is particularly helpful, unless you go into more detail. You could say you liked the strong characters, or that you disliked the ending because it felt too improbable. You could say you thought the opening line was hilarious, or that the 2nd person narration was distracting. Just get specific (always keeping Rule #2 in mind). The worst of all vague comments is along the lines of “the writing could use some work.” If you think that’s the case, explain why. For instance, the sentence structure could not vary enough, the protagonist’s name is used too often, or pronouns are often used in a way which makes the antecedent unclear.

This ties into Rule #1, because vague comments are difficult to translate into actual story changes. Take the effort to convert vagueries into specifics, and your critique will have more effect.

6. Find the Good and the Bad

When you’re reading a story for critique, there may very well be tons of negative things you want to say, and as Rule #3 says, you ought to say them. But critiques don’t have to be all bad news. If there are aspects of the story that you liked, you should say those too. Don’t make up things that you like, just seek them out. Starting the critique off with positives and shifting to negatives seems to work pretty well; it establishes a set of story aspects that you don’t think need to change, giving a foundation for any future suggested changes to be built upon.

This ties into Rule #1, because it’s just as important for the writer to know what people liked as what they disliked. This way they can make more informed decisions about what to change and what to leave unchanged. Also, if a particular person always gives unrelentingly negative critiques, the writer may feel bad and may just stop sharing stories with them. By mixing in positive comments, you help maintain a balance with the writer, and maintain a happy critiquing relationship.

How to be critiqued

Some of these rules will be familiar, but seen from the other perspective

1. A Critique Should Help the Author

Yup, the same Rule #1, except in this case, the author is you. You can’t control what kind of critiques you will receive, but you can control how you react to them.

2. Don’t be a Dick

Not every critiquer who reads your work is going to follow any kind of etiquette. I like to use critique forums, but one drawback of them is that there is no entrance exam. Most people are generally trying to be helpful, but the occasional person is just a troll, plain and simple, trying to piss off as many people as they can manage. They may resort to personal insults, or may gleefully try to rip your story apart in the snarkiest way possible. Hopefully this won’t happen too often, but it will happen, and you need to keep your temper when you react. If something really gets you riled up, sometimes it’s better not to react at all: Don’t feed the trolls. Trolls generally act trollish because they want attention, and by responding with rants and raves, you are encouraging their behavior. If you do react, be polite, even though they don’t deserve it. If you can manage, you might just want to say something extremely short like “Thanks for reading and commenting.” If you think the person stepped way over the line, you might consider saying something very simple like “please direct your comments about the story, not about me,” but in general, it’s probably best to just keep quiet.

This ties into Rule #1 for a couple of reasons. First, it may affect other people’s opinions on the forum. If you fly off the handle and act like a troll in response to a nasty critique, then this may affect how likely people will be to read your stuff. Second, it’s just a waste of your energy and attentions. Trying to launch a writing career is generally a very demoralizing business, trying to stay afloat above the constant stream of form rejections. If you post in response to a troll, then you’ve already spent more energy than the communication is worth. It’s best to just move on.

3. This is Your Story

As you read critiques, remember that this is your story, not theirs. Of course you should fix outright grammar/spelling/continuity errors. But you shouldn’t follow any other advice without carefully considering it first. If a critiquer doesn’t like the ending, that doesn’t mean you have to change it. You’ve still gained something by learning how the ending might not to appeal to some people. This is still valuable information.

This ties into Rule #1 because you are the author, and the story is based on your vision. If they offered comments with good intentions, then they have provided a valuable service, but that does not mean you are obligated to follow their every whim. If you follow every suggestion blindly, it will become a story by committee, with all the appeal diluted to the equilibrium of the common vote. It’s good to get opinions from people with a variety of tastes, but if you feel the need to follow all of them, the result will be a bland mishmash, not the gleaming story you hope for.

4. You Don’t Always Need to Say What You Think

It’s the critiquer’s responsibility to say what they think, but that’s not true of the writer. What do you do if someone says a comment which you think is totally incorrect, maybe pointing out an aspect of the story that they see as a flaw, but you see as a strength? You don’t need to tell them you disagree, or that you’ll be disregarding their suggestion. This ties in closely with #3. You won’t be following every person’s advice, but you don’t need to point this out to them, and you don’t need to tell them where their critique is wrong.

This ties into Rule #1, because if you are constantly telling critiquers that you are not going to take their advice, they may come to the conclusion that their critiques are not being taken seriously, that you do not consider them valuable. And trying to convince a critiquer that their critique is wrong is a futile effort–critiques are opinions, not facts, and so they can’t really be wrong. They can just be wrong for your story.

5. Don’t Explain (Unless…)

Imagine that you’ve written a very complicated story, with a complicated plot, and a complicated setting. A critiquer responds and says that they just plain didn’t understand what was happening at any given time. They may ask you to explain. In general, it makes more sense not to explain.

This ties into Rule #1 because, when a story gets published, the reader generally does not have a direct line to the author to explain the parts they didn’t understand. The text must speak for itself, and if it doesn’t do so sufficiently, then the text itself may need to change. If the text can’t make sense without author’s explanation, then more work may need to be done to improve the story’s clarity.

That being said, there are times when explanation may be worthwhile. Using the example above about the critiquer not understanding what’s happening. If you want to make the plot possible to understand, but you’re not sure how, then it might be worthwhile to explain, to see if the critiquer has any ideas for how to bring your intended ideas out in a way that’s more clear to the reader.

General

And, just a couple things that you can keep in mind that don’t tie in very well with the previous categories.

1. Writing Skill is not Critiquing Skill

Although writing and critiquing are very closely related, skill in one does not imply skill in another. A great writer may not have sufficient practice in critiquing to pick apart how someone else’s story could be improved. And someone who has developed great skill in picking apart aspects of a story for critique may not have figured out how to fix these flaws, only how to spot them. When someone critiques your work, your instinct may be to weight their advice based on their publication history, but this is a bad instinct. Likewise, when critiquing someone else, you may be tempted to ignore flaws in their story if they are famous but, again, this defeats the purpose of critiquing at all. Each critique and each story should be taken on its own merits, regardless of the writing skill or publishing history of the person in question.

2. Turnabout

One way to help yourself follow these rules is to encourage critique exchanges, rather than one-sided critiques. In this way, you can both better learn where the strengths and weaknesses of the other person’s stories tend to lie, and you’ll be much less tempted to be a jerk if you know that the other person will have the opportunity to give you the same treatment.

3. Where to Critique?

Okay, so this isn’t so much a guideline, as a question that you might have asked yourself, that I will answer briefly.
Find a local in-person writer’s group. Most metropolitan areas will probably have one or more. My local speculative fiction writers group, for instance, is MinnSpec.
The easiest way to find people to critique you is to go to a critique forum like Baen’s Bar or Critters.
A bit more involved, and with more unpredictable returns is to arrange your own group, or just exchange critiques with individuals, perhaps via email. Stop by the forum of a writing forum or magazine forum, like the Writers of the Future forum, or Hatrack River.