REVIEW: End of Month Reviews #65 - May 2009 [spoilers]

[Andrew Perron]

On Sun, 7 Jun 2009 09:01:35 +0000 (UTC), Saxon Brenton wrote:

>      Hmm.  There's not much to talk about this month.  That's a bit of a  
> trend, these days, isn't it?  It's at times like these I worry about  
> Arthur's conjecture (from last year) about the effects of the economic  
> downturn on RACC.  [drums fingers thoughtfully]  And of course there's  
> some guilt involved in that, since I certainly haven't produced anything  
> in the way of fiction this year, despite having a couple of things on  
> the backburner.   I should probably do something about that...

I meant to put out some stuff in May, but real life got in the way (as it
does).

>      From the perspective of writerly tricks a lecture transcript like  
> this is interesting because although it presents factual details - and  
> therefore for practical purposes acts as a Frequently Asked Question  
> document - it also has just enough narrative detail to act as a story in  
> its own right.  That narrative detail does not have to be much:  
> descriptions of turning on the screen display, or the lecturer pausing  
> for a drink, or even the simple statement of the details on screen  
> changing.  Anything to break up the exposition.  Furthermore, within the  
> exposition itself the lecturer talks more or less naturalistically, and  
> he even makes asides to clarify points of information that would be  
> known to his in-story audience.  Whether a real life audience would find  
> it an interesting story depends on several factors, including their  
> tolerance for information dumps, but at least the writer has tried to  
> make it more interesting than a straight dissertation.

I found it worked well on this level, and the interjections made the whole
thing richer rather than distracting from it.  And the information itself
was interesting indeed, especially the point that all super-types could be
easily classified as monsters.

Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, zombie attack!