[REVIEW] End of Month Reviews #80 - August 2010 [spoilers]

[Scott Eiler]

On Sep 30, 4:08Â pm, Saxon Brenton <saxonbren... at hotmail.com> wrote:
> [REVIEW] End of Month Reviews #80 - August 2010 [spoilers] Â 
>
> SW10: The Waitress From Beyond  {high concept 10}
> SW10: The New Look  
> SW10: The Earth Is A Death Trap  {high concept 11}
> Superhuman World 10 [SW10] stories
> by Scott Eiler

Heh.  It seems I've finally been busy.
>
> Â  Â  Â No, those aren't typos. Â Scott wanted to make contributions to
> previous High Concept challenges.
> Â  Â  Â All three of these stories contain one or more intriguing ideas at
> their hearts. Â But as I've gone on about before, sometimes the length of
> the Superhuman World articles aren't enough to do justice.
> Â  Â  Â (Well, maybe. Â It depends on whether an idea is being used as the
> basis of the story, or as a throwaway comment included for world building
> or even colour. Â Unfortunately an intriguing idea included for nothing
> other than colour might spark the interest of the reader, causing them
> to go 'Gee, it would have nice to follow up on that'.)

Good point.  I used to have entire web pages devoted to my colorful
world-building comments.  (e.g. http://www.eilertech.com/stories/2007/journal.htm)
I actually have followed up on one or two of those.  Maybe I should
follow up on the multiple super-powered personalities of Isaac Hayes.

> Â  Â  Â The first story, 'Waitress From Beyond' is my favourite of the three.
> It held together as a nice character piece from the World Journal Monthly,
> and gave an unusual insight into the situation of Earth as it now stands.

Thanks.
 
> Now, in real life most
> people tend to ramble when they talk and use lots of 'uhm's and 'you
> know's, so those speech patterns probably aren't realistic. Â Nevertheless
> they are evocative of the way the reader would normally *think* that type
> of person would talk, and so are well handled.

Thanks.  Some wise people on this newsgroup once told me not to
embellish the dialog.  Real newspaper accounts don't put in "um" and
"y'know" either.


> | Without Joyce, we could only pick two candidates to investigate. Â So
> | Bruce and I went after the Ivory Coast and the Vatican. Â But no luck.
> Â  Â  Â Needless to say there's two posts worth of adventures contained
> in that brief paragraph which have had to be glossed over as part of
> the broader narrative. Â I can see why it's done, but it's still a
> particularly glaring example.

If I wanted to write a novel, I'd get Our Journalists to these exotic
foreign locations, fighting off assassins.  But for this story I chose
real journalism instead.  They just made some calls to consulates and
then corroborated them with friends of friends of friends
("independent sources", that is).  But no luck.

> Â  Â  Â The third story again gives a broad overview of the situation on
> Earth... the depressing
> conclusion is that unless the Earthlings take up the offer of the
> Trillions to hibernate to ride the problems out most of them will die.

I have for once followed up on the situation on Earth, in time for the
current High Concept Challenge.  I now know what starts to happen
after that.  Earlier this year I predicted a big story line, and it's
about to come true.  So throw me another High Concept, because it's
time for more colorful world-building.

Thanks for the review, Saxon.