Author Topic: EP168: Family Values  (Read 32656 times)

CammoBlammo

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Reply #50 on: August 03, 2008, 01:35:25 PM
I enjoyed this story, and I agree it does a great job of world building. It's a great example of the old 'show, don't tell rule.' The world was built not by straight descriptions, but by implication and context.

I have a lot of trouble with this in my writing, which often becomes so bogged down with description the plot forgets to happen.



Rain

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Reply #51 on: August 04, 2008, 03:22:27 PM
I liked it, it seemed to be an interesting world. As some others have mentioned i found it hard to hear at some points i dont know if it was poor sound quality or just some sound effect



Planish

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Reply #52 on: August 07, 2008, 01:49:04 AM
It was only out of politeness that I continued listening past 5 minutes or so. I thought maybe it was going to become (intentionally) humorous, but such was not the case.

It's harder to deal with sentient jellyfish society revolving around preudosexual transfer of energy (hoeever plausible the measures) in a society of rigidly quantifiable (and possibly emperically verifiable) social hierarchical standing, that just happen to also experience the same emotions as we do in pretty much the exact same way, and also dance and engage in representative government by plebicite.  Teh anthropologist in me says, with such different starting conditions, it's just not believable that so much of their psychology and society would feel just like ours.
Yeah, what he said.
Any world-building that went on was immediately rendered pointless by the similarity to human culture. In spec-fic, the usual thing is to say "what if..." and then explore what might happen. If what happens is "same-old same-old", then the "what if" is moot. Compare with, say, the Flouwen of Rocheworld.

I just could not stay engaged in the story.

The background noise removal artifacts didn't help either.

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The Dunesteef

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Reply #53 on: August 12, 2008, 05:35:08 PM
Fun story.  It's always interesting to get a sci-fi story that doesn't include humans in any way.  It's got to be hard to write, since you don't have that character to look at things and relate them to humanity.  I really enjoyed this one.

Check out some great stories at The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine


ancawonka

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Reply #54 on: April 01, 2010, 04:57:08 PM
For those of you who enjoyed this story, it recently appeared on the Drabblecast (3/11, I think). The reding is very different and really fits with the tine of this story.




Unblinking

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Reply #55 on: April 05, 2010, 06:59:40 PM
Politics can make anything boring.  If the politics and politicians were more different than our own, maybe the differences would've interested me, but it sounded like the same old BS that goes behind any politics in the human world.  For one thing, I just really don't relate to politicians.  The system seems to be designed in such a way that only the most dishonest creeps rise to the top--that's not a criticism of any particular politician and I'm not going to get into a discussion about that.  Some candidates are better than others, yes, but the choice tends to be about who would be the least bad, and too many seem to view politics like they're betting on a sports pool--it's the team that matters, not the individual athlete, and you root for you team even if you don't think you can win or even if you think you don't deserve to win.  None of that is the author's fault, but I have trouble relating to someone whose only motivation is political power at the expense of others, and sycophantic supporters who give their everything for no other reason than some vague belief that this person is somehow better than the other.

I try to give the benefit of the doubt until about the 13 minute mark of any story before shutting it off, and it ended just before I reached that.  The most interesting part was at the very end with the heat transfer, and then it just ended without her confronting her detractor and actually getting some real conflict out of it.