Author Topic: EP293: A Small Matter, Really  (Read 20813 times)

Talia

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Reply #25 on: May 24, 2011, 04:31:22 PM
Why would they still have the money?

IIRC, there was something thrown out about since they're so close to the singularities or since they're the ones making the change, they're in some sort of reality or causality "bubble" that allows them to hold onto the money. I think?

But the money isn't there. Money is a societal construct - it exists in the minds of people who aren't in the bubble. It exists in electronic records across their universe.

All it would have taken would be for the author to mention that the POV character had brought hard currency rather than electronics. A quantity of gold, or unobtanium, or whatever. That is all it would have taken to render the story utterly believable for me.

I donno, I thought it was encoded in this data chip or whatever. Perhaps the technology allowed the money to just exist on the data chip..? I don't even know if that makes sense. I guess I was assuming the chip was self-sufficient. Well, actually, she probably still had all that money four years previously, so even if it was just tied into her bank account, it would still be valid if it just acted like an ATM card of sorts, wouldn't it? It maybe wouldn't work if during that four years she'd gone bankrupt or something...



Faraway Ray

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Reply #26 on: May 25, 2011, 01:07:44 AM
For myself, I'm a little bit over time-travel/time-paradox stories at the moment. There sure has been a lot lately.
I think time travel stuff is much more attractive to writers than it is to readers.

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I think time travel stuff is much more attractive to writers than it is to readers.

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time travel stuff is much more attractive to writers than it is to readers.

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time travel stuff is much more attractive to writers...

Yes.

Or maybe it's just me. I dunno, I've been sick of time travel stories for a long time now. Either a lot of thought and space has to be devoted to working out the logic kinks and negating certain uses of the technology, or a lantern has to be hung on how it doesn't make any sense. Both feel kinda unsatisfying, IMO.

And what ground can be covered by the time-travel tale at this point? I'm not sure what Cook was going for. Cautionary tale? Be satisfied with what you have type of thing? That's been done to death. Some of the setting details were interesting, but they're relegated to stage dressing.


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ElectricPaladin

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Reply #27 on: May 25, 2011, 02:23:22 AM
For myself, I'm a little bit over time-travel/time-paradox stories at the moment. There sure has been a lot lately.
I think time travel stuff is much more attractive to writers than it is to readers.

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I think time travel stuff is much more attractive to writers than it is to readers.

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time travel stuff is much more attractive to writers than it is to readers.

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time travel stuff is much more attractive to writers...

Yes.

I think the appeal is in the story's almost unavoidable imperfection. Readers experience an imperfect story and go "well, that was disappointing" and then go back to their lives. Writers go "but... but... if only..." and then spend the next six months trying to write their own version, which invariably (at least in some readers) inspires the same reaction.

The circle of life...

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Scattercat

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Reply #28 on: May 25, 2011, 09:40:32 AM
FWIW, I'm a writer, and I hate time travel stories pretty much universally.  When I like them, it's in spite of the time travel, not because of it. 

This story... was a little too amused by its own title and ended up with the main plot being overshadowed by the setting flavor.  (Which is a lot like many RPGs I've owned, whenever they tried to feature metaplot, so I guess that's kind of apropos.)  I, like many other commenters, would rather have read a story about Stout-of-Heart instead of this story, which is both good and bad for the author.  That's the risk of putting cool setting details in, I suppose.



AlwaysBreaking

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Reply #29 on: May 25, 2011, 03:00:51 PM
This one started off good, I like the world, the idea of "hacking time", and even the characters. I was even willing to overlook the plot holes. Then it devolved into a mellow dramatic lost love story. Having the main character die at the hands of her wookie was too much. Wait, it wasn't a wookie side kick, was it?



eytanz

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Reply #30 on: May 25, 2011, 05:04:18 PM
And what ground can be covered by the time-travel tale at this point? I'm not sure what Cook was going for. Cautionary tale? Be satisfied with what you have type of thing? That's been done to death. Some of the setting details were interesting, but they're relegated to stage dressing.

For me, the part I bolded was the real issue here. The time-travel stuff was just window-dressing. In other words, I don't think that the problems this story had had much to do with the fact that it was a time-travel story (though I concede that it's an overused trope and therefore a problem in its own right). The main problem is that this story wasn't interesting enough to stand on its own, and didn't have a coherent enough take-home message to act as a cautionary tale.



blueeyeddevil

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Reply #31 on: May 25, 2011, 10:39:52 PM
My triumphant return to the boards begins...

This story: eh.

It isn't clever. Its prose is so-so. Its shyamalans the ending.

To nitpick: people have been talking about how the techs would keep the money. This reaaallllly misses the point. Why on earth would people who can control the flow of frickin' causality need money? I mean really. And they just operate out of a church basement? With one easily bribed guard?
Add this to the never explained, ridiculous 'consciousness outlives causality' bit, and this whole story feels like the clumsy first draft of a story.

 



eytanz

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Reply #32 on: May 26, 2011, 09:57:57 PM
Moderator's note: I split off the discussion about interesting and unintentional adjectives and verbs used by posters in discussing this story here.



Balu

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Reply #33 on: May 30, 2011, 10:50:44 PM
The horrendous consequences of this reminded me of a bad acid trip I had. So much so that I kept looking for it in the Pseudopod forum.

So well done, I suppose (shudder)

« Last Edit: May 30, 2011, 10:53:02 PM by Balu »



El Barto

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Reply #34 on: May 31, 2011, 02:12:43 AM
I thought I kinda liked this episode, until I read the comments here, which then activated a closed timelike loop in my brain and made me realize it wasn't as enjoyable as I thought.

As a reader (and not a writer) I do quite like time travel stories when they are done well and/or have a nice twist and I liked the twist at the end here because I think it is always fishy when a time travel tale has the protagonist remembering both realities or there's a shimmering wave that ripples out in time and slowly things modify themselves.   

Maybe some of the people we think are crazy out there really just learned the hard way what happens when you really try to time travel.



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Reply #35 on: May 31, 2011, 08:56:15 AM
   

Maybe some of the people we think are crazy out there really just learned the hard way what happens when you really try to time travel.
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matweller

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Reply #36 on: May 31, 2011, 01:11:14 PM
I thought I kinda liked this episode, until I read the comments here, which then activated a closed timelike loop in my brain and made me realize it wasn't as enjoyable as I thought.

That is exactly why I read the forums sparingly. It's like watching political commentary on tv -- it's exciting to have your beliefs challenged and discussed, but when the discussion starts to detract from your enjoyment of life, it's time to take a walk and live to chat another day.



Devoted135

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Reply #37 on: May 31, 2011, 01:50:36 PM
I thought that this story had so much potential, so many awesome moments that it was sad that it didn't really seem to take advantage of them. For example, the MC's ability to communicate inaudibly with her alien and her disdain that the scientists weren't doing the same was really cool, but never referred to again. Also, I thought her anticipation of her husband's imminent return was nicely done, and the horror of flashing back and forth was pretty well written, but then the story was very abruptly over. I personally wasn't interested in learning more about the church of Osiris, but again, why use up that many words to half explain it and then never utilize it in the story? Not to mention the plot holes that blueeyeddevil pointed out above...



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Reply #38 on: June 01, 2011, 05:38:43 PM
I enjoyed the setup more than the payoff.  I liked the IDEAS of the story more than the story itself.  Using singularities to hack time, cool.  Dual realities existing in someone's mind, cool.  Mini-wookie aliens that think humans are gods, very cool.    Data fields that are accessed telepathically, VERY cool.  The rest of the story seemed like carrier for the tech and world, like so much proverbial celery for proverbial ranch dip.

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Reply #39 on: June 02, 2011, 01:30:46 PM
The rest of the story seemed like carrier for the tech and world, like so much proverbial celery for proverbial ranch dip.

Mmmmm, proverbial ranch dip.



CryptoMe

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Reply #40 on: June 04, 2011, 05:10:01 AM
I agree with whoever said this was interesting until it devolved into a love story.
I wanted the husband's undying to be the "small matter" that actually ends up bringing down the church and catching the time-fiddling techs in some clever way. Sigh. Maybe I'll go join ElectricPaladin and get this in an alternate reality.



InfiniteMonkey

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Reply #41 on: June 04, 2011, 04:23:58 PM
My biggest objection - problem?- with this story was unclarity with the ending. Is she screaming because she remembers both realities, or because she's still existing in both realities? The latter was what I had thought. But then if her alien devotee kills her, doesn't the her that only remembers the changed reality live on? But "where" does she live on?

Or maybe I'm just a thick monkey.



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Reply #42 on: June 13, 2011, 02:43:55 PM
My biggest objection - problem?- with this story was unclarity with the ending. Is she screaming because she remembers both realities, or because she's still existing in both realities? The latter was what I had thought. But then if her alien devotee kills her, doesn't the her that only remembers the changed reality live on? But "where" does she live on?

Or maybe I'm just a thick monkey.

I was wondering that too.  When one of the two versions died I thought "Oh good, problem solved!  Now she only has one reality again.".  But I don't think that's what was intended.  I suppose that would depend on whether there were an afterlife and whether the shared consciousness could extend beyond biological life.



Scattercat

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Reply #43 on: June 14, 2011, 12:25:43 AM
Well, if you have two waves that are interfering with each other, and you shut down one wave...



LaShawn

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Reply #44 on: June 22, 2011, 07:37:02 PM
Well, if you have two waves that are interfering with each other, and you shut down one wave...

Wait..so she did live? At least the her with her husband? Then why didn't it say soooooo? ::thumps head on desk in confusion::

I echo everyone else in that this story feels like it had all these great ideas and mashed them together into a patchwork story that fell short. Pick out any of the threads and focus on a single one, and I think it would have gotten a much stronger story. Plus, I found it too wordy for the pretty much simple plot. Did we really have to hear the long drawn out specifics of time travel when there was going to be an odd flux happening out of luck anyway?

To be fair, I did love the whole paradox of the MC being aware in both timelines. I wanted to explore that more since that rarely gets explored, but was very annoyed when the deus ex alien machina stops it. Then he oh-so-conveniently kills himself. (Hmm...I guess I didn't like the alien bodyguard as much. I did feel his whole purpose was to simply kill his mistress at the end.)

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Reply #45 on: June 23, 2011, 01:20:14 PM
Well, if you have two waves that are interfering with each other, and you shut down one wave...

Wait..so she did live? At least the her with her husband? Then why didn't it say soooooo? ::thumps head on desk in confusion::

I think that her living on with her husband would've made sense, given the rest of the details, but I don't think it was supported by the text.  The fact that the end of her narrative is her death, with no hints of continuation makes me believe that she's actually supposed to be dead.



mbrennan

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Reply #46 on: June 28, 2011, 02:39:48 AM
I was waiting for the bit where we would find out that the Catholic Church of Osiris was the big, complicated project the time-hackers were working on, and that the protagonist coming in to ask them to resurrect her husband was part of the alteration of reality they'd engineered in order to lead to their desired end-state.

When the story bogged down in the long introspection before the husband's return, I suspected I wasn't going to get that story.  By then it felt clear that something was going to go wrong with his return, and all those preliminary paragraphs were there to delay it and therefore build tension (which it failed to do for me).

I agree that lots of the throwaway aspects of the setting were more interesting to me than the actual story was.