Aphelion

Sergio,

I liked the story concept, and especially the double intrigue, and the mechanisms by which the deadly activities are carried out.

As Mare stories go, this one is not bad; I've seen a few others that were a little weak by comparison (just my opinion) -- the ones that seemed to focus a bit too much on the setting or dialog and not as much on plot.

There is considerable ambiguity in the way the story ends; we don't know if the first character's virus has time to develop and become active before he meets his end. I like that; a good story doesn't always answer all the questions, and this one leaves us worried about the fate of our favorite bar. I won't be surprised if this incident gets mentioned in a subsequent Mare story.

I don't share Vila's opinion about the villain's lack of character traits; his internal thoughts prior to the meeting tell a lot, as he feels revulsion for just about everything and everyone in the place. Surely, with such a variety of life-forms in the bar, he'd find something admirable in at least one of them. This doesn't make him one-dimensional; since he still cares for the future of his own species, it rather shows him to be twisted, perhaps by a lifetime of hateful indoctrination.

Technically, the most notable glitches were the several places where the spacebar got hit in the wrong place. I think you also make too much use of bold and italic fonts; that much emphasis is unnecessary and even a little distracting. These devices are like exclamation points; use them very sparingly.

That says an awful lot, actually -- English is (I've heard) a difficult language to master if you didn't grow up with it, and you seem to understand its workings quite well.

I wonder if I should post a recommended reading list for aspiring Mare writers...

Sure! Start with everything written by Asimov, Clarke, Bester, Heinlein, Niven, Bradbury, Verne, Wells, Zelazny . . . they'll need Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, too . . .

Oh, wait . . . I haven't even read all that stuff myself . . . umm, how 'bout just reading all the Mare stories? That's what I did.

For sure, foreign languages can be difficult. The June 2010 issue of Analog magazine has a science-fact article titled "Der Mann, Die Frau, Das Kind," by Henry Honken, in which he talks about the use of gender (linguistic, not necessarily biological) in language. I was left wondering how anybody ever manages to learn a foreign language.

Yeh, Tao, I recall a few real doozies from the era of pre-microchip sci-fi . . . one was a short story, in which a crew of spacemen have their nav computer crash, and they have to calculate their path home. It's a good thing those boys were all sharp on their math skills, because they wound up doing it with pencils and paper, and maybe some crude abacuses that the ship's mechanic threw together for 'em.

We're already making the Borg look like walking antique collections . . .
the Future sure ain't what it used to be . . .