Aphelion

One good thing about December's late arrival is that I can finally catch up on those stories I hadn't read yet, including this one.

This reminded me a lot of something I wrote one summer over 20 years ago. I too figured out elaborate weapons and battle maneuvers. I carefully orchestrated the combat, painstakingly detailing each move, each missile shot, each kill. I figured, this was a soldier, so fighting was his life. Then there was another battle and another, until there was well over 100 pages of it.

Thing is, I was wrong. What I wrote was boring, because I missed the point entirely.

By and large, protagonists are people with problems, and/or with serious flaws. Their motivation is the need to solve their problem or fix themselves. Unless you're writing for military tacticians or battle historians, struggling to overcome the hero's problem is what makes it interesting for the reader. The battle should be secondary, something that is going on in the background while the real story overshadows it.

Cowpens was a great battle in the Revolutionary War. Just brilliant. But the way that battle was used (along with parts of the Battle of Guilford Court House) in Mel Gibson's movie The Patriot, made it a part of the movie's climax, as a setting for the final fight against the evil colonel.

Big Mac, to borrow his namesake's moniker, doesn't really have much of a problem. These rebels might as well have been the Marx Brothers defending Freedonia for how effective their fight was, even with weapons they shouldn't have.

And Mac needed risk, which is another main ingredient that a hero needs to face while trying to resolve his conundrum. Without it, it's just a hack and slash story, but with plasma rifles instead of swords. The audience, IMO, needs to worry about the hero. You want them to catch themselves holding their breath while they wait to see if he lives. To do that, you need to endear the character to the audience with his personality or his problem, then threaten his existence as he knows it.

So in short, my advice is to write about the person, not the battle.

Nate

First off, welcome to the forum. Nice to meet you.

Secondly, let me just say that sometimes I may come off a bit grumpy in my critiques, but it's not intentional. I've done an awful lot of these, and after a while you forget to add frills and dressings that make it polite discussion and not a lecture. I really should do better.

Your ability to craft the setting is an asset which many writers never get. They frequently gloss over the details of their worlds, and therefore what they write never seems like a real place. Here, on the other hand, I never once doubted that you knew this place inside and out. You knew what each weapon could do, and you knew where every Marine was.

Given your explanation that this was only a prologue, I can only guess that this was meant to test the waters. It was as if you wanted to see if this story would get good enough reviews to see if it was really worth it to put more work into, or try selling, the bigger piece. Thing is, it was presented in a short story venue, but it clearly wasn't a whole short story.

As a reader, I feel cheated. I expected to see an entire story, with beginning, middle, and end; character development and a climax. Just because Aphelion is a free zine doesn't mean people don't want to read complete stories. If you wanted to know if this world was good, I think you should have written a different story in the same setting and submitted that instead. Honestly, even though I realize that whole exchange in the text had a different meaning, I would have liked to seen a story about the cook trying to make a meal and get people to eat it in the midst of all this. That uses the setting and tells a more focused, easily-contained yarn.

Oh, one more thing I think you should do. Here and there, slip in a perception that uses one of the other senses besides sound and sight. That will help make your characters seem more like real people and not cardboard cutouts walking through the scene (that's an exaggeration). Combine that with the risk I mentioned before, you'll really have something to write about.

I might have gone grumpy again at the end there, sorry. The point is that I think your writing shows promise, but that you should more take into account the needs of your audience, both when crafting the story as well as when submitting it.

Nate