Aphelion

This was a rather creepy story, but suffered from a couple of problems.

Two things bothered me quite a bit; the first was a technical flaw. Specifically, a completely unheralded scene change between the EVA exploring the Sumerian craft, and the following discussion aboard the current exploratory craft. I got lost for a moment and had to backtrack to make sense of the scene change which should have been marked in some way.

The other thing that bothered me was the use of the humanity-as-malevolent-virus trope. It's just been used too many times. Once upon a time -- many years go -- it was shocking and thought-provoking. Nowadays, it just comes off as being preachy, or just recycled. The same goes for its accompanying theme of we're-being-controlled.

These tropes call up an underlying question also -- how do the aliens know that we're so bad? And, deeper yet, if they have this much reach, then why is there nothing suppressing them? Maybe Mr, Giles could write us a story answering those questions instead of just retreading old ideas.

I also noticed an error or two in punctuation.

I don't think that the aliens viewed humanity as a malevolent virus... they viewed them as a potential threat, in the sense that any species that managed to reach the artifact / transmitter might have the potential for interstellar travel and thus to become a competitor.

The lack of a clear transition marker between scenes in the ancient and modern ships might have been an oversight on my part -- I remove multiple paragraph breaks in the formatting process, and might have removed one that was intended as a scene separator. (It wouldn't be the first time...)

RM

Robert_Moriyama wrote: The lack of a clear transition marker between scenes in the ancient and modern ships might have been an oversight on my part -- I remove multiple paragraph breaks in the formatting process, and might have removed one that was intended as a scene separator. (It wouldn't be the first time...)

RM

Lesson to be noted: mark transitions with something more than just an extra line space.
*****

And the .75 G from an object the size of a bus would mean that you would have to spin the thing at 4366.8 radians per second. So the bus-sized craft is rotating 1390 times per second (pi radians in one spin. . .) And since I only gave it a diameter of five meters (bus). . .if you tried to stand-up your head would be very close to zero G.

It spins at over 83,000 rpm . . . and DOESN'T rip itself to bits . . . and that's not even considering what the Coriolis Effect would do to a person . . . gods, please don't send me on a mission like that . . .

This is why it's good to have a Wolfe-man around . . .