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Thanks goes to Cyantreuse, Apoplexic, Jack Ike, Aiden Eldritch, Cimmerian, and whoever the fuck else looked at this in chat.
I hope you all enjoy!
SCP-2473 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-2473.
Damn. I've seen the video, I can't believe I missed the reference
They're similar stories but I made a point of being as different as possible because plagiarism is bad.
(account deleted)The Glitch Mob is great, but you forgot my additional theme music proposal... which you knew I was gonna link at least five more times between you pitching the draft and you posting this
Seriously though, this is probably my favorite thing you've written. I love the space drama aesthetic, and this also has some elements of SOMA that are perfect.
You know, I didn't mention your music idea because I knew you'd wanna do it :P
Hmm… Thoroughly impressed with quite a few things here. I like seeing the Foundation interacting with D-Class in a way that doesn't involve simply stuffing them into an SCP and then shooting them when the experiment is over. The fact that a doctor was assigned to evaluate the D- and her injuries in this one really helped my suspension of disbelief.
Also extremely pleased with the fact that the entity was reduced to using memetic visual metaphors to convey their message, as opposed to the old Scifi trope of "Well they read your mind and learned English" or "English with gibberish thrown in, because… look shiny spaceship!".
I also love that the Foundation was forced by the nature of the object and its trajectory to actually acknowledge its existence to the world governments and negotiate for the right to keep this item.
I have only two nitpicks:
"The apparatus for recycling human waste failed before recovery"
How does the Foundation know the apparatus is for recycling human waste if it's failed? It's exo-technology, so it could be for literally anything, and without observing its function, this feels like guesswork.
"the current working estimate is of 20,000 years (±5,000 years) between death and recovery"
I'd like some elaboration on how they got to this number. As is, and with the stated fact that carbon dating is inconclusive, it feels entirely arbitrary to simply stick that number there.
Other than that, I think this brings quite a bit to the table. Well done
Going down your list, gonna say a little 'bout every paragraph.
- Yeah, D-Class abuse doesn't make much sense I think.
- Sitting in a computer for 20,000 years does funny things to a girl. Does a number on her people skills, if nothing else.
- The Foundation needs governments to get along with its operations. Sometimes they gotta give world governments a few inches so they won't try to take a mile.
- You got catheters running out of a mummy's orifices and into a weird machine, it's either life support or a sex thing. Foundation assumed life support because that's slightly less horrifying.
- The radiocarbon dating wasn't a total bust, and there were other ways to determine dates.
Glad you liked it!
What the hell, If you had told me you were inspired by THAT video, I might have been able to offer some more substantial advice. :P
Even with the connection to 1795 that you've pushed and knowing what you're going for, I feel like you haven't communicated what you've imagined to someone that doesn't know what's going on. Hell, I'm not sure myself how this is supposed to make me feel, other than sad for the girl. I thought there'd be a bit more dread?
If you could explain what's going on here to me, that may help. All I'm feeling is confused by the different details I know about this.
- There's a communication gap between the D-Class and what's left of the pilot. There's unreliable narration going on.
- The girl in the sim is a digital copy of the pilot. She's not all there anymore.
- The people who built this were scared. The ship left early, with only one passenger aboard. There were supposed to be dozens more ships, each with 11+ crew. Whatever scared them got them first.
- The autopilot wasn't sure what to do, so it hid and tried to keep the little girl's mind safe until it thought the monsters were gone and the girl could finally get to her original destination safely.
I hope that helps. Lemme know if there's a way to make that clearer.
I already understood all of this, except:
The people who built this were scared. The ship left early, with only one passenger aboard. There were supposed to be dozens more ships, each with 11+ crew. Whatever scared them got them first.
I've thought on two more problems for me as well:
- First off, referring to the quoted passage above, I didn't really receive any indication of urgency from the adults other than them being busy and yelling with each other once. The fact that the girl goes to space and then goes back in a very small part of the article framed this story to seem more like an isolated accident, with a narrow perspective of the actual story (running whatever's in space).
- along with what Communism said, the story meandering and such, there really isn't anything to it besides the story: no world-building, no interesting history from this society, because it all comes from an unreliable narrator who by all appearances is just an average young girl. There was nothing to indicate that the culture and society the girl grew up in was any different from present day, as she did "normal little kid stuff".
I know you said you wanted to do something "scientific", but the rigid nature of this anomaly hurts it more than helps it for me.
The thing is, my hope for this article was that readers wouldn't take it at full face-value, that it'd get them thinking on bigger implications and allow them to draw their own conclusions. I was trying to make a point of letting the reader take the information presented (non-anomalous but anachronistic spacecraft, unreliable narrator hiding in the spaceship, a story of a planetary exodus as told by the unreliable narrator) and think about the bigger picture (pre-modern human civilization, a broken witness to that civilization and its fall). I don't know how I could better present that without spelling it out; I was intentionally oblique. Iunno, man.
I realize critiquing this may have messed up the presentation for me. Still, I guess it really is just opinion when I say that the narrative just feels long-winded and lacking in points of interest among the way, for a story that could have been communicated in just one interview log.
Sorry bout that. No hard feelings, hopefully.
One's opinion on a piece isn't gonna be cause for hostility on my part. Do you suppose the idea I sent Scantron's way is a good place to take this?
The narrative from a d-class alone?
I think it would serve to streamline the story and let it move quicker, though if you wanted to present a warning message with this article using that cross link, I'd say it would hurt it. It depends on how you'd revise the story's presentation, which as I said, just feels lacking in depth.
I'm not sure how exactly you could go about rewriting this, since many people already seemed to enjoy it. Taking another step away from Shelter wouldn't hurt, though, since the whole "girl creating worlds in her space pod" aspect was interesting in itself and I would want this thing to take a similarly dark path.
This spent a LOT of time communicating something that made me feel very little. The monologue itself wasn't really enjoyable in its own right — I had to tolerate it to get to the real meat of the information.
Overall, the SCP seems to mostly be a vehicle for a meandering story with an unspectacular narrator — it's a format I've had my fill of, and I didn't really enjoy myself at any point.
if your reading this your gay
I can see where you're coming from. There's supposed to be a lot of dependence on understatement, fridge logic, but if I didn't pull through, that's on me. Care to make any suggestions on improving the piece?
I'm not sure what, if anything, you could add or subtract from this piece as it stands that would solve the basic problems I had with it. My suggestion is to figure out what story in particular you're trying to tell, then find another vehicle to tell it — perhaps not a literal vehicle this time, and maybe something that doesn't involve extended metaphorical sequences and meandering into technical details. The details are up to you, really.
if your reading this your gay
It occurs to me, a traditional narrative from the D-Class and/or researcher perspective might be more effective at sending the message home. Do you think I could pull that off better than this?
bandages were applied at puncture points to minimize injury.
I think you mean 'infection', since she's already been injured.
I'll say this, since I've been very against the crosslinking: connecting two skips via reference to a third, completely unknown skip is a pretty darned clever idea. That there's more to it that just that is also good.
If anything kept me from upvoting, it's probably the lengthy interviews that often feel like a narrative more than someone talking. Also the fact that it's basically a dream skip.
"Appears" to be a re-entry vehicle, appears to have an ion drive, appears to have a cockpit - all those "appears" stick out like sore thumbs, be specific.
I sing of arms and the man
Storm-tossed by Hera's jealousy
I like to think that the Foundation is tentative about drawing conclusions about anomalies. However, I think, in this case, it's pretty damn obvious what each thing is, so I have made the edits you suggest.
I can honestly say that I "got" the basic message, and that's without reference to the linked SCP or the videos. Of course, I'm the kind of guy who cried watching Titanic (and not just because they messed up some of the history), so take that for what it's worth. :)
On the whole, very evocative. Of course there's no image of the girl's face; "she" doesn't remember it anymore. And the entire piece works very well on a scientific level, too.
Upvote from me, and I don't give them lightly.
There are things I like and things I don't like about this piece, which balance themselves out to a no-vote.
There are aspects of the writing which, to be brutally honest, I find annoying.
First, (as Vezaz pointed out) endless repetition of "apparent", "apparently", "appears to", and "seemingly", which is boring and dilutes the punch of whatever you're writing. If you want to have a versimilitud-istic "hey we're scientists so we leave room for alternative explanations!", you can get that out of the way in a single sentence: you could preface the interpretation of the craft's systems and function with a sentence saying "we've made the following conclusions based on our study of the spacecraft, but we're not 100% sure", or bundle that admission into a footnote near the beginning. And then you can cull every "appear" synonym thereafter.
Second, you've overused the "quotation marks as a way of indicating uncertainty or describing something by analogy" device. ('Payload', "V", "bottom" of the "V".) It smacks of lazy writing — i.e. there exists a more accurate, precise way of conveying one's meaning, but it's hard to compose, so the writer's resorted to a hand-wavy, milquetoast description. I'm not entirely innocent of this sin, so apologies for the hypocrisy in casting the first stone, but it's avoidable 99% of the time. The quotes on 'payload' aren't necessary — and if you really want to put across the uncertainty of rigorous scientists there, you could go for [obvious/clear/definite] payload. With "V", just V-shaped would have been fine, and instead of "bottom" you could have said [apex/point/vertex/tip]. You could also have described the shape as a chevron or arrowhead.
Third, there's a just a little too much technobabble. Not an egregious amount, but enough to choke up the narrative space. e.g. is it absolutely necessary for your story to say "gravity and visual sensors have been identified"? And that the solar panel is "hexagonal in shape and approximately 8 meters in diameter"? Adding scientific details to a scip is like adding spices when cooking — you need a pinch to bring the piece to life, but too much can be overpowering.
Fourth, the interview logs read like prose rather than natural speech. You hit some of the classic natural speech indicators — hesitancy, repetition, filler words — but the sentence structure is way too perfect throughout. People stop-and-start sentences a lot when talking irl, go back on themselves to add affirmative interjections ("so it was like, yeah, like I was saying before"), use sentence fragments, miss out pronouns, that kind of thing. Also, given that these interview sequences are dream-like, I'd expect her to describe them like how actual folks describe their dreams: progressive aspect ("I was walking" rather than "I walked"), re-doing their descriptions because they didn't quite get it right the first time, lots of demonstrative determiners ("there were these big clouds"), focusing on really specific, slightly absurd aspects ("the trees had these little pink flowers shaped like aeroplanes") etc. There's also some unsubtle exposition, especially that vague, slightly implausible "I just had this narratively useful sense of nostalgia, you know?"
But what I did like is the story itself. I felt genuine emotion bubble up inside of me. Scips don't often make me feel sentimental, so well done. In terms of development and pay-off, you delivered the core of the narrative pretty well. The comment from Wolfrover, and Sergeimosin's bit about treating the D-class like a human being, give a good explanation as to how that was achieved.
So — I can't believe I'm ending yet another crit with this conclusion, insufferable misery guts I am — genuine emotional punch, but let down by some aspects of the writing. No-vote.
I think I'm at a no-vote, for reasons others have discussed above, but I sort of feel like I should specify that the story just wasn't very interesting.
They're pre-modern humans, but you never went into any implications about that. It decided to land at an obscure military base, a point also unexplored. The story told by the end was: a little girl from another planet that was facing an unspecified bad thing accidentally got launched alone in a spaceship, and then eventually died but the spaceship uploaded her.
(And the damn no-face thing. I'm not entirely sure what you intended, but this wiki has made me endlessly tired of the "AND THEY DIDN'T HAVE <facial feature/s>!!" as a stylistic choice.)
I don't feel like I missed anything you mentioned in the discussion thread or missed and subtle story cues, the story just never did anything to really pay of the original mystery of "Woo, ancient alien spaceship!" in a satisfying way.
I didn't watch the short video above, but this really feels like a description of a music video for a certain kind of rock band, with a self-contained narrative that either ties up at the end of the video or serves as a half-cliffhanger for their next single, not particularly directly tied to the lyrics. The kind that are mildly pleasant to watch, but they're not Contact/The Arrival/pick your think-y sci-fi feature. You've successfully evoked that mental imagery, but the story never developed past that point.
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
