(account deleted) 21 Jan 2017 18:44
First picture appears to be borked.
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(account deleted) 21 Jan 2017 18:44
First image is still borked on my side. Might just be my end, though. It was. Just had to view the image file and refresh it.
This is for the History Contest. It is also part of the Coldest War canon. Enjoy!
Image sources:
Image 0: Sourced from this image in the public domain.
Image 1: Edited from Image 102-08896 from the German Federal Archives, under CC-by-SA 3.0. Image actually depicts an early hair perming machine.
Image 2: Edited from a public domain image sourced from Pexels.
Image 3: Edited from this image of the "Buddhabrot" fractal.
Image 4: Sourced from public domain. Image is actually of the crash of a Curtiss C-46 in Nicaragua in 1960.
Critique credits:
Thanks to Taffeta, Tygently, ARD, AbsentmindedNihilist, Apoplexic, Kalinin and MrWrong for feedback before posting. MASSIVE thanks to vezaz, who, in his infinite patience, helped with brainstorming the key alt-historical content for this article as well as running through it with a comb so fine you could cut yourself on it. Seriously, your advice over the past week has been one of the best (if not the best) help I've ever gotten with sleekifying my clinical prose. You're the best, man.
Recommended theme song:
Sigur Ros - Untitled #1 (Vaka). The visuals accompanying the live version of this are hauntingly fitting. Points of light shift in the dark, suggesting fractals or vast landscapes - which slowly revolve to form the shape of a human face.
I absolutely love this. I like pretty much everything that plays with under-utilised histories, and you've managed to make a brilliant story of it. The characters have realistic, distinctive voices and it's well-paced all the way through. Well done!
Day 57. I have reached the middle of the skip. Supplies are gone. I cannot get out…
In all seriousness, despite this article's impressive length, the content does not drag, and the narrative inside only continue to ramp up the intensity with each successive collapsible. I think the use of the various testimonies is what really helped with that, as it allowed you to break from clinical tone and get right down to story telling, the kind of story telling that kept me engaged from the start of the article to the end.
Toss in a cast of strong characters, and interesting historical documents, and this article really does shine and capture the flavor of the history contest.
+1. A really neat skip.
I have problems with this, which I'll get into below, but no matter what you take away from that, please at least address your use of the word "psychological." (First collapsible)
You've basically substituted it for the word "psychic" without any modification or attempts to make the content more scientifically valid/realistic.
psychological regimen
Regimen isn't a word that's typically used in psychology. The drug portion would be psychiatric or pharmacological, and the rest is just conditioning. And, again, framing the whole thing as psychology has the problem above. Mental conditioning regimen maybe? Meaningless, but better than psychological.
personnel with extensive experience in psychological phenomena,
This phrase can refer to literally everything any human ever experiences.
Psychological resilience and psychological distress have actual technical definitions that are pretty distant from how you're using them (basically DnD-stat-ified), but I can't think of appropriate technical terms that fit the context unless you just change it to "psychic <x>"
Ok, on to other critiques:
- The entire pre-collapsible description is a combination of fairly interesting Foundation history with the most absolutely bog-standard Cold War PsyOps tropes imaginable: ECT and scopolomine and sensory deprivation and an honestly really silly picture. This is only really disappointing when compared to your first statement from Jocasta, which had some excellent Foundation technobabble. That, and it runs so damn long for something we've seen a dozen times, when there's so much more content to get through.
- There's a lot of uncharacteristic or immersion-breaking poetic language going around. It sort of shows up in every log (especially dream ones), but it's most egregious in the newspaper quote. An out of character example would be when you mention that Jo had been so upset that she could barely write but still produced two full pages of prose.
- I'm really, really not clear on the timeline: When was Jocasta's excursion as opposed to the armed incursion and disappearance?
- I could really have used a footnote or explanation that the R&AW was Indian intelligence, since we're already in internal Foundation politics. I know it comes up in context, but we're already in internal Foundation politics, so it took me a bit.
So, parts I really, really enjoyed: Jo's first log, the last ~2/3rds of Jo's last log, all of O5-5's Liason's statements, and the general history and twists leading up to the events and statements of the last collapsible in general.
Parts I really didn't enjoy: Honestly…. like 80% of the elements about the ascended Rao. There are a lot of things that are never made clear: How did he enter the trance state by himself? Why was he outputting gamma radiation? How and why did he disappear? What was all the religious imagery and and and vaguely cthulhian-entity nautical references1 and the somewhat meaningless spontaneous phrase appearing on walls about? I wouldn't mind these things so much if they weren't, again, bog-standard religious/paranatural mystery tropes. I'm not satisfied with the answer "Maybe we'll never know" when the question is "What was that ghost up to in the condemned amusement park?"
The wheel imagery and multiple-worlds stuff was neat, but this was all interspersed with bad tropes and excessive dream imagery so dry and long-winded that I had to stop reading this article and come back multiple times. I only finished it and got to the ending which I actually enjoyed because I had set out to comment on it, and didn't want to write this unfinished. If it weren't for that, I wouldn't have gotten past Jocasta's dream log.
Soooooooooo….. no vote? I love the worldbuilding and a lot of the plot, but you build it on top of an entire fort of tropes above a sea of bland imagery.
Footnotes
1. Those were neat but went nowhere.
I don't think edits are allowed until the end of the contest - I'll definitely fix the bad terminology once everything is said and done!
1) Not everyone's heard of irl CIA wacky psyops shenanigans, and even if they have, I felt like their direct inclusion into Foundation alt-history is something that really plays to the age old "all conspiracies are true/all myths are true" aspect of the site. I also figured that launching straightaway into more esoteric technology would turn some newer/more traditionalist readers off, hence the heavy reliance on traditional tropes. Nobody can please everyone, after all :P
2) I make no excuses for the poetic language, though I'd say as the author that Jo was merely inspired, not upset - the part about heavy corrections was meant to imply that she'd made an effort to make her document more friendly as an official form submission later on - editing Rao's name to SCP-2498 for example - before giving up.
3) Jo and Ziegler were not present during the raid; the assumption would be they left on the day itself, shortly before the incident, and Jo "killed" Rao minutes following the plane crash.
4) Not explaining R&AW was my bad. I'll put in a footnote as soon as I'm able, or add more contextual clues.
5) re: Rao spontaneously entering the trance state: originally there were logs showing his growing mental instability during his ventures, culminating in him almost breaking down when following some high-altitude aircraft to stretch his abilities (hence the reference to the "AWACS sim", left in there because I still thought it sounded neat) - my original pitch was that he'd broken some arbitrary limit and ascended that way. Those parts were cut for length during editing.
6) Rao disappeared because Jo "killed" him on a metaphysical level. Maybe he died, or Jo merely cut a cord. (Yes, I'm resorting to "who knowwwwws???" as an explanatory device here - though I also kind of expected readers to basically supply an explanation along those lines themselves, since it's not terribly far fetched :P)
7) Agree that gamma radiation feels extraneous on hindsight; it's basically a physical phenomenon I can tack on to justify the "sealed room, evil inside" trope.
8) Religious imagery is mostly my self-indulgence, and also tying in with the whole wheel of time/fate/human-into-God schtick.
9) Cthulhuesque imagery was going to be developed into something bigger, but I didn't have the space to do so. I'll admit it's a case of putting nice lines/nice plot threads in for their own sake as opposed to the whole story's sake. Mea culpa!
10) re: bog standard paranatural/religious tropes, see point 1). Not everyone's jaded by them, and I certainly wasn't, but again, to each their own :p
Anyway I totes get your reasons for not liking this and thanks so much for the insightful comment! It's really appreciated.
Ooooh, right, contest editing rules. Yegh.
One more response:
3) Jo and Ziegler were not present during the raid; the assumption would be they left on the day itself, shortly before the incident, and Jo "killed" Rao minutes following the plane crash.
6) Rao disappeared because Jo "killed" him on a metaphysical level. Maybe he died, or Jo merely cut a cord.
Ahhh. See, I didn't catch the temporal sequence (i.e. overlap) here, just based on the context clues given. I tried to go back and reconstruct it, but I couldn't find dates or times for Jo's excursion except the dates of their testimony. So, that wouldn't have fixed everything for me, but it's an issue.
(Edit: Also, minor aside, the "bog-standard" comment included the radiation and other things there, not just the religious imagery. I didn't dislike Rao's human-into-god story in general or all of the religious imagery, just… I think my "too many tropes" problem is strongly aligned with my "too much content" problem.)
Just… one… more… collapsible…
So, 'round about the dream report I started getting this nagging feeling that this was a case of overwhelming quantity trying to disguise a lack of creative quality. Echoing Petrograd a bit here; it doesn't exactly smell of originality, and does get a bit long in the tooth for that reason. Gamma radiation from nowhere, experimental psychic program, a test-subject's inexplicable apotheosis, vague warnings of doom received in dreams, even vaguer hints at Cthonic monsters from another dimension… have I read this story before?
I don't understand the reference to "higher dimensions", as it's never explained why the Foundation made the assumption that beings from the planes beyond were responsible for blowing up a city hall, or why so many witnesses decided it was a manifestation of their deity of choice instead of a hostile UFO. On that note - how did the Foundation manage to explain away a city hall getting demolished by alien geometry - to the rest of the world, if not India? You suggest that news of the event reached the very edge of the Western world, at least in esoteric (but nonetheless civilian) circles. What was it this time, global deployment of crop dusters stocked with amnestics? Cargo planes full of the stuff?
I'm not a history expert, so perhaps I wasn't able to fully appreciate the historical context, although it wasn't all lost on me. The suspicion and back-and-forth between departments within the Foundation and without, in the context of an extended paranormal Cold War, were credible.
It may sound like I've balked at more or less all of your writing, but that's not the case. In fact, I'd be lying if I said I didn't love this to pieces. Sharp prose can potentially trump any trope, and abovementioned flaws aside, your prose is just so damned enjoyable. You've gone for storytelling over documentation, and it works well. The characters are solid, and the story is generously embellished with little details that make it real, but thankfully you don't push things too far in that regard (your prose is also several merciful shades short of purple).
I mentioned I had a nagging feeling that this scip is all talk and no walk - a feeling was easy to shake off at the conclusion of an unusually meaty read for this site, the kind that are (thankfully) rare and (usually) worth the time taken to pore them over.
My automatic response upon finishing this article was honestly just a sort of stupefied: "Jeez, this must have been one ####er of a project." … See, my brain knows what it likes, doesn't it?
Minmin, this is a good thing and you should be proud. +1
I can't help much with the lack of originality part save for substantial rewriting, but as for the implausibility of the "holy sighting" incident - there are sizeable amounts of extranormal events throughout recent history that hardly impact human consensus belief in objective reality. See: The Lady of Zeitoun, The Miracle of the Sun, weird cloud formations resembling cities/Jesus/ships/etc, weird rain, ball lightning. People believe in scientific explanations they don't fully grasp as much as they believe in miracles, and the world doesn't burn. The weirdness quotient of real life humanity can be surprisingly high.
Dang. :O Also, Sigur Ros. :D
A couple concerns. Ziegler's journals seem awfully detailed as actual journal writing. The first one felt unrealistic, but the same level attained in the second makes me think he has extremely good recall. Still, it was offputting.
The anomalous (or should I say, interesting) nature of the object isn't really revealed until a solid halfway through an enormous article. I just found myself wondering why this was an SCP when they'd gone to all the trouble to make a remote viewer, and I wondered that for rather a while.
What the heck is an E-Class? <.< I've been seeing that a lot lately.
Lastly, this reminds me of another article, not nearly as good, that is also the animated corpse of an Indian man. And I mean, there's a lot more to this than just the physical characteristics of poor Rao, but the specificity of the details is kind of weird.
HIGH Unknown. God, I don't know.
I really like this bit for some reason. +1
What the heck is an E-Class? <.< I've been seeing that a lot lately.
Is that new though? I can't recall ever seeing it before… Which could just be because I can't remember everything, y'know? :B
It's an old thing that's coming back; the D-class contest helped revive it I think.
Good lord that was wordy. Good, but kind of a chore to get through.
The testimonies, especially Ziegler's first one, were too flowery for what I assume are supposed to be official reports.
Also "The skies are cold. I am not alone." is eight words, not seven. Unless the "And then he said seven words" is meant to imply that he's not speaking English there.
Also also "All they needed was half an hour to crash that plane - with no survivors." Is that a Dark Knight Rises reference, you rascal?
All that aside, it's well-trod ground but I like it. I was expecting higher-dimension god-being shenanigans from the word 'parapsychology' but at least you managed to sell it well. Even if there is a lot of selling.
Take my weary +1.
I love Cold War shenanigans, Coldest War shenanigans, Coldest War shenanigans that take place outside of Europe, geopolitics shenanigans, and unsettling New Age weirdness shenanigans.
This is long as hell, but I'm not sure that there's a way to do it more concisely/less circuitously that wouldn't ruin the effect. +1
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
