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Unread 6 Nov 2006, 00:04   #1
KingAlan
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My science-fiction novel

I'm an aspiring science-fiction novel writer, and over the past couple of months, I've finished the first three chapters. If anyone's interested (please send me a PM with you email address in it), I'll send you the chapters.

Title: "Nathan Steele 2326"
Name of main character, and date of events: Read the title again. :P
Location: Earth

Nathan Steele is a (relatively) normal Terrestial teenager, in the year 2326. A prize contest he won sends him to Washington, which happens to be the Terrestrial Republic's North America capital, on Friday August 13th.

This day does prove to be one of bad luck - beyond bad luck. Human conact with aliens has been peaceful - until now. An alien warfleet commenced its invasion on this hitting Washington among several other initial targets.

Alternately, would any of you like me to post the story here?
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Round 13- complete n00b, 13:5:19
[Hidden Agenda member from round 14 on out]
Round 14: 11:7 MoD, final rank 1006
Round 15: 11:9:7, Galactic Commander, final rank 724
Round 16: 4:5:7, GC (The Colt 4-5's), final rank 380
Round 17: [forgot my final result]
Round 19: final rank 233
Round 20: 2:7:15, final rank 222
Round 23: bad end rank, crashed too many times
Round 24: am playing Zik

I provided the name for Round 16, "The End of an Era".
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Unread 7 Nov 2006, 14:34   #2
Marv
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Re: My science-fiction novel

Isn't this on GD as well?
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Unread 7 Nov 2006, 19:45   #3
Darkling
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Re: My science-fiction novel

I do not see that big of a problem you posting it here, just try to keep the size of the separate threads down in size to a reasonable level.
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Unread 14 Nov 2006, 04:53   #4
KingAlan
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Re: My science-fiction novel

yes Marv, it was. some people who saw that post not-so-nicely suggested [via rep points] that i take it over to the RP forum, so I did.
__________________
Round 13- complete n00b, 13:5:19
[Hidden Agenda member from round 14 on out]
Round 14: 11:7 MoD, final rank 1006
Round 15: 11:9:7, Galactic Commander, final rank 724
Round 16: 4:5:7, GC (The Colt 4-5's), final rank 380
Round 17: [forgot my final result]
Round 19: final rank 233
Round 20: 2:7:15, final rank 222
Round 23: bad end rank, crashed too many times
Round 24: am playing Zik

I provided the name for Round 16, "The End of an Era".
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Unread 14 Nov 2006, 05:02   #5
KingAlan
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My science-fiction novel

Chapter 1: Another Day, Another Thousand Dollars

It all started during an especially boring eighth-period English class. I had dozed off during some stupid quiz and woke up to the teacher's shout of "TIME'S UP", which was at a decibel level that was also planned to awake my friend Tom DeLuca, two rows behind me. I then looked down at my paper and saw only my name, "Nathan Steele", and the date, "5-21-2326." Damn!

Oh well. It was Friday afternoon, and I didn't especially care. And it was about time for school to let out anyway. Then one of my classmates, Tony, piped up from the back of the room: "There's gonna be no homework this weekend, understand?" Tony then proceeded to crack his knuckles.

The teacher, Andrew Fletcher, felt like playing along, and he stammered out "Er…yeah…class dismissed."

None of the 23 students in this particular 8th period English class lingered for long, myself included. I ran into Tom DeLuca again at the end of the hallway, near the staircases.

“Darnit, I am way too thirsty today, considering it’s only 15 degrees out today…” He then headed over to the nearby water fountain.

I stealthily moved in on his right, and cranked the water up full blast. Now it was time for some running. There was a set of double doors, leading to stairs, at the end of the hallway, and went through them. I then clomped down the stairs and was out of the building rather quickly.

Tom lived quite close to the school building, within a few blocks, so he normally walked, and I saw him turn left. I, however, turned right and began to walk in the direction of the nearest bus stop.

Of course, four hundred and fifty years after its development, the internal combustion engine was out of use. These buses, and most other vehicles, ran on some sort of hovering technology. I'm not sure exactly how they worked (I'm a high school senior, not a college engineering major); I believe it had something to do with magnetic repulsion (to keep them off the ground), combined with small ion engines for thrust; these things were probably capable of more than the 70-or-so kilometers per hour they were currently doing. Anyway, "they seem to work well enough", I thought as I scanned in my cash-card and took a seat.

I looked back on the Johnston High School building. It wasn't all that different in design from the nearby ones, just larger and with more levels. It had the same façade of molded sheet metal, and the same type of windows- rectangles about a meter long and 1.5 meters tall. Their arrangement, in neatly packed rows and columns, was interrupted only by the set of doors.

During the course of the ride, I thought up more strategies for 'The Game', that is, 'The Mercurian Duels' a new science-fiction computer game that was exceedingly popular at the moment. To put it in a nutshell, it involved running special missions throughout the solar system, and doing so better than your opponent. In the game, most of the ten planets had a human presence either on their surfaces or on their moons; in reality, only the Earth, Moon and Mars had a heavy human presence.

This game, however, was fairly accurate in how it depicted the Earth. Although nuclear weapons were used a slight few times after Nagasaki, massive nuclear disaster had never occurred, a major contributor to the planet remaining in fairly good shape. This meant that the planet's population had stayed at several billion- I believe that the last Republic census put the number at around 25 billion.

Humanity had been rather ingenious about where to put all these people, and the game represented these devices. In addition to the existing ‘traditional-type’ cities, there are the giant North Pacific 'pier cities', that is, cities located on flat, modular ships. There are also the self-contained land cities, which are somewhat like skyscrapers that go horizontally as well as vertically, containing all normal city facilities somewhere within them. (One advantage of these was that they were relatively easy to place in hostile environments, due to the fact that they’re self-contained. In fact, I had a memorable 'Mercurian Duels' game where I was based from a self-contained city in the desert of western North America.) In addition, both the real world and the fictional world were united under one government, referred to as the 'Terrestrial Republic'.

Come to think about it, a late night playing this game had probably led to me falling asleep in class today…But soon enough, the bus came to the stop closest to my house, and my attention turned to the more practical matter of walking towards said house.

The stop was at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Baumer Street, and my house was at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Grapevine Street. Getting from one corner to the other entailed a walk through the city's Triangle Park.

There, I immediately saw someone I recognized. That someone was Sgt. John Murphy, of the 7th Division's Mechanized Infantry section. In other words, this guy was a tank commander. He had access to quite a few military facilities; relevant to me was his access to military junkyards.

You see, I had a plan to build a small personal spacecraft, which were somewhat common by now, and Sgt. Murphy was one of my main sources for parts.

"Hey, Nathan," he called out.

"Yeah?"

"I don’t really feel like a lot of talking right now, got to head home soon, but I wanted to say that I found another one of those ID-4's for you." (The ID-4 was the 4th-generation Ion Dynamics small-craft engine.)

"Sweet! Thanks."

“It’s in that gray cardboard box over there.”

I noticed a gray cardboard box next to a large white cooler marked DRINKS. (Did the cooler contain fine wine, perhaps?) I picked up the box and started walking closer to my house.

I opened out house door and flopped onto the Brumar Mk VI sitting device. Then I was interrupted by ‘Marvin’, the ‘personality’ of our Entertainment Systems robot. “He-llo, Na-than,” it intoned, ‘How a-bout the fo-low-ing mo-vie selection?”

“No, not that one, not right now,” I responded. “Activate the Humor Headquarters channel.” Its voice recognition mechanism complied, and I was soon watching ‘2H’.

I began to open the parts box from Sgt. Murphy. The engine set didn’t contain that many parts, just a lot of wires dangling out a central component. However, there was a small cooling fan in the back. I tried to spin the fan, almost playfully, but the fan didn’t want to budge. Poking around, I discovered that some pieces of paper were jammed in near the spindle around which the fan rotated. Examining those pieces of paper, I nearly dropped the heavy metal engine on my foot. You see, ‘the pieces of paper’ were dollar bills. A few $5s…and a $1000. Jackpot! Furthermore, I noticed that each of them had the same message scrawled in the bottom margin: “The Apocalypse comes August 13th”, or some such nonsense.

I began to think about what I would do with that money. ‘The Mercurian Duels’ game subscriptions weren’t cheap, and neither were spaceship parts. (Sgt. Murphy wasn’t able to find everything I needed.) Yet I had a better idea. Why not turn this large pile of money into an even larger pile of money? I turned off the entertainment system, over the robot’s protests.

Looking at the $1,000 bill itself, I noticed that it had a portrait of General James McKinnak (in fact, the same person this city, Mackinnacksville, was named after) He was a hero of one of the wars of the late 2100s, which had been key in bringing about planetary unification.

Then, I went to my bedroom, hopefully to gain ideas on what to spend the money on, and looked upon a certain shelf that contained two different items: some 250-gram silver bars, and a handful of ancient coins that were almost like small landforms in their irregular shapes.

Both of these had been gifts from my (moderately) rich uncle, Alex Frayer. You see, although it had long been known that asteroids contained iron, rock and/or ice, and perhaps nickel, it had recently been discovered that some asteroids contained more valuable metals and minerals. My uncle’s business involved mining some of these asteroids, including Argentos, which had a diameter of 50km. I noticed that both of the gifts on that shelf were precious-metal items- he had chosen those particular items due to his line of work.

I had heard him describe the mining business, and it was really quite an operation. Robotic crawlers scoured the various asteroids, filling up massive storage bins with bits of rock. Small ships flew the bins to a nearby smelting center/ foundry, where the metal was separated from the rock. Then, the metal was molded into convenient forms, like my 250g bars, and shipped out to various Earth ports, and the industrial centers on Mars.

The combination of items on that shelf led me to my father’s set of metalworking equipment; it was a hobby of his to make various things using this setup. I myself had used the equipment before, so I had somewhat of an idea on how to use the machine, and its computerized control and design center. I set up a punch to make a row of circles in the metal bars; these would become the coin 'blanks'.

By scanning in a picture of myself, I created the coin design itself: modeled after Roman coins, with myself in the Emperor’s portrait of course. I came up with two denominations: $5 (12.5g) and $10 (25g). I used bird-of-prey motifs on the back, and the respective Roman numerals. The final step in the design program engrave those into dies.

The newly-created machine dies were made out of a modern material called 'titanized steel'; one slammed down on the blank disk to create the design. Making my first batch became a process of lather, rinse, repeat, then restock the tube of blanks. By the end of the hour (it was now 5:30), I had turned four 250g bars into forty $10 coins.

I would spend the $1,000 to buy metal for more coins, assuming that I could accomplish anything by selling these. But of course, I wouldn’t spend all of this lucky find on myself.

I brought ten of the newly minted coins with me when I went to buy the gifts. One of the cashiers I ran across that afternoon remarked on my coins and bought one of them, for $11. (using her personal money I hope!) On my way out, I showed some more of the coins to a passerby. He seemed like a successful middle-aged man who could well afford them, and he gave me $35 for 3. Jason Koch was the guy’s name, I thanked him for his purchase and moved on. Hopefully, I would soon be doing this on a much larger scale...

I found a restaurant gift certificate for my parents (Isaac and Kathryn), as well as some movie/VR disks for my 11 year old sister, Alexa. I then walked away from that complex, back towards my house.

In the intervening time, my parents and Alexa had arrived home. I walked in the door with a rather smug look on my face. “Well, guess who found a large quantity of money today?,” I said, holding out the items.

“Well, that’s very nice of you,” my mom said as she saw the gift items.
“Legal money?” Alexa teased.

“O’Malley’s Steakhouse? Nice one. Haven’t been there in a while.” That was Dad.
“Princess Daria, parts 3 and 4. Awesome! Part 2 was such a cliffhanger…” (This was Alexa’s comment on her gift.)

Now it was on to the food consumption chamber. The kitchen’s automated system had assembled meat disks in a bread casing, along with fried tuber slivers, and pieces of a small red fruit (which were covered in glucose crystals).

In the frenzy around my new silver project, I had half-forgotten about the engine where I had found the money in the first place. Once this thought crossed my mind, I headed out to the garage, in which I was storing my partially built spaceship. To add some degree of secret agent panache to the building, I had an access keycard and a simple voice recognition password system. But most of the gadgetry was inside.

The ship itself was somewhat T-shaped, with the engine mounts constituting the ‘top bar’ of the T. The engine mount consisted of a metal block with six round holes, the spaces for the actual engine components. There were two on top and four on the bottom, and the top was tapered accordingly.

The lefthand space in the bottom row was still empty, and I moved towards placing my new engine component there.

Installing this thing required a process with few, albeit tedious, steps. First, you had to connect various wire strands. Red in the engine mount block connected with red on the actual engine; this wire went to the fuel system. Green went to the cockpit control panel, and black would have connected to the emergency self-destruct device. (which I had chosen not to install) There was a small tube sprouting out of the fuel tank that needed to be locked in place. Finally, the engine slid in and clicked, but it was advised to solder or weld the outer rim, as having an engine fall out is generally an incident you want to avoid.

Standing back and looking at the work in progress, I guessed that it was about four-fifths complete. The fuel tank was right behind the engines; it still needed to be filled. The cargo compartment, which needed its lid installed, lined up perfectly right in front of the fuel tanks. It measured about 1.5 meters wide by about two and a half meters long, which made it slightly thinner than the fuel tank assembly. The cockpit, which was noticeably thinner, was in front of that.

This is where many of the yet-to-be installed components belonged. I was still looking for several control panel sections. The whole thing could also use paint (I’d prefer a color besides metallic grey), as well as a coating of the heatshield solvent Epsilon-1400. There were a few other assorted parts (that I already had) that needed to be put in place, but that didn’t take too long, and I was out of the garage by 7:30.

This gave me plenty of time for a Mercurian Duels game. I got to my computer, and logged into the game network. When checking the rankings list, I noticed that I had risen slightly, to #1,732. I decided to challenge Swordrunner, the player at #1,690.

My opponent chose the Star Pirates player type, and a main base somewhere in the Asteroid Belt. I chose ‘Corporate Army’ and a headquarters in the northern half of Earth.

Swordrunner: Good luck.
Emperor Nathan IV: You’ll need it.

It took a little while, but I eventually got several agents to Mars, which gave me a position within wonderful striking distance of Swordrunner’s main base. Plus, my fleet was greatly aided by my researchers’ recent discovery of the Level V cloaking device. After an expensive retrofit to install this, my fleet moved into position practically at his gate. Yet a lot of credit also belongs to the double agent I had planted in his Data & Scanning center- I had him throw up a wonderful decoy- that is, a fake report of what seemed like a lucrative pirating target in the vicinity of Jupiter, leading a portion of his fleet away. This enabled me to uncloak my ships, and face a smaller fleet in the upcoming battle, which I ended up winning.

I ended up getting the supply of silver I wanted on the next day (Saturday), a two-kilogram block from Kriger Metals for about $700. Once I got back home, I ran the press a few more times.

Sunday was really rather uneventful for a non-school day. On Monday, I brought in various school paperwork- and a cache of coins I had struck off of the 2-kilogram block. I decided to set up shop in the lunchroom for most of the time it was open, and somewhat understandably, my Economics teacher let me out of class to go do this.

Many people were interested in trading face value for them, perhaps for novelty value, and for a few people, it was just an unusual way to get change for a large bill like a $25. There were a few people who gave me small premiums.

Later, that same Economics teacher came by to see me. “Well, you’re certainly passing the practical portion of my final exam,” he said. He also said “I want two of the fives, and one of the tens.” All in all, I had a very nice day, with a few large bills and a litany of smaller bills adding up to $553.

I soon expanded this operation a bit. I continued selling the coins at school, and sometimes took my table to that same commercial center where I had made my first few sales, and I came up with a few new designs to get more money out of the schlubs (er, provide them with new and exciting buying options).

This was going so well, that it was time to order silver directly from the source- Frayer Asteroid Mining Company. I placed the order on 7/4/26:

“Frayer Asteroid Mining, how can we help you?”
“Hello, Uncle Alex. This is Nathan. I have a real order this time, not, saay, 1234 kilograms for John Doe...”

“That had been quite a prank,” I thought to myself.

“How much?”
“Well, I’ve been futzing around with Dad’s Metallix 440 setup. In fact, I’ve been striking my own coin designs on it. They look sorta like the Roman coins you gave me for my 17th birthday...I’ve been selling them of course.”

“Great to hear that the entrepreneurial spirit runs in the family, and I’d love to see some examples of your finished products. Now back to my initial question, how much do you want?”

“Seventy kilos.”

“70kg? I am assuming you want an installment plan for the $25,000?”

“You are correct. It's a lot better investment than that car Tom’s buying...”

“Well, be ready to get that shipment on July 14th, somewhere around noon. Bye now.”

Ten days was a darn good time for Asteroid Belt-Earth shipment. In fact, an Interplanetary Shipment Systems ‘backbone’ freighter had left a few weeks ago, and Uncle Alex already had some material on that. Soon enough, after a multitude of activities relating to the end of the school year, the ship arrived. Once the ‘backbone’ freighter landed at the Earth depot (which was an orbiting space platform), smaller ships took the goods to the various Earth destinations where they were headed. I currently saw one of these zooming down our street. It was rather boxy, as fit its utilarian purpose. The only decoration consisted of three-centimeter red stripes along the sides, as well as an identification number.

It used small counterthrusters to settle down on our lawn calmly, and I watched its crew of two step out. One must've been the Security guy (Two meters tall, about 115 kilos, and a giant Lasertec Mk V rifle kinda says ‘Security’), and the other crew member was the pilot. The pilot helped me unload the 7 10-kilogram boxes. Payment had already been taken care of, as I had already transferred money into the appropriate Bank of Solaris account. In turn, I gave the pilot the case which contained the coin sample that was headed back towards my uncle. (These Interplanetary Systems pilots were fairly used to being given return shipments.)

I locked six of the boxes in the spaceship garage, and started working on the other one. In other to start making coins out of it, I started using the same procedure that I had used before. I had made only one small change – I installed a few more minting tracks. (spaces for more coin dies) Dad was pleased with this upgrade to his equipment.

July 15th was the day of Johnston High graduation ceremony, which was a well-deserved accomplishment, but a rather dry formality...

However, it was a rather dry ceremony UNTIL John Cooper had loudly shouted “Darnit, we’ve busted our butts for weeks, now let’s PARTY.” This was the cue for someone to wheel in a giant cart fully stocked with beer. No problem, since most high school students were over 17, the legal drinking age here (and the legal age for several other things.) But suffice it to say, official ceremonial decorum broke down after that.

July 16th – Parents and sister weren’t in the house, girlfriend was. No explanation needed.

A few days later, it was about time for mail delivery. I wasn’t expecting much, since I took most of my business orders in person or over videophone networks. However, there was something else addressed to me- and it looked pretty official.

It was a notice from the Interplanetary Shipment Systems sweepstakes department. Entries in their contests were given to most customers. This time, I had chosen to enter one of the vacation contests. The letter read:

“You, Nathan Steele, have won I.S.S. Sweepstakes Number #V-10273, the ‘Capital Idea Vacation Getaway’. As you live on the North America continent, your vacation will be to the continent capital, Washington DC”

Evidently, transportation was included. The train tickets were dated for a few weeks from now, August 13th to be precise.
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Round 13- complete n00b, 13:5:19
[Hidden Agenda member from round 14 on out]
Round 14: 11:7 MoD, final rank 1006
Round 15: 11:9:7, Galactic Commander, final rank 724
Round 16: 4:5:7, GC (The Colt 4-5's), final rank 380
Round 17: [forgot my final result]
Round 19: final rank 233
Round 20: 2:7:15, final rank 222
Round 23: bad end rank, crashed too many times
Round 24: am playing Zik

I provided the name for Round 16, "The End of an Era".
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Unread 14 Nov 2006, 20:51   #6
Kal'rek
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Re: My science-fiction novel: Chapter 1

Hey, I took the time to read this chapter, its always good to read otehr peoples works.

I dont want to be rude but there were a few things i'd like to point out.
When i was reading it it felt more like i was reading a list of things that happened, not an engaging chain of events.
If you tried not to be too specific ie instead of "Two meters tall, about 115 kilos, and a giant Lasertec Mk V rifle kinda says ‘Security’" something more descriptive like "A large man tuned to a life of action brandishing his hulking Lasertec rifle."
And along these lines, try not to use too many brackets try to use semi-colons or hyphens (sp?) instead. and when expressing numbers write tehm as words (instead of $1,000 bill 70kg say, one thousand dollar bill and seventy kilos)

I am by no means attacking your work, these are all just my own opineons im just trying ot be constructivly critical, its always good to see a sci-fi writer out there =)
I like the idea and would like to know more.
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Unread 3 Dec 2006, 01:21   #7
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Re: My science-fiction novel

I haven't had enough time to read the entire thing, but I read the first few paragraphs and skimmed along the rest, noting more style points than story features. I have to say that I agree with Kal'rek's points.

I'd also recommend you vary your paragraph openings, with time phrases and conjunctives, e.g. However, Therefore, Nevertheless, Moreover, Firstly, Next as well as alternating between verbs, passive clause and nouns for your first words (e.g. The cat sat on the mat/The mat was sat on by the cat/Sitting on the mat was the cat).

Regarding content, I think you are telling all of the events one after another, with no mystery to anything and the reader never feeling involved in the story. You don't have to describe every little event, and sometimes it is better to miss out some events and then discuss them later on.

As for the story I'm not really qualified to comment because I didn't read it all. I'd be inclined to think the storyline wasn't particularly original (from the summary), but I'm not too into the distant-future stuff so don't take anything from me. I know that because I didn't read it all I don't know everything, but first impressions are important and it might be good for you to hear this perspective in addition to Kal'rek (who read it all).

As with Kal'rek, I don't intend to offend and would like to voice my constructive criticism. Now I have done, and you are free to ignore it!
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