Saturday, October 10, 2015

Dancing in the Dark, by Ramona Louise Wheeler

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, April 2015; ~7,800 words
Rating: 1, Improvement needed

A captain of an "ice ship" finds a really big comet to help with terraforming planet Tarse.

Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)

An almost solid block of infodumps. The narration is of the "tell don't show" variety, and the dialogue is all unnatural. The first-person narrator is an extremely unlikable "Mary Sue" type. And the science is all wrong. There is no need to send human ships to find comets; they'd have found them all using telescopes and unmanned probes--much as we are doing in our solar system today. And the idea that you never know where a comet is going to go next seems to confuse comets with whales.

1 comment (may contain spoilers):

  1. So much infodump, I actually don’t mind comprehensive background info and worldbuilding but here it wasn’t told very well either, but at least it got a core intriguing idea

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