Sunday, February 11, 2018

Deep Down in The Cloud, by Julie Novakova

[Clarkesworld]
★☆☆☆☆ Needs Improvement

(Dystopian Action Adventure) Mariana and her two companions descend to an underwater datacenter to try to change the world or die trying. (4,930 words; Time: 16m)


"," by (edited by Neil Clarke), appeared in issue 137, published on .

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

Pro: The underwater scenes are tense and very believable.

Loss of data from a solar flare or a terrorist EMP attack are real concerns, and some datacenters are already being built hardened against that. (They don’t need to be built underwater, though.)

Con: There are serious copyediting problems with this story. Numerous sentences that look like copy/paste errors or else serious grammar errors. Places where the grammatical tense changes in the middle of a scene. Etc. Enough to spoil the story for me.

Mariana and Hector’s motivations seem pretty weak. It’s very hard to believe Hector was willing to die for this.

It’s also very hard to believe the system was utterly dependent on a single data center.

Finally, we are supposed to be cheering on a team of terrorists, but it’s not entirely clear that they’re the good guys here.

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Julie Novakova Info: Interviews, Websites, ISFDB, FreeSFOnline

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