The prologue of Sector 36, a military sci-fi novel about AI, war, and buried secrets. A gripping excerpt set in a war-torn sector of space where nothing is what it seems.
1. The premise appears to be a mix of William Gibson, Robert Heinlein, C. M. Kösemen and Harry Harrison. I am looking forward to your twist on these expectations.
2. In a near/far future, "OMG" or something entirely new "branding" filler expression would be more credible than "oh my God" unless Dr Linton was born in the 20th century, or you're creating a hidden/sly ref to the OMG particle, or you're actually planning to bring God into this novel in some unexpected way.
3. I like the brace dialogue markers. I have not seen them used before in lieu of double quotes.
4. The prologue does have a good hook, and I would def read more of your novel.
For #2, what I went with was using present time idioms just so the dialogue flows smoother. I'd imagine some hundred years in the future people wouldn't be speaking the current form of English and they would use all sorts of slang that wouldn't make sense to us. I view the dialogue as being dubbed for present-time readers :)
#3 - I'm using braces for over-the-wire comms, standard double quotes for face-to-face. This will show up in the following chapters, this one is exclusively over-the-wire.
#4 - So happy to hear this! I will definitely share more. Thanks for subscribing!
#2: you'd be amazed how legible 300-year old English is (e.g. Gulliver's Travels) and one would have to go back 550+ years to get to a less legible English (i.e. Middle English), e.g. Canterbury Tales which is mostly readable with very little adjustment (on matters on spelling variations) and only a few vocabulary stumblers (i.e. archaisms, the mirror image of neologisms?).
IMO, a sci-fi novel set hundreds of years in the future completely dubbed to current English could be as dull as watching foreign movies on Soviet, Bulgarian, Serbian or Hungarian TV in 1980s (which you might not know about, but I hope you at least agree that captioned TV is better than dubbed TV).
But you are right in a way: what I am asking for is actually a writer's trope: branding words/phrases that (often) introduce new concepts and make a novel unique (beyond the plot or the characters).
I can argue that a few very successful novels have introduced neologisms or novel (sic) phrases into the English language (e.g. Dickens' boredom, Heller's catch-22, Joyce's quark, Gibson's cyberspace, Capek's robot, Orwell's newspeak, Big Brother or doublethink, Atwood's Nolite te bastardes carborundorum or Blessed be the fruit), but such new words are definitely not needed to ensure nor do they necessarily aid a novel's success.
I am off my soapbox now as this #2 observation thread is literally [Lewis Carroll's] going down the rabbit hole :)
1. The premise appears to be a mix of William Gibson, Robert Heinlein, C. M. Kösemen and Harry Harrison. I am looking forward to your twist on these expectations.
2. In a near/far future, "OMG" or something entirely new "branding" filler expression would be more credible than "oh my God" unless Dr Linton was born in the 20th century, or you're creating a hidden/sly ref to the OMG particle, or you're actually planning to bring God into this novel in some unexpected way.
3. I like the brace dialogue markers. I have not seen them used before in lieu of double quotes.
4. The prologue does have a good hook, and I would def read more of your novel.
5. Good luck!
Thank you! I appreciate the feedback.
For #2, what I went with was using present time idioms just so the dialogue flows smoother. I'd imagine some hundred years in the future people wouldn't be speaking the current form of English and they would use all sorts of slang that wouldn't make sense to us. I view the dialogue as being dubbed for present-time readers :)
#3 - I'm using braces for over-the-wire comms, standard double quotes for face-to-face. This will show up in the following chapters, this one is exclusively over-the-wire.
#4 - So happy to hear this! I will definitely share more. Thanks for subscribing!
#2: you'd be amazed how legible 300-year old English is (e.g. Gulliver's Travels) and one would have to go back 550+ years to get to a less legible English (i.e. Middle English), e.g. Canterbury Tales which is mostly readable with very little adjustment (on matters on spelling variations) and only a few vocabulary stumblers (i.e. archaisms, the mirror image of neologisms?).
IMO, a sci-fi novel set hundreds of years in the future completely dubbed to current English could be as dull as watching foreign movies on Soviet, Bulgarian, Serbian or Hungarian TV in 1980s (which you might not know about, but I hope you at least agree that captioned TV is better than dubbed TV).
But you are right in a way: what I am asking for is actually a writer's trope: branding words/phrases that (often) introduce new concepts and make a novel unique (beyond the plot or the characters).
I can argue that a few very successful novels have introduced neologisms or novel (sic) phrases into the English language (e.g. Dickens' boredom, Heller's catch-22, Joyce's quark, Gibson's cyberspace, Capek's robot, Orwell's newspeak, Big Brother or doublethink, Atwood's Nolite te bastardes carborundorum or Blessed be the fruit), but such new words are definitely not needed to ensure nor do they necessarily aid a novel's success.
I am off my soapbox now as this #2 observation thread is literally [Lewis Carroll's] going down the rabbit hole :)