Jeffrey Meyer's (centurymeyer35) Reviews

First and foremost, your tense agreement is all over the place. You flip-flop between past and present frequently, and not in a good way. I strongly urge you to pick one tense and stick with it. Either something happened or it's happening. It's important you decide way you're going to tell the story us.

Second, your punctuation leads to confusion in places, with missing commas causing run-on sentences and dangling clauses.

   Shorter lines could be better. Pretty is often about the surgical strike rather than the broad punch. Saying only what needs to be said can take the reader directly to the heart of the matter without distracting them with extraneous words. You might find it valuable to consider paring out articles and such.

   Rhythm or blues. There's nothing wrong with free verse poetry. There's nothing wrong with blank verse, either. However, sometimes a little rhythm goes a long way. I don't necessarily mean a Hallmark greeting card rhythm; sometimes an internal cadence even if different from line to line but remaining consistent from stanza to stanza can give lines a memorable quality.

   Rhyme and reason. Ditto the above about blank verse and free verse. However, a little bit of alliteration, assonance, and/or rhyme—even if it's just a few words within a line or two—can again hook the reader and keep their attention.

Characters: You set your characters up well, giving each enough definition for the reader to color them in in their mind. The exposition is sparse, but that is a strength; it provides a reason for the crew's presence but doesn't bog down the reader with excess details. Their behavior fits the story, but is individual enough to be easily believable.

Setting: The setting is subtly delivered. The military efficiency of the homes speaks to the fact that it is pulled from a military man's mind; the recognition of his home reinforces the telepathic reflection. I was wondering if the attic was going to be a void since he was never allowed up there and would likely not know what it looked like, making replication difficult or impossible. Its presence is an interesting detail, raising the questions of whether this is an actual alternative reality or a recreation.

Story: The story arc is complete—well, as complete as a cliffhanger can be. One is left wondering, though, how the boy at the end impacts Isaac emotionally. Nostalgia? Sadness? Encouragement? Fear, perhaps? If there were one last line stating its impact, this reader would have been one iota more satisfied with the ending.

Mechanics: I found no mechanical errors. Punctuation, structure, and layout were all correct and easy to follow. While a violator of good mechanics myself sometimes (shameful, I know), make a huge difference to me. It shows how much the reader cares about both their output and the reader's experience.

  Tom Callaghan: Your main character is only vaguely sketched until the end, but that works out in this case because there is more exposition up front that character interaction. The wife is only slightly mentioned, and in very generic terms. One hopes she becomes more involved later on.

  Callaghan Family: There is an inner turmoil in the family that promises to become a subplot, perhaps as Tom reacts to the movement of the mote. At this point, the family just provides a sketched framework for Tom's non-work life.

  Ollie: A coworker who seems familiar and comfortable with Tom. The reader has the feeling the two will work closely together as the story progresses.

  Professor Iris Vaughan: Potentially a key player in many ways. The reader knows Tom is having marital issues; could Vaughan be a paramour, or could there be a sexual/romantic tension between the two as the story progresses? Additionally, how will her expertise help move the story along?

  Marco: Pretty much a place-holder, and kind of a jerk.

  General World: The world of the motes is a bit difficult to understand at first. This reader thought the motes created a web between themselves, or emitted some sort of directional energy. As the "power" of the motes is explained, the effects mentioned earlier in the exposition, (planes exploding, people being injured, etc) make more sense. It might work better to explain the mote's interaction with matter a little earlier in the story.

  Society: I felt the social reaction was for too "accepting." While it serves the story better, I would think the reality would not have been the brink of war, but a breakdown in basic social services and international relation. While chaos would not serve your story, the idea of only days passing before everything was pretty much back to normal didn't sit well with the reader.

  Motes: A thoroughly novel entity, the motes are incredibly interesting, and their mystery draws the reader in deeply, no matter any other "flaws" of the story. Excellent antagonist!

  It is understood that this is the beginning of a story, so the arc is incomplete. However, the elements so far have set up multiple storylines that the reader can already identify as plot movers. This is a fine beginning, although with a slow-ish start full of necessary exposition.

  I did not find any glaring errors in punctuation, sentence structure, or tense or plurality agreement.

  Although a small item, I noticed that the lines of dialog beginning with Tom's greeting Marco are only single-spaced, whereas everything else is double-spaced.

  I found the headers awkward. I don't know if they represented chapters, or if they simply represented sections of one chapter. I have done the same thing, and I have seen other authors—some of them best-sellers—do the same thing, but in this case it felt like a shortcut from one concept to the next, rather than a smooth blending of the story. It's a hard one for me to explain, and it may very well just be my personal preference, not something that is either wrong or right.

  As mentioned, this story has an incredible beginning with a concept the likes of which I have never read. It grabbed me immediately and held me all the way through the end, leaving me wanting more.

  Selfishness: We have a surplus, but are not willing to give any away, fearing that we will be left with not enough, even though we have more than we could ever use. The situation is analogous to money, material...even love.

  Generosity: Okay, I lied—there's really no trace of true generosity in this story. It's totally transactional, quid pro quo. Is that a reflection of our everyday lives also? I think upon reflection, that it is.

  Ambition: The one thing that drives mankind forward past fear is looked at closely here. "This is our Apollo moment." Nice, succinct statement about the ambition of our species.

  Fear: We see how fear tends to freeze us in place. In this story, humanity almost passes a chance to change their entire world because they are afraid of unknown consequences and unknown actors. Can we not interpolate this to missed chances in our own lives? I know I can.

  "What are you doing with that time if everything is just done by A.I?" Ah, this is explored, in a way, by HG Wells; aren't the Eloi just humans that have become intolerably and insurmountably indolent because the Morlocks do everything for them? I think we can easily extrapolate AI as the Morlocks and humans as the pointless Eloi. But that begs another question: how long before (as explored in other popular fiction) the AI becomes sentient and decides to come up out of its holes to overcome the lazy human race? It's simple question you pose, but one with a lot of ramifications.

  "...A.I. so you don’t have to learn." This strikes deeply into my heart. I work in the natural gas industry, where hands-on is a must. Yet even we are looking at ways to automate and AI-tomate our administrative workflows. Recently, a friend of mine in the IT department asked me: "Why don't you just ask AI how to do that? It's taking you forever to figure it out." AUGH! I was aghast. If AI short-circuits and dies, what would I do then if I never actually learned the thing I was doing myself? Another analogy—We taught our kids to drive using a manual transmission. We had cars with automatic transmissions; but we made them learn the hard way, first, before they were allowed to use the easy way. Because there will probably be a time that a manual transmission is all that's available! When AI is not available, what will we do, what will our children do, if we have never truly learned to do that for which we rely on AI?

  "I create." "I think, therefore I am." Are the two statements really so different? I would say they are identical. I would further submit, in support of your essay, that AI does not think, and therefore it is not a replacement for humankind. Taking a religious cant, just for fun, we also read in the Bible that the devil is unable to create, that he is only able to distort that which has already been created into a mockery of its true form. Well, the opinion on the table is that AI is bad for humans; but we can extrapolate again that it is also bad for the soul, that we are surrounding ourselves with the devil's distorted works! (Mind you, I'm not religious; I'm just chasing the argument down one more road of validation.)

  "Just a mess of stolen hard work and stories." This is an interesting point, because it may not actually support your proposal. It has been observed by many great minds that there is nothing truly original left in the world. Everything man creates is a combination of many other things earlier men have already created. For example, I have read that only 7 storylines actually exist, and that every story is a nested loop or combination of these storylines. Nothing original, nothing created: just rearranged building blocks of those things that came into being just after Homo Habilus became Homo Sapiens. It's not a comfortable thought, but AI might have actually learned its skill of mimicry-vs-creation from us humans.

  "Not just for the environmental impact, but simply for the fact it makes the world less human." For one thing, I'm skeptical there is a negative environmental impact from AI. In any case, you don't really expound on that in this essay, so it may not be something you want in your conclusion. Beyond that, we get into a paradoxical discussion about AI vs human ingenuity. Human curiosity would be bound to invent AI; to prevent or preclude that would be to limit and interfere with that which you mention holding so dear: creativity and creation. Yet AI brings about a stupefaction and dulling of the creative process. Yet again, minds like yours, not dulled or stunted, rail against the negative side effects of AI. And yet one more iteration in the cycle, your own creations, be they words or art, might be a detriment to certain other humans, triggering them inadvertently to some dark consequence. Like the atomic bomb and serin gas, AI was likely an inevitable invention{emdash for better and for worse— in any human timeline one can imagine.

  You have a lot of fragments in this essay. I would encourage you to revisit the paragraphs and look for these fragments with the fact in mind that this is an essay. Some readers might expect a valid argument such as yours to be stated with better grammatical structure.

Your thesis becomes clear, but it's a little muddled in the beginning. I once got some simple and incredibly helpful advice from a mentor 30+ years ago with regard to essays, presentations, sales pitches, etc:

          Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em
          Tell 'em
          Tell 'em what you told 'em

          A problem, as I see it, is that you get a little ahead, in your introductory paragraph, and start to make some of your points rather than just introducing them. You're "telling them" before "telling them what you're gonna tell them." In this reader's opinion, from "We have all seen..." to "That's not what scares me." should be omitted from that first paragraph.

  "Tie-out." I think there is room for your concluding paragraph to more closely reiterate your thesis, with that last sentence definitively reinforcing it.