Published October 9, 2007
Jax fervently swore in a dozen languages. He payed no attention as to whether the words were actually swear words.
A sandy-furred alien, Kuust, popped his head out of the "manhole," which was what the engineers of Ninth Galaxy called the large underfloor lab.
"What's the matter Jax?" He pinned his ears back against his head because of Jax's blasphemy.
"I'm sorry, but my mechanical talent went down the hyperspace chute."
"I know what you mean. It's happened."
"Ah, they made a mistake..." Jax's talent, sometimes said with a capital T, was literally discovered as a punishment. He was on a penal colony and had been forced to fix the station's many broken and antique machines.
After coming to Ninth Galaxy, five years ago, he'd lost a lot of his anger. What was left was an easygoing mechanic who knew a starship like his own mind.
Kuust stirred him from his memories. "It's time to go. The shift's up."
"O-k, blindfold me. I hate that ether-lithium converter." Jax quickly regained his wit.
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138,220 Literary Works • 672,084 Reviews
Hello!
RandomTalks here with a short review!
I am not very sure where you were planning to go with this story. I want to echo Teague's words and say that this really is too short to actually base a review on. It does sound like an interesting world, but before we can even enter it or try to understand what is happening, we cut straight to the ending. As a results, we do not have really any content to actually analyze an interpret. There are some basic things that can help you turn this story around.
First of all, provide some background information through the narration of the story or if necessary, in the author's note before the story. I was a little confused at first because I could not understand what is going on. You dropped us in the middle of an entire new world without making any introductions. We do not anything about this world, or how it works or what the characters are even taking about. As a result, it gets really hard to follow the text and stay invested in the story, mostly because we cannot comprehend what the story is about.
You have to introduce us to the character as well. Characters are probably the most important aspect of a story, as they are the ones we follow until the end. Here, you provide a very short description of Jax's physical appearance and I really appreciated that. However, you have to realize that we do not know him or his motivations. We have no emotional connection to him, because he is just sort of introduced to us for the sake of the story. You need to show us through the narration who Jax is and what his story is and why we should care about it.
This part is too disjointed to make sense of. One minute, we are talking about Jax's punishment and then we move on to his story five years ago. Of course,, the fact that we do not know or understand any of the terms they keep referring does not exactly help the situation. It could have been an error in understanding on my part also, due to my lack of any information about this world and the characters.
What you need to do here, is expand on what you already have to create a complete story that can stand on its own. You have an interesting character here and interesting elements. You just have to build around them and expand so that the readers have more substance to read and analyze. You have all the ingredients for a good story, you just have to construct one now.
That's all!
Keep writing and have a great day!
Okay... this isn't much different from the piece with the same title you posted a while ago. It's still far too short and far too disjointed to really properly critique. This seems to just start and stop very suddenly, with no real substance in between.
Like I said before, expand! Readers need to have meat to sink their teeth into, and critiquers need something they can sink their teeth into and rip completely to shreds.
-St. Razorblade
The Official YWS Pirate