*emerges from the dark depths known as "Lurking"*
Where do I begin?
Let's start with the pretentiousness. I cannot count how many stories I've seen with a beginning similar to this one. It basically sounds like someone trying to warn someone about how hard the world is without actually understanding how hard the world is. It's empty. It's vague. It has no context or meaning to give it substance. Kind of like a mass produced Halloween costume you'd find on a rack at Walmart - it's flimsy, there's a thousand like it, and nothing inside to make it convincing, much less threatening.
And this story appears to be environmental fiction, too. These have been done to death. Openings scolding humanity for how terrible it is for using natural resources have been done to death. Openings talking about how Earth is looking for payback are about as threatening as an angry customer demanding to speak to the manager when you are the manager. You want me to be afraid of the Earth's terrible payback? Make me. Mother Nature does not need someone going around telling people how bad she's going to screw everybody for being mean to the environment. Mostly because she's already screwing everybody over. Show me that part.
I'm also turned off by the narrator's sheer arrogance in this piece. If you're going to do a Green Aesop, this isn't a constructive way of doing it. It has a Holier Than Thou attitude that treats the audience as if they're stupid, and I find that most readers don't appreciate that. This isn't helped by the choice of second person narration, which gives off the intention of directly addressing the real world audience rather than some fantasy equivalent of the audience. Like it's trying to walk the line between essay and science fiction. And falling off.
Ideally, the prologue is supposed to hook your audience into the story you're about to tell. It takes great skill to write a good prologue in general, and even greater skill to write a prologue that insults the audience and still hooks them. My advice? Go back to the drawing board and figure out exactly what you're trying to accomplish with this intro. If you're trying to talk about how people need to be more mindful of their impact on the environment, try essay, not science fiction.
And that was just the first part of the prologue. Onto the second!
...
Aaaaaand I'm lost!
It feels like I was reading one story and tripped completely into another, except the arrogant narrator is still hanging around. There's still the thread of insulting humanity to connect the two parts, but otherwise, what?
I namely have major issues with how Earth's Great Punishment is being carried out by, of all things, a supernova. That's the Sun. Unless Gaia asked Apollo to be her hit man against humanity, I honestly don't see the connection between the first part of your prologue and the second. Also, even basic Googling tells me that our current Sun is way too small to go supernova, so... huh?
But I digress. I have far bigger issues with humanity's solution, this so called "Sun Vault." Let's assume, in this story, the Sun does go supernova for some sci-fi reason. As a result, the parts of the Earth that don't get obliterated by radiation will be incinerated alongside the Earth. Now the temperature of a supernova depends on the specific type and can be tricky to measure, but let me just say that in a Normal Type Ia supernova the core of the star (in this scenario, a white dwarf) would reach temperatures high enough to start carbon fusion, which is greater than 5×10^8 K. In standard form, that is greater than 500,000,000 Kelvin. The temperature of the core of the Earth is estimated to be 6,230 K, plus or minus 500 K. Granted that temperature measurement is before the star collapses, but that gives you a sense of the forces you are dealing with here. No Sun Vault is going to withstand that, no matter how deep you dig it. Because there won't be any ground to dig anymore.
Any way you slice it, this story, when it's not being pretentious, isn't making any sense, which isn't a good thing considering it's the prologue. At first I thought this was going to be an environmentalist story about how humanity needs to be more mindful about how it uses Earth's resources, and then I get blindsided by a supernova that apparently has nothing to do with how humanity uses Earth's resources because it's a supernova. That's bad for Earth, too!
The first thing you need to do before doing anything else is figure out where your focus is. You want to write environmental fiction? Fine, go for it. You want to write about humanity surviving a supernova? Sure! I'm just not sure how those two ideas are connected.
But maybe they are. Maybe this will all make sense later in the story. Maybe there's a reason why the sun went supernova even though it's physically impossible, and maybe there's a reason why the Sun Vault works. But that's the problem. Right now your audience won't understand, and they're probably not going to stick around long enough to find out. So if you are dead set on keeping this "humans somehow cause supernova with reckless environmental policies," I will give you some advice.
First off, give your audience something to identify with. This is probably the most important piece of advice I can give you today. If you take nothing else from this review, take this. Cut the Holier Than Thou, cut the unexplained science, cut being Mother Nature's middle man and downsize your scale. Yes, I know that extinction-causing events may seem very exciting and a great way to kick off your story, but I find audiences aren't very good at grasping big concepts like that without context. So, how do we get context? Again, with focus.
Right now the audience has nothing to relate to. We have all this doomsday talk and big things happening, but they carry no meaning for the audience. Because they're just events. An event alone can't make your audience feel anything but the vaguest of emotions. It's like the difference between "a wedding" and "your best friend's wedding." There has to be someone to care about for it to mean anything beyond connotations. Which is a long winded way of me saying that we need characters. Preferably likable, interesting characters.
Second, you can take all the questions I have asked about your premise and use those to fuel a mystery that your new cast of characters must solve. Maybe the sun has already gone supernova and they are floating in space in their Sun Vault with no clue as to what happened, why it happened, and how they survived. This makes it so the audience can solve the puzzle with the characters, and there you have a plot instead of a series of endless questions from your readers.
Overall, I see no major grammatical or spelling errors. The issue with this piece lies primarily in poor execution, poor setup, and lack of focus. The Holier Than Thou attitude of the narrator needs to go, and the story needs to be made accessible to the audience by limiting its scope, at least initially. The premise as is has too many holes to count, although that isn't necessarily bad. What is bad is the fact that this prologue is trying to be pretentious and all-knowing yet fails to answer basic questions such as "Why should the audience care?" Had this been portrayed as something more along the lines of a mystery sci-fi, I might have enjoyed it more. Change your approach, and you can change this negative into a positive.
Hopefully this helps.
--Dover
Points: 7963
Reviews: 57
Donate