9.4 KiB
[Weekly Challenge] "Rational Horror"
Post:
Last Week
Last time, the prompt was "The Chosen One". /u/Kishoto is the winner with his story "Clark", and will receive a month of reddit gold along with super special winner flair. Congratulations /u/Kishoto! (Now is a great time to go to that thread and look at the entries you may have missed, especially the late entrants; contest mode is now disabled.)
This Week
The prompt for this week is "Rational Horror". We've had a few discussions in this subreddit recently about what that might entail, especially this thread. Is it delightfully existential horror? Lovecraftian unknowability? People responding reasonably to a serial killer stalking them instead of running down into the basement? Genre-awareness? This is your chance to show your vision of that definition. Remember, prompts are to inspire, not to limit.
The winner will be decided Wednesday, July 29nd. You have until then to post your reply and start accumulating upvotes. It is strongly suggested that you get your entry in as quickly as possible once this thread goes up; this is part of the reason that prompts are given a week in advance.
Rules
-
300 word minimum, no maximum. Post as a link to Google Docs, pastebin, Dropbox, etc. This is mandatory.
-
No plagiarism, but you're welcome to recycle and revamp your own ideas you've used in the past.
-
Think before you downvote.
-
Winner will be determined by "best" sorting.
-
Winner gets reddit gold, special winner flair, and bragging rights.
-
All top-level replies to this thread should be submissions. Non-submissions (including questions, comments, etc.) belong in the meta thread, and will be aggressively removed from here.
-
Top-level replies must be a link to Google Docs, a PDF, your personal website, etc. It is suggested that you include a word count and a title when you're linking to somewhere else.
-
In the interest of keeping the playing field level, please refrain from cross-posting to other places until after the winner has been decided.
-
No idea what rational fiction is? Read the wiki!
Meta
If you think you have a good prompt for a challenge, add it to the list (remember that a good prompt is not a recipe). If you think that you have a good modification to the rules, let me know in a comment in the meta thread. Also, if you want a quick index of past challenges, I've posted them on the wiki.
Next Week
The prompt for next week is "The Chessmaster". This is the character with layers upon layers of deception and backup plans for when the backup plans fail. Sometimes, being the chessmaster means sacrificing a few pawns. Other times, it means recognizing which piece is really the king. For more, see the entry at TVTropes.
Next week's thread will go up on 7/29. Please confine any questions or comments to the meta thread.
Comments:
-
u/JackStargazer:
[The Real You](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PmC1LfBHH2poxcgKJZRjDprwWLrlOgD3zHG9o_OIRvk/edit?usp=sharing) **Edit:** Wow. Thanks guys. Well, I guess this means I have to actually finish one of the dozen other blurbs I started writing and never finished, hmm?-
u/JackStargazer:
For reference, this is the first original fiction I've ever written to be shown to others. I wrote it just now in one ninety minute long session. I've enabled comments so that people can leave feedback.-
u/eaglejarl:
Your in-document reviewer seems to have been a tad upset, but it made perfect sense to me. The fact that the AI was in the box was clearly stated in the beginning, and the minute his voice got faked, I knew what was going on -- she was scamming them all for reasons of her own. My initial guess was that now she has a "trust-worthy" sock puppet who can tell the world that no, Celeste is safe, really. Also, the horror worked for me.-
u/JackStargazer:
That's bang on what I was intending to convey, yeah. Thanks for the input. -
u/Pluvialis:
Hah, I didn't realise that the new David was Celeste. Just thought it was a rational horror story about uploading not really being a continuation of you, no matter how you do it (i.e. that the new David was a copy of David, not himself - yes I know that's equivalent but the slow destruction that one copy experiences is still chilling).
-
-
u/ArgentStonecutter:
Another comment: the guy should have set up some identification protocol. I certainly would have, just to make sure the copy was intact. The whole "going through the identification protocol with the upload" schtick is old hat already, in 2015. -
u/ArgentStonecutter:
Have you read Greg Egan's short story *Learning to be Me*?
-
-
-
u/Sagebrysh:
[Manifest Destiny](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ROXAO2hIUVKnbu1ucOSevwKFAZAPmeN6McssiSIEB40/edit?usp=sharing)-
u/PeridexisErrant:
Niiiiice. My only science nitpicks - because the more accurate, the more horrifying: 1. Saturn-orbits have [apokrone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis#Terminology_graph), not apoapsis (that's Earth-only). Also lovely mythological overtones... 2. LIDAR and microwave RADAR can show a lot of things, but not everything. At 10km altitude LIDAR is basically only good for landscape features; you could tell that part of the ship is missing but little else. 2km gets you to ~1m resolution though. On the other hand, the microwave backscatter is highly revealing about the surface type - this could be seriously creepy and it fits well. The SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography) works from earth orbit @~100km, and from 10km the backscatter can tell which part of a flat paddock has been grazed most recently. *KSP and remote sensing geek hats off, now...*-
u/Sagebrysh:
> Saturn-orbits have apokrone, not apoapsis (that's Earth-only). Also lovely mythological overtones... While you're right about aprokrone, which yes is a cool term, apoapsis is the catch-all for general navigation. You're wrong about it being specific to Earth, the term for that is apogree (from the page you linked :P- u/PeridexisErrant:
...My only defence is that I'm writing at almost two o'clock in the morning. (too stubborn to stop reprinting this part until it works...)
- u/PeridexisErrant:
-
-
u/Coadie:
Couple of fixes: >Saturned loomed > Saturn loomed > I was broken from my revere > reverie >I chuckled, climbing out of my chair and stretching my legs in the temporary absence of weightlessness. Mixing your tenses here, I think? Try: "I chuckled, as I climbed out of my chair and stretched..." >“Do it then.” I said. > “Do it then,” I said. This one's a common mistake, which I still catch myself doing. No full stop. This error appears in a couple of spots. >Marine privates’ Matterson, ... No inverted comma necessary here. >“How is this possible?” I asked to now one in particular > to no one Could be good with a bit of work, I agree with DataPacRat though, and perhaps you could increase the tension by allowing the realisation to unfurl a little more slowly?
-
-
u/writer525_1154:
[Death^2](http://pastebin.com/E389usCf) Spoilers for The Prestige- u/eaglejarl:
> Firstname Tesla's machine You probably want "Nicola" there. Also, later on you have "He's hardly been sleeping"; should be "he'd" to match tense. I've seen the movie, loved it, and this is a great extension of the concept. It didn't work for me as horror because the scenes of torture were not evocative enough for me -- they felt glossed over, as though the story were hurrying on to some more interesting bit. The ending also left me puzzled -- if the copies are identical to him, why are they so antithetical to his own motivations? (No interest in revenge, willingness to work with copies.)
- u/eaglejarl:
-
u/Coadie:
[Up-arrow](http://pastebin.com/fSe7K6jT) *edit* Well, that was disappointing. Wasn't quite expecting a negative score. C'est la vie.-
u/ArgentStonecutter:
It's a good set up, or maybe an epilog, but without more work to establish a background it's too abstract to be horrifying. -
u/Fun-Thoughts:
It doesn't really feel like a story, more like a scenario being described. Needs some serious expansion in my opinion. except for that, very well written, the quality is high, but like ArgentStonecutter said, it needs a background, or something else to connect to, so that it can be more than a scene describing an idea.
-