Readers welcome, about 2550 words.
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My grandfather would have been astonished to learn how quickly freedoms eroded after the restocking of the Supreme Court. He died not long after that. I was still very young in those days. Looking back at those fifteen years, I find it hard to believe how much things changed.

There is a door in the science building that I've never seen open. Rumor has it that the government pays one of the professors to run experiments in there--a sort of state-supported mad scientist program. I had some guesses. Dr. Randel in chemistry was a strange fellow, and Dr. Price in biology was just plain creepy--the perfect image of the mad scientist. Rumors also said that anyone going in that door never came out.

I often went out of my way to walk past that door. Not many people had reason to go past, but I happened to be taking a class with the new guy, Dr. Fleisher. He was given a make-shift office in the basement not far from that door, and I was waiting outside for my appointment.

Edit: formatting

[This message has been edited by Spaceman (edited July 07, 2005).]
 

Also, I'm not convinced that first person is really the best choice. Is there a particular reason you picked it? (Didn't OSC talk you out of it?)
 

If you can wait until Monday night for a response, I'll give it a read. I have a busy work weekend. I MIGHT be able to get it read and critted before Monday night, but I'm not about to guarantee it.
 

This is not a satire piece. The first paragraph is necessary to justify how the events can be happening. I did consider that it might not be the right FIRST paragraph, but I need to think on where else to drop the information into the piece. Maybe some suggestions on the feedback loop?

Rahl: He didn't talk me out of it, no. He didn't try. He merely discussed whether it is appropriate. In this case, I'm not trying to get inside the character's head. I want this to sound like something the character is telling after the fact, so first person is the correct choice in my view.

[This message has been edited by Spaceman (edited July 08, 2005).]
 

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There is a door in the science building that I've never seen open. Rumor has it that the government pays one of the professors to run experiments in there--a sort of state-supported mad scientist program. Rumor also said that anyone going in that door never came out.

I often went out of my way to walk past that door. But I happened to be taking a class with the new professor, Dr. Fleisher. He was given a make-shift office in the basement not far from that door, and I was waiting outside for my appointment.

 

Reminds me of the old Maeser laboratory on Utah State University campus. Genuinely creepy and mysterious.
 

So far, it's all summary. (Summary done in an interesting voice, to be sure.) I think if you started the story where the action starts -- either with a mention of the SC change, or not -- I'd be more interested.
 

And, you're much safer if you don't open the door...
 

Still, it is a commonplace of SF that our current ideas of Constitutionality won't last forever (considering that most of them were invented out of whole cloth within the past few decades anyway, this isn't unrealistic). I don't think that you need to start with that. Most readers will expect that, in a story set a dozen or more years in the future, social mores and legal codes will have changed pretty dramatically.

Also, if you look at the recent decisions of this court, you definitely see a trend towards totalitarianism and token democracy. So it isn't like you really need the first paragraph in any case. It has nothing to do with your opening, and I suspect that you aren't going to do much more with it than the rest of the opening already posits or hints.
 

Well, people - in general - do not like doors that they are not allowed to open. If it just happens to be closed, thats fine. But if its closed, and, for whatever reason, we are told we cannot open it, then all of a sudden, it becomes of prime importance that, at our earliest opportunity, we must open that door.

So I think you've tapped into something primal in human nature.

However, the entire "mad scientist" angle that surrounds the closed door kind of trivializes it. For some reason, I can't help but imagine the character opening the door, and its like the old, black-and-white Frankenstein movie's lab scene on the other side.

I think if you focus more on the simple fact that here, in this busy place, where room is so important that they're putting scientists in basement corners, there's just a door that no one opens, then that would touch deeper on the human need to open forbidden doors.
 

To include a first paragraph like that one marks the narrator as a legal scholar or the author as a politicialist trying to write SF. Everyone that reads a lot of SF already knows that a story set more than a decade in the future is supposed to show more than a decade's worth of change in society. It's just that obvious.

By stating the obvious, you're saying that you don't think the audience is smart enough to know that already. Which marks your story as "political" fiction rather than SF. And political fiction just isn't worth writing. Nobody's going to read it unless they already agree with your point and don't care about anything other than whether they agree with the "point" of a story.

It's the same thing as kicking off your story with a diatribe against the current administration (or it's current opponents). You don't just lose half your audience, you lose all the audience that actually cares about your story rather than your politics.
 

I'd be interested in reading the whole thing, if you want to email it to me.