Looking for critiques on the first 13 and/or anyone interested enough to look at chapter 1.
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Captain Tarvis Hanbaum stopped breathing, his heart pounding in his chest. His brain seized up for a moment. Then it began racing as a wash of memories and questions flooded over it. "She looks like…But she can’t be! It’s impossible." Stumbling from the room, he somehow made his way from the museum to the ship. Feigning illness, he instructed his adjutant to make sure he was undisturbed for the remainder of the day.
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The planet hung like a rusty brown ball in space, wrapped from pole to pole in cities but completely barren of life except for a few hardy microbes. It was obvious that it had once been able to sustain an immense amount of life. Now it was a barren rock spinning through space around a medium sized yellow sun. That suited Captain Hanbaum just fine. A planet without intelligent life meant he could land immediately. No having to wait for a First Contact Team to be dispatched from the massive carrier ship the Wandering Star, currently stationed safely above the ecliptic of this solar system.
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Thanks.
[This message has been edited by Mechwarrior (edited August 21, 2005).
Removed HTML tags for italicized text.]
[This message has been edited by Mechwarrior (edited August 21, 2005).]
"It can't be! It's impossible!" Maybe just one of these statements, and show us the feeligns he has in his body.
Note about the dead world: if there's no life, make sure your astronauts keep their oxy tanks with them -- there'll be no free oxygen, of course. What killed everyone? They'll at least wonder. And it may still be there.
I note that the captain is a cold-hearted bastard: happy to see an entire planetful of people exterminated, for his convenience. What a monster! I'm all for reading about monsters, but I want my MC to have some virtue, or I won't care about him enough to read. Maybe you could have one sympathetic character, on screen a lot, and one that's this selfish.
Good point about the flashback. Only need to yank that one line to fix it.
Now that you mention it, I can see how, out of context, the opening makes the MC sound monstrous. From a military standpoint, empty villages mean you don't have to worry who's hostile and who's not. That overrides any feelings of compassion - at least in a veteran.
The next couple paragraphs do soften the character's image, and he is offset by a kinder, gentler executive officer. I'm still tweaking dialogue and scenes to make them more 'human' and less caricatured. I don't like to think of this as a purely character story but he isn't the same man in the end.
I'll take some advice from John Barnes. If a character starts to have a character trait, either take it out (if it doesn't fit your goal), or shove it up the reader's nose.
...and having complexity (the hard edge + the softening) is also cool. I suggest the softening be there not to make him look less monstrous, but to make him look more conflicted or complicated.