And the winner is...

Oof. Judging the 2/13/09 Friday Challenge was tough, as we had a lot of really good entries this time. But much as I'd like to put off the decision until tomorrow, I can't, so:

torainfor: Superb writing, as always. Of all the entries I think you did the best job of making the Kalmari seem alien, and not merely like humans who just happen to have a certain squiddish quality. I especially liked the business of having them be better adapted to low-G than humans, and having the maguffin in the bag be a child's toy and not what he thought he'd packed was a brilliant piece of misdirection.

Ben-El: I'm not sure what to say about this one. Duke Nukem and I have history, and it's hard to separate my thoughts about your story from that. It's terrific, in a demented, macho, over-the-top kind of way. But...

Leterren: I liked the pathos very much. Style-wise, this seems like it could use a good tightening-up edit, but the moral point is potent. The narrator's decision to try to save the Kalmari seems insufficiently supported—there's obviously some kind of epiphany that takes place here, but it seems only hinted at, not shown—and then his decision at the end to turn over his notes to his commander seems like a surrender. But there is a tremendous lot of potential in this story, and I'd like to see it after another pass.

Which is not to say that I'm recommending you rewrite it. That might be a wasted effort, as I'm afraid most editors would probably reject it as being too much like "Enemy Mine." But you definitely have some good ideas and I look forward to your future work.

Chandler: Very nicely written, with some brilliant description, but I'm still puzzling over the C. S. Lewis reference. Is this the crashed pilot's dying hallucination, or what? Overall, I'm afraid I just don't get this one.

Giraffe: This one had a distinctly 1940s Astounding/1950s Galaxy vibe to it. Very good, economical writing and a very clever little Droid Friday, but the "rebooting the species with a new Adam and Eve" plot was done to death fifty years ago, and then minced into little pieces, and then jumped up and down on with hobnail boots, and then made into a couple of forgettable episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. I'm afraid that no matter how you approach it or how good your story otherwise is, this is one of those ideas that's permanently tainted, and as soon as an editor begins to suspect that that's where the story is going—which I did at about the halfway point—it's dead, Jim.

Henry: What can I say? I mean, besides MORE COWBELL!

And that, I think is the big problem with this story: that it's impossible to read those lyrics now without thinking of that Saturday Night Live skit. Which is a pity, as it torpedoes what is otherwise a good, strong, professional story. I wish I had an idea for getting around this problem, but I'm afraid I don't.

Euthyphro: What torainfor and Henry said. It's close, it's funny, but it would benefit from a tightening-up edit. I think I caught a contact buzz just from reading this one.

Al: What everybody else said. Good story, well-told. There's something a little too precious about "Martian speed metal," and much as I'd like to believe people will still be listening to Tommy centuries in the future, I have my doubts. I can't even get my kids to listen to it. But overall, a good read, and I really like the way you managed to pull out a happy ending.

KTown: And this is my last, "what everyone else said." Just about the time I was really getting into this story, you chopped it off like the back-end of an AMC Gremlin. Where's the rest of the story? This one is great, but it's only about two-thirds of the tale. It needs an ending.

This, by the way, is a good thing. Remember Lucas's Law: "Always leave 'em begging for more and complaining that you finished too soon, not complaining that you went on too long and begging you to stop already." While that's generally good advice, it actually is possible to finish too soon, and I'm afraid that's what's happened here.

Vidad: I liked almost everything about this one. I liked the shift in the temporal point of view, to its being a story from years ago being told by grandpa to an impatient child. I liked the shift in polarity: the horrible, voracious, all-devouring monsters are us! I liked the little inside jokes. ("You’d be amazed how durable those life support systems used to be. Not like the cold equations-style stuff they use today.") I even liked the horrid pun at the ending, which was a brilliant reversal of Richard Matheson's classic Twilight Zone horror-punchline, "It's a cookbook!"

In fact, the more I think about this one, the more I want to remove that "almost" qualifier in the first paragraph. Torainfor, Henry, and Al all wrote really strong contenders this week that made the final round, and if KTown's story had had an ending it might have won, but in the end I have to go with the one that made me laugh out loud, and that was Vidad's "Necessity." So Vidad: congratulations, you're our winner this week! Now come on down and claim your prize!