And the winner is...

A calm and clear Sunday evening here, after a hectic week and a whirlwind of a weekend. It's the end of Summer already! It hardly seems possible, but the sunsets are coming much too early these days, the evenings are uncomfortably cool, and the geese are flocking up in the cow pasture and getting ready to fly south. #3 Daughter is back in college. The Kid starts high school next week. The weather service issued frost warnings for the north end of the state last night.

I met a retired couple from Virginia yesterday. They've hit the road in their motorhome and are out to see the capitols of all 48 contiguous states, "but as soon as we see snow in the air, we're turning around and heading for home." I suggested that if they really wanted to make it to Montana before that happens, they'd best get a move on.

And so should I.

Snowdog: "Day 25,915 of My Incarceration" is a really terrific start to a story. You really put us inside this guy's head and paint the big picture in a few deft strokes.

The big problem with this one is that I want to know what happens next. This guy has been in prison for 71 years. I simply can't believe that after all that time, the best he can come up with is, "I could improvise a weapon to end it all today." If he was the type to give in to despair and choose to escape by suicide, he would have done so decades earlier. No, this guy is working on some brilliantly, deviously clever plan to escape, and I want to see it in action.

And of course, once he emerges from his time capsule, that's when the real story begins to unfold.

Torainfor: "Life Sentence" did something that your stories have never done for me before, in that it left me—well, to be blunt, uninterested. What you've presented here is the outline for a really strong novella, or maybe even a novel, but I get no sense of being in the story at all, and no sense of the narrator's character.

All the action takes place offstage. Everything that happens is revealed en passant. It's all telling; no showing, and barely even any doing. The other characters are just a list of The Summer Stock Company Players: "old Toby Gruyere," "Mike Jeffries," "John Branton," and "Margarite." Branton especially should be a fascinating and charismatic character, but we don't see any of that. We only know he's charismatic because our unnamed narrator says he's charismatic, and leaves it at that. Even the narrator's children, Bastian and Sophie, are nullities, and since it would seem we are supposed to care for them, that is most unfortunate.

I think you've got some really good ideas here. But this one is all skeleton and no flesh, and needs much more development before it functions even as a rough draft.

Topher: "Methuselah Unbound" is a terrific first chapter. You tell the story very well, and make Gabe an engaging and sympathetic character. Beyond that, though, you've also tapped into one of the great main veins of fantastic fiction. From Washington Irving's "Rip van Winkle" to H. G. Wells' "The Sleeper Wakes" to the great-grandpappy of all "that Buck Rogers stuff," Philip Francis Nowlan's Armageddon 2419 A.D., the story of a man pulled out of his own time and thrown on a one-way trip into the future is one of the great tropes of the genre, and it never seems to get tired.

You've written a really strong start here, but there's clearly more story to be told. If you're so inclined, I think you'd find it worthwhile to explore the question of what happens next.

Al: And so finally, we get to "The Disconnect". I have to admit that this one had a terrific ending that I did not see coming at all. The story is tight, well-written, and has just the right amount of scientificobabble to put the premise over. (Just curious: did you ever read Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio?)

The thing just plain works. I hesitated a bit over rendering judgment—I'd really like to see where "Methuselah unbound," goes—but this one is complete as it stands and delivers the setup and the punch in one graceful sweep of motion. Ergo, Al, "The Disconnect" is this week's winner, so come on down and claim your prize.

And for everyone else who submitted an entry, thought about submitting an entry, or just read the entries: thanks for giving it a try, and remember, the next Friday Challenge is already in progress!