And the winner of the Greater Challenge is...

Sorry it's taken us so long to get to this point, folks. Not only has it been a busy week or so, we had four thought provoking entries to read and judge. Let's take a look at the entries.

"The Vet," by Guy Stewart

Bruce says: We had some serious ambivalence over this one. The ending has a really nice, creepy, nasty dark vibe, but the story has a rocky start. It's in Dabney's point of view, then Anna's, then back into Dabney's again, all in the space of the first five paragraphs. There seems to be some major confusion over whether Dabney is actually a self-aware and emotional being, or whether he's merely following pre-programmed directives to simulate the appearance of having independent thought and emotion. Likewise, there seems to be some confusion over whether Dabney is a mechanical device with a synthetic organic outer layer, or an entirely synthetic organic being fully subject to organic chemistry. For a story told mostly in the voice of a third person limited narrator with access to Dabney's interior monologue, this lack of a clear sense of who Dabney is and what is going on in his mind is bothersome.

This story has a really strong ending. The setup leading to that ending needs considerably more work to support the ending. Also, on a picayune point, we felt the title gave away too strong a clue as to how the story would end. A less-revealing title would work better.

Henry says: I concur with Bruce. The ending was bang on and very thought provoking but the shifts in P.O.V. were disconcerting and also wondered how some pills could "kill" a bot. I think you've got the makings of a great story, it just needs some more work to bring it to full potential.


"Cera," by Miko

Bruce says: This story accomplishes something remarkable. You have given us a really repulsive scumbag of a sigma character in Pratt, and then made him interesting anyway. By the end of the story we care about what happens to him. We don't care precisely what happens to him -- he could just as well wind up being skinned alive and with his hide tacked up to dry on the wall of the barn, and we'd be equally satisfied -- but we want to find out what his fate will be.

The story has some large flaws. Pratt turns into a monologuing windbag when he's explaining himself to Renie. Mara turns into a really overbearing monologuing windbag in the last few hundred words. These scenes need to be trimmed and tightened with industrial-grade cutting equipment. But we absolutely loved the way that all this arguing over how Pratt is treating Cera suddenly cuts to Cera's P.O.V., and all we see there is an communications error log. We have to wonder how many readers are capable of parsing out the log and figuring out what happens in the final scene; we would hope it's more accessible than we believe it is. But in any case, there are some very cool things going on in this story, and with some serious tightening, we think this one could find a publisher. Good work.

Henry says: As others have noted, Pratt is a well-named character; he is just so wonderfully unlikeable. I really liked your setup but once the monologuing begins, my first thought was that I'd fallen into an Ayn Rand story where everyone speaks about psychological constructs as if they held PhDs in the subject. With Pratt, I assumed he was just spouting the "line" he'd been taught by the UniSoc; so the formal speech worked well enough for him. I don't doubt the others would have a solid sense of self and respect for individuality, but I'd find a less stilted way of handling them. As with Bruce, I thought running Cera's error log was a great way to end, but even in the field of science fiction you probably want to simplify the log for the non-IT people who end up reading your story.

Written as is, I think you could sell this to a magazine with strong Libertarian leanings. With some rewriting, I think you could sell it to quite a few places.

"First," by Ben El

Bruce says: We split on this one. There was one really big and baffling transition: does Colonel Weer become Private Weer, or is Private Weer the character formerly known as Nova, or is this a flashback, or what? The sudden appearance of Iambe on page 9 also threw us, but that's easily fixed by having her do a walk-on in the first page or two and then be told to wait in the corner until she's summoned on page 9.

The real difference of opinion came after Weer got out into The Rust. I thought Johann was a wonderfully gloriously grubby and half-daft Mad Max sort of character, spouting bits and ends of poetry and scripture in between his moments of glaring and painful sanity, while Karen just couldn't follow it. The ambiguity of Artemis's fate also bothered Karen, while I think it works just fine the way it is.

In all, it's a very strong story that would benefit from some reworking, focusing, and tightening. In particular, it would make more sense if the second half of the story was told from the P.O.V. of Private (or perhaps Lieutenant?) Nova, which would both indicate the passage of time and establish sufficient continuity to the first half. Also, a few words of explanation as to why the Secret Police bots decided the solution to the society's problems was simply to begin killing people randomly would help. But I think there is the core of a very good story here, and I'd like to see you develop it further.

Henry says: I agree with Bruce on this one. I loved the way you opened the story, particularly with the emphasis on the button. Jahann's rambling pronouncements were very entertaining and just enlightening enough to show that he wasn't just a crazy old wild man.

"Cymate," by Torainfor

Bruce says: I am deeply disturbed by this story. You whipped it out in one day? Sheesh. I'd hate to see how it would have turned out if you'd actually worked on it for a while.

I think your self-assessment is basically spot-on. This is a really rough draft of a really good novella, and you need to develop it further and try to shop it to F&SF first, then Asimov's, and then Analog. I would try to work in a touch of talk about the Vinge Singularity, just because that topic has been fairly hot lately, and by calling it the Vinge rather than Kurzweil singularity you'd identify yourself as one of those SF writers who knows What's Really Happening.

The one -- and there is only one -- thing that set off warning bells for me is when the sentient cymate asks to be called "Eve" at the end, as there have been so many SF stories that end with some person/thing/entity being identified as either Adam or Eve that it's kind of the gold standard of ideas that have been overused. But aside from that, this one really needs to be expanded, developed, and polished, and then taken to market.

Henry says: As with Bruce, alarms went off in my head when the cymate chooses to be called Eve. The story has way too much potential to have such a little thing work against it. Perhaps you could pick a name out of Greek mythology that would work; maybe Athena or Nike or even Aphrodite? Anything but Eve! Now, get busy polishing this one and get it published!

This was a really tough one to judge. All the entries are strong; the strongest set of entries we've seen so far this year. Worse, they're strong in many and varied ways, making direct comparison tough. With polishing, each of the entries should be strong enough for publication in the right market. With that in mind, we checked the voting, which wasn't much help, either as nobody received more than a single vote. In the end, the judges chose torainfor as the winner for this challenge. Come on down and claim your prize!