I, Car A Conjecture by E. A. Moore

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Lester Curtis
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Re: I, Car A Conjecture by E. A. Moore

Post by Lester Curtis »

It is a bit on the funny side. Supposing that this AI is developing a personality, it seems to be carrying out the secret fantasies of its creator.

This scenario is an example of a 'technological trap,' along with elevators and subway trains. Millions of people use these things every day with no consideration at all of their possibility of failure, let alone what to do in that case. People have died in technological traps.

The wife reminded me of my own ex. She was such an awful backseat driver that, for the last few years of our marriage, I refused to drive any car she was in.

Back to the story, though--the premise is solid and entertaining, but the writing is plagued by really bad dialog tags:
Maisey reminded him.
muttered Frank distractedly,
Maisey nagged,
shrieked, wailed,
etc., etc., etc.--and possibly the worst one I've ever seen,
"Humph!" humphed Frank
Maybe that was an intentional attempt at humor, but all I could laugh at was the absurdity of it.

All this is "telling," as contrasted with "showing," and does nothing good for the story. Mr. Moore should throw away his said-book, along with quite a few modifiers:
"Said-book" ism. An artificial verb used to avoid the word
"said." "Said" is one of the few invisible words in the English
language and is almost impossible to overuse. It is much less
distracting than "he retorted," "she inquired," "he ejaculated,"
and other oddities. The term "said-book" comes from certain
pamphlets, containing hundreds of purple-prose synonyms for the
word "said," which were sold to aspiring authors from tiny ads in
American magazines of the pre-WWII era.

Tom Swifty. An unseemly compulsion to follow the word "said"
with a colorful adverb, as in "'We'd better hurry,' Tom said
swiftly." This was a standard mannerism of the old Tom Swift
adventure dime-novels. Good dialogue can stand on its own without
a clutter of adverbial props.
(from https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Br ... ng.lexicon)

A good exercise would be to remove ALL dialog tags from this story, then put back only the words 'said' and asked,' and then only when really needed (some of the dialog tags in this story are unneeded). What you'll find is that the dialog works perfectly well on its own.

Other than that, it was mechanically clean; I didn't notice any SPaG errors. Characterization is good; setting is good (a little sparse, but well-balanced in context); dialog is good, and the plot made sense. I liked the ending, too. Clean up all the verbal clutter and you'll have a winner.
I was raised by humans. What's your excuse?
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