New and Improved by Ezra T. Gray

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Robert_Moriyama
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Re: New and Improved by Ezra T. Gray

Post by Robert_Moriyama »

...
I would've liked to know whether we were dealing with an apocalypse leaving only civvies to hunt for survival or whether this was a mere "outbreak"; ie, were authorities still in authority?

Along the lines of the above critique: why would the beast not recognize his brother in law when he still possessed enough humanity to relate to the readers in a fairly sophisticated manner all this info on the implants?

I also wondered why, at the end, the beast was condemned to hell for unintended consequences? Why damn the primitive? Is the desire to be better, faster, stronger seen as a deadly sin? Vanity, maybe? I'm just curious about that. Although I wonder if this third POV shift is too much for the length of the piece.

Dan E.
<br><br>1) My impression was that the implant was expensive enough that there wouldn't be that many 'beasts' running around.<br><br>2) Despite the coherence and even eloquence of the narration, the protagonist (like many a serial / mass murderer before him) was likely incapable of viewing others as anything but (a) competition, if they were also Prometheans, or (b) prey. The euphoria and exaggerated sense of omnipotence prevented him from recognizing a third type: (c) an armed threat.<br><br>3) It wasn't so much vanity and the desire to be more (with little or no effort) that made our beastie-boy hell-worthy -- it was the murder and cannabilism! Actually, given the revelations in the final paragraphs, it may be that very FEW Prometheans turned into psychotic killers.<br><br>Robert M.<br><br>
Last edited by Robert_Moriyama on October 17, 2005, 06:15:15 PM, edited 1 time in total.
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Jack London (1876-1916)
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Robert_Moriyama
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Re: New and Improved by Ezra T. Gray

Post by Robert_Moriyama »

Sigh. I suspect that once the feral impulses started to take over his mind, the protagonist wasn't exactly doing a lot of reading / scanning world news. And as a predator-to-be, it might be that other occurrences of predation would stand out to him, seeming to be more common than they really were.<br><br>Toronto has seen a horrendous number of homicides involving guns over a relatively short period. However, a statistician noted that clustering of this kind can occur by random chance ('random' and 'evenly distributed' are NOT synonymous, although it is tempting to expect them to be) -- it is not necessarily indicative of a trend or a microcosmic reflection of conditions at large.<br><br>So -- you're turning into a psychotic with cannabilistic urges. While you're still human enough to do things like watch newscasts, you see reports of others who have gone further and acted on those urges. You assume that the anecdotal reports are typical ('assumption of mediocrity', or something like that).<br><br>I would expect that the Prometheus implant procedure was about as common as, well, another kind of implant procedure particularly popular among Californian women of a certain IQ (Kate would be exempt on that basis, of course). There would be a lot of Prometheans, but as a percentage of the population, they would be very much in the minority. Maybe the hunters were 'deputized' by the authorities (since hunting thousands of berserk feral killers would be beyond the combined resources of police, National Guard, and regular army combined) ...<br><br>Robert (See, I CAN rationalize anything) M.
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

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