Interface by Rick Huffman

[Megawatts]

Not a bad attempt. A good ‘epic’ along the lines of Neo and the Matrix. This story isn’t far in the future: Chips implanted in humans are already here and we have quadriplegics using computers
by their thought processes.

This story showed how high tech can sometimes go down a path that it was never intended to
follow. The world of cyberspace and its horizons and universe is immeasurably unknown to us yet. We’ve still just a canoe on a sandy beach before a never-ending expanding ocean. I personally believe that traveling to the stars will become possible through cyberspace, and eventually we as humans in the distance future will cultivate this new dimension and live in it.

A little more showing over telling would have gone a long way in this one. The balance between
show and tell wasn’t bad, but showing when possible is better than telling.

And remember character development. Always strive to get the characters to come alive. In a short story this can be hard, and the characters in this one did have dimension. Morphy, in my opinion, should have more since he as the main one.

All in all, not a bad story, and it did have all the elements needed for good story telling. Maybe
a better balance, and some more sensory input, but the author has a good handle on story telling and I hope he continues here a Aphelion.

I liked it very much. Would be interested in reading other comment!

[Lester Curtis]

I wasn't able to warm up to this one much. Too much of it just seemed like a list of speculations on what living in cyberspace might be like, and it was weak in motivation and conflict/resolution.

Why was Morphy unable to simply wake himself up? And why did he fall asleep in the middle of reading email, anyway? Not a good career move, at any rate . . .

I thought it odd that he should find himself plastered to a computer monitor image, and worse that he kept falling off.

Besides, it's disappointing that all the guy did in there was get himself in and out of computer games. There's an incredible richness of material completely ignored here; for example, what if he found out that he could get into banking computers and move money around any way he liked without being traced? And that's just the most obvious; he could explore the private emails of politicians or military or religious figures, divert air traffic, control cable TV programming . . . he could have godlike powers with real-world results. And what would happen if another person got the chip and he met them in there?

Far bigger things are possible than reading email and opening doors and playing games. This was just too shallow.