Kamosis
Active Member
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2012
- Messages
- 29
That's my first time doing anything like this, so any critic or suggestion is welcomed ^^
This book cover is... crowed. There is this bunch of ships flying around and attacking the silliest looking space station ever. Really, who would think that a colossal greek helm would look nice in a battle station? This thing is just silly.
Our book opens with a quote from somewhere telling us about how awesome the warriors from troy are and then we have our prologue of “The Mapple Syrup War”.
It all start with this ultra shy scientist that find about this colossal ring in space and start telling everyone else, but of course before we can’t have any plot, instead we have a long discussion about the skywatch and how they all have ticks and how they are underpaid and how they are protecting humanity from an impact that has almost no chance of occurring. Really boring stuff.
In “Footfall” the very first lines of the book are the aliens looking to Earth and deciding to launch the attack, the kind of thing that make you want to keep reading, here we have exposition that will serve no purpose because we are never again going to see these characters again.
After this bit of exposition we have our mysterious ring and Shy Scientist say:
"Yeah. A Halo. Maybe it's the Covenant."
I hope you like this kind of shout out, because this book is full of them, its start cute, but after a while they just get tiresome. On another point, the defining characteristic of this guy is that he is shyer than Fluttershy, but never once he shows it.
After a bunch of phone calls and people talking to other people about the ring and how mysterious it is and then:
Planning for shots by the big telescopes of earth's major countries is blocked out months and even years in advance. They also cost a lot of money.
As the terminator circled about the globe that night, all such scheduling was put on indefinite hold and dozens of telescopes pointed to a very small patch of the sky.
There was, of course, a huge outcry amongst 'real' researchers who had grants to study oxygen production of Mira Variables that, naturally, were more important than anything else that could possibly be happening especially with those bunglers at Skywa... A WHAT?
Yeah, because these “real” researchers are just a bunch of morons preoccupied with silly things like understanding the universe.
Next scene is a press conference that just reminds us from everything we just know so far: Nothing.
"And I repeat, we have no idea as to its method, we don't know how it works, or its purpose, we don't know why it is here. At this moment, it is as enigmatic as the monolith from 2001..."
That’s two unnecessary shout outs. And I’m so glad that we needed to establish that we know nothing.
Next we have one of the few scenes in this book where he remembers that there is any country at all besides the US.
"Waiting... Waiting... Present are the Presidents of the United States and Russia, Prime Ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, China, India, Brazil. Each have staff present. We will not be responding to questions. We are the Grtul. We come in peace. The ring in your sky is a gate to other worlds. We produce these rings and move them into star systems. Use of the ring requires payment. The payment schedule will be sent to you. There is to be no use of hostile energy systems within three hundred thousand kilometers of the ring which are capable of damaging the ring. Anyone who pays may use the ring.
I hope you enjoy, after this the rest of the world will be almost forgotten, because of course that only the Americans matter. After that they talk about how anyone can use the portal, including hostile forces and that blocking the portal is a big no. The director of Nasa says that in theory that shouldn’t exist any hostile species capable of reaching space, but the Chairman of the joint Chiefs goes “f*ck science! Evil aliens must exist because the other aliens said about hostile forces.
Then they ask the Nasa guy about building a spaceship capable of reaching the gate and he says he needs a bit less than a trillion dollars and five years. No one even mentions asking the other countries for help, hell, they not even bother trying to contact Russia or China and asking what the guys in their space programs think about it.
The next bit is about the aliens finally arriving and about trading:
“But what they mainly want is precious metals. Specifically the platinum group which are pretty rare. Also gold."
No. Space is freaking huge and full of valuable things, so what can we found in a planet that we cannot find in space easily? Most of valuable metals would be really common in space, a single asteroid with about 3% metal would have about 20.000 million tons of aluminum and similar proportions of gold, platinum and other rarer metals.
So, what our little blue planet can offer? Life of course! The big thing that exists here is complex life forms, so if aliens are coming here they would want to know about our life forms, about our culture, movies, books, religions, music!
But of course, in this book all aliens are morons, so they want to trade magic chips for gold.
Five years later Mexico City, Shanghai and Cairo are obliterated by a species of evil aliens that come across the gate. The book says that 16 millions are dead, but a quick search gives me that only Shanghai have about 23 millions habitants in it, but let’s assume that the rest will die soon from starvation and disease. The Evil Aliens, called Horvath, demand all of our metals and the US president bitches about it, the Glatuns say that they can’t help and the chapter end.
My biggest problem with this chapter is the destruction of the three cities, it simply didn’t have any impact, this scene should be visceral, we should feel the tragedy, but since no one of these cities is from the US the book doesn’t care. Why can’t we see the leader of Mexico, China and Egypt claiming help from the aliens? Why the US president does that?
This book cover is... crowed. There is this bunch of ships flying around and attacking the silliest looking space station ever. Really, who would think that a colossal greek helm would look nice in a battle station? This thing is just silly.
Our book opens with a quote from somewhere telling us about how awesome the warriors from troy are and then we have our prologue of “The Mapple Syrup War”.
It all start with this ultra shy scientist that find about this colossal ring in space and start telling everyone else, but of course before we can’t have any plot, instead we have a long discussion about the skywatch and how they all have ticks and how they are underpaid and how they are protecting humanity from an impact that has almost no chance of occurring. Really boring stuff.
In “Footfall” the very first lines of the book are the aliens looking to Earth and deciding to launch the attack, the kind of thing that make you want to keep reading, here we have exposition that will serve no purpose because we are never again going to see these characters again.
After this bit of exposition we have our mysterious ring and Shy Scientist say:
"Yeah. A Halo. Maybe it's the Covenant."
I hope you like this kind of shout out, because this book is full of them, its start cute, but after a while they just get tiresome. On another point, the defining characteristic of this guy is that he is shyer than Fluttershy, but never once he shows it.
After a bunch of phone calls and people talking to other people about the ring and how mysterious it is and then:
Planning for shots by the big telescopes of earth's major countries is blocked out months and even years in advance. They also cost a lot of money.
As the terminator circled about the globe that night, all such scheduling was put on indefinite hold and dozens of telescopes pointed to a very small patch of the sky.
There was, of course, a huge outcry amongst 'real' researchers who had grants to study oxygen production of Mira Variables that, naturally, were more important than anything else that could possibly be happening especially with those bunglers at Skywa... A WHAT?
Yeah, because these “real” researchers are just a bunch of morons preoccupied with silly things like understanding the universe.
Next scene is a press conference that just reminds us from everything we just know so far: Nothing.
"And I repeat, we have no idea as to its method, we don't know how it works, or its purpose, we don't know why it is here. At this moment, it is as enigmatic as the monolith from 2001..."
That’s two unnecessary shout outs. And I’m so glad that we needed to establish that we know nothing.
Next we have one of the few scenes in this book where he remembers that there is any country at all besides the US.
"Waiting... Waiting... Present are the Presidents of the United States and Russia, Prime Ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, China, India, Brazil. Each have staff present. We will not be responding to questions. We are the Grtul. We come in peace. The ring in your sky is a gate to other worlds. We produce these rings and move them into star systems. Use of the ring requires payment. The payment schedule will be sent to you. There is to be no use of hostile energy systems within three hundred thousand kilometers of the ring which are capable of damaging the ring. Anyone who pays may use the ring.
I hope you enjoy, after this the rest of the world will be almost forgotten, because of course that only the Americans matter. After that they talk about how anyone can use the portal, including hostile forces and that blocking the portal is a big no. The director of Nasa says that in theory that shouldn’t exist any hostile species capable of reaching space, but the Chairman of the joint Chiefs goes “f*ck science! Evil aliens must exist because the other aliens said about hostile forces.
Then they ask the Nasa guy about building a spaceship capable of reaching the gate and he says he needs a bit less than a trillion dollars and five years. No one even mentions asking the other countries for help, hell, they not even bother trying to contact Russia or China and asking what the guys in their space programs think about it.
The next bit is about the aliens finally arriving and about trading:
“But what they mainly want is precious metals. Specifically the platinum group which are pretty rare. Also gold."
No. Space is freaking huge and full of valuable things, so what can we found in a planet that we cannot find in space easily? Most of valuable metals would be really common in space, a single asteroid with about 3% metal would have about 20.000 million tons of aluminum and similar proportions of gold, platinum and other rarer metals.
So, what our little blue planet can offer? Life of course! The big thing that exists here is complex life forms, so if aliens are coming here they would want to know about our life forms, about our culture, movies, books, religions, music!
But of course, in this book all aliens are morons, so they want to trade magic chips for gold.
Five years later Mexico City, Shanghai and Cairo are obliterated by a species of evil aliens that come across the gate. The book says that 16 millions are dead, but a quick search gives me that only Shanghai have about 23 millions habitants in it, but let’s assume that the rest will die soon from starvation and disease. The Evil Aliens, called Horvath, demand all of our metals and the US president bitches about it, the Glatuns say that they can’t help and the chapter end.
My biggest problem with this chapter is the destruction of the three cities, it simply didn’t have any impact, this scene should be visceral, we should feel the tragedy, but since no one of these cities is from the US the book doesn’t care. Why can’t we see the leader of Mexico, China and Egypt claiming help from the aliens? Why the US president does that?
