Encapsulation - FIRST DRAFT

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

This is the first draft of the story. Theedited and expanded final versionis available free for KU subscribers and for sale on Kindle.

Planet Dirt: Remnant of an exile world, ground down by governmental and megacorp warring.The Accident a generation ago erased what its inhabitants had not already forgotten.Their brightest scientists vanished without a trace, leaving only the icy Wasteland.Carrick, a gangster, chooses Wasteland exile rather than betray the Family. Intelligent and loyal, he determines to bend the frontier’s prisoners to his will.After all, when people won’t choose what’s best for themselves, they must beforcedto choose.But the Wasteland conceals impossible scientific phenomena that force Carrick to realize how little he understands.And when an officer of humanity’s ancient, starfaring empire crashes into the Wasteland’s heart, he reveals Planet Dirt’s coldest secret.The Accident was only the beginning of a bitter end.

Information

Status: Completed
Year: 2021
Author: ArgyleInsect

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.1/ 5.0
Followers: 18
Views: 9,476

Reviews

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Community Reviews(1)

TwelveGreatApesRoyal Road
★★★★ 3.5
Grammar
Just to get this out of the way, the grammar is generally fine, especially by the standards of this site. There are a few typos and doubled up words, where two potential terms have been added and not deleted. However these don’t occur often enough that they take you out of the story, and there are generally only a few mistakes per chapter.
There are also a couple of occasions where the character’s name is literally written as the word ‘Character’, presumably as a placeholder term! Seems like an easy fix though.
Style
The text is easily digestible, focussing on short, straightforward stage directions that move the plot forwards, than longer, more descriptive moments. It’s punchy and easy to read.
Judging such a thing is always going to be a matter of personal taste - I enjoyed the fast progression from beat to beat, but I did sometimes feel that the narration often overwhelmed the voices of the characters somewhat.
Action scenes, especially, felt more like receiving a dispassionate summary of an already concluded event rather than being present in the thick of the action.
There are also a few moments where the narrator would suddenly break the fourth wall out of nowhere, which were a little jarring considering the rest of the text was written in a totally different style.
Story
The work is fairly short and more of a novella length, which obviously restricts its room for development. That said, this is a good, self contained story, and ambitious in what it tries to achieve in a relatively short amount of time. The pacing is pretty spot on, right up until the very end of the story, where things begin to feel a little rushed. It could also be argued that perhaps a little too much time is spent on the prison, as I did not feel truly drawn into the story until the plotlines of the two protagonists started to interweave.
There are also a lot of plot points which are left underdeveloped, perhaps due to the brevity of the work. The idealogue virus could certainly hav