@krellin:
OK, I finished reading your story--would've finished sooner but I had to get up and do something in the middle of it--so anyway, my opinion or critique or whatever...
I think it's a very obvious story, krellin, which is not a good thing. It's extremely heavey-handed; even if the title doesn't give up the game for you--and I don't think it does, and I'll explain why in a moment--it's still painfully obvious in every paragraph of every page what's going on, yes, but also exactly what's gpoing to happen yes; this really robs your story of any sort of suspense or, subsequently, dramatic build-up, as from Page 1 I can guess what's going to occur at the end of Page 34 with almost perfect accuracy. It's very transparent that way, which I think is the fault of two things, primarily--the implausibility of your subject and your style.
The sort of theocracy you have set up in the world of your story doesn't seem plausible, and not nearly enough for the audience to connect to the world of the characters so much as view it as something alien and most assuredly science-fiction, which, to be fair, seems to certainly be your intention, as it seems you wrote this for an Isaac Asimov contest and make it pretty clear form the outset that this is a world set in the future. The trouble with that is, however, that if you're going to set something in the future and make it science-fiction, you need a common element and commom, humanistic characters to ground the story in the modern sensibility so a modern audience can read and take it in and not be off-put by this stragne new world you've created for them to read about and experience.
I would guess that you intended religion to be that intemediary aspect with which we can relate, as well as the other characters, particularly Peter, his father, and the Church Father.
Setting the characters aside for a moment, however, the treatment of religon in this world doesn't seem plausible because of the extent to which you allow it to have a sort of 1984-esque intrusion into the privacy of the characters; indeed, I'd say the one thought I had throughout your story was how much this all reminded me of 1984, which is good in that 1984 is a great story and certainly one you can build on for social commentary and science fiction, but at the same time it hurts your story because it means the reader draws comparisons, intentionally or not, with 1984, and as no one on this site is as talented as George Orwell--myself included, I don't pretend to be Shakespeare 2.0 here, just a poster with an opinion--you don't want to set yourself up in comparison with him, as Orwell will win every time, and make any imperfections or lesser aspects of your story seem glaring even if, in reality, they're really minor things.
An example of this, really, comes with the Peter's father's spying on him, as well as the amount of information the Church has on Peter. While, again, implausible--and I'll say why in a moment--these details also bring to mind the monitors from 1984 (I think you even mention "monitors" in your story, actually...? Maybe just briefly?) and these and the nano-chips recollect the monitors from Ender's Game, a fact not helped by the fact your protagonist is named PETER of all names. ;)
Drawing reference to other stories isn't just OK, it can be done and done really well; most if not all successful authors allude to someone, even Homer's Iliad and Odyssey have references to previous myths, and as such Dante and Shakespeare allude to Homer, and then Keats and Browning and Shelly allude to Dante and Shakespeare, and then D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot allude to those figures, and so on and so forth...and it can really help a work--after all, if Dante and Milton don't allude to the Bible, among other sources, like Homer and Aristotle, they have no stories...you can't have The Inferno without the Classical and Biblical villains, and you can't have the Paradisio without Dante's having got an idea of what Heaven might be like from the Bible, and without the stories of The Fall of Man and The Fall of Lucifer, Milton's Paradise Lost is lost to us forever.
So you can draw on other sources to write fiction, and you can do so well.
But the issue is, if you're going to do that in order to help you create a world, you ahve to make the world and those allusions plausible.
Creating a world where a Church is allowed to implant chips and deliberately cause pain to people and, to an extent, control their actions via the psychological pain-avoidance response--which probably has another, more technical name, but I can't remember it right now--is not plausible or reasonable for a reader in the year 2011. It's not something that could ever occur today. The idea that the federal government would be allowed to implant chips in people is by ITSELF, I'ds say, an idea that's so implausible for an imaginable future that by itself it could be grounds enough for destroying the plausibility of the world you created, but for a RELIGION to be allowed to do that and cause pain like that in a free society is beyond feasibility, meaning that this story eitehr has to take place ina theocracy or a society so far into the future that there's such a disconnect between their world and the world of 2011 that I, the reader, struggle to really effectively connect with Peter and understand his plight, as if I can't understand the sort of world he lives in, WHY they are allowed to do this, HOW this ever came to be, HOW the United States or United Kingdom or wherever else allowed, somehow, for this to become an accepted policy when if such an idea were introduced today it'd probably be one of the most unanimous vetoes in history and the public outcry over even the IDEA of that sort of an invasion of privacy and torture for religious means would be so decried whoever was foolish enough to propose it would very soon and very truly have to fear for his OWN life. We live in an age of INCEASING availability of knowledge and freedoms--at least in some regards--and so to see such a sharp decrease is frightening in a story, yes, but the extent to which you take it makes that seem so implausible that it completely undercuts the power of your intended statement.
Why, then, is this OK to do with 1984, why is it OK there and not here?
And why is it OK for Milton and Dante to draw on other sources, but in your case I've said invoking Orwell's a double-edged sword and one thats more than likely one that will do you more harm than good in this particular case?
There are at least two reasons why Orwell's 1984 is alright in its Big Brother, monitor, Inner Party/Outer Party world of seemingly-implausible totalitarianism while your story...not so much:
One is, again, when this was written: Orwell's 1984 was written at a period in time after the World Wars and at the height of the Cold War, when we had just seen just how iron-fisted and soul-crushing and invasive a society could become with Nazi Germany, and the West's perception of the USSR, at least, was certainly no glowing portrait of their level of freedom in that State, either. (I'm NOT SAYING THE USSR WAS EVIL HERE, NO ONE mistake my statement here for that and start a 200 post rant back and forth on this subject again, I'm saying that post WWII the common PERCEPTION was that, not that the ACTUALITY was like that.) As a result, then, Orwell's audience would have been far more open and receptive to the notion of a State completely subverting and taking over its citizens' lives; it had happened for them not a few years before, so it didn't seem implausible at all. By contrast, for all our governments' mishaps by both the Left and Right over the last few administrations, no Nazi Germany-level sort of takeover can compare with an Orwellian world or Hitler's Reich; even something as controversial as The Patriot Act doesn't compare in the sense that while both Nazi Germany and The Patriot Act allowed for what may be seen as unacceptable breaches of privacy, the latter didn't also feature goose-stepping soldiers invading homes and burning places of business and worship and 6 million at the same time. It's popualr to be cynical about the current, modern era in which we live, but the fact remains that Orwell's 1984 was born of a different time than ours, and while it still rings true to this day, were he alive today, Orwell might not have written 1984, not because he wasn't talented enough, but because 1984 was a response to a specific political movement or two, both of which are now in the history books, largely. Your world, Peter's world, is a resonse to religion and technology, but it seems an unnatural outgrowth of those two things, at least by modern standards, as the modern common electorate would never allow this to take place, whereas Orwell's world HAD just taken place...Big Brother and Oceana are exaggerations of them, yes, but Hitler and Stalin HAD just taken power, and so the idea that this could happen soon--hence the title 1984, a reference to how things might go south in such a short period of time--was far from alien to Orwell's audience, it was seen as being at least plausible...probable? No. But PLAUSIBLE...the idea that this COULD happen on this scale, because it had already occured on a smaller scale in their lifetimes...yes. The idea that technology will become more integral to our being is VERY plausible, that works for your story...but the idea that it willbe used in this Orwellian fashion is implausible in a Post-Cold War era. What's more, even the era kin which we DO live in that might seem to support your supposition, "The War on Terror Era," works counter to it, as your world isn't one of terrorism and small cells attacking the larger populace from the shadows, but rather a Big Brother sort of world, and in an age where so many--including YOURSELF--call for smaller government, the motivation for your wanting to denounce the controlling aspect of government and religion is clear, but confused,a s you know you would never allow this to happen, your fellow voeters would never allow this to happen...even big-government advocates like Putin and I would never allow this to happen, as while we both suppport larger government, we do so at least in part because we feel larger government will best ENACT and PROTECT civil liberties, NOT detract from them, so even the crowd most contrary to you politically would never allow this to occur, so the idea that it could occur in an age of so much media scrutiny and pandering to the popular electorate is, again, implausible, and so, in a world as new and alien as your science-fiction, Ender's Game/1984 world, there is little to no room for the reader to feel that this is anything but a hypothetical world from which he is far removed and, as such, a world he ultimately does not and cannot care about.
Which is where the second reason for the success of 1984 comes in.
1984 is meant as an allegory, in the same way that Animal Farm is. This is made perfectly clear to the reader by Orwell, and, as an allegory, 1984 can be experienced as a FANTASY OF REALISM, that is, it has modern ideas and elements, to be sure, but the outlandish lengths to which Orwell takes thes ideas CAN be taken as his writing a fantasy, albeit a grim and modern one at that. This is NOT, then, a world that you absolutely have to have a grounding in to understand and relate to on the sort of humanistic, persona experience-level as the first audiences of 1984 would have had...you don't have to have lived through fascist Nazi Germany or the USSR and the Cold War to take in 1984; it's written in such a way that it can be taken as a fantastical allegory by future generations, and so a different sort of connection can be made in that regard. The same goes with Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost--if you're like me and don't HAVE that grounding in the Catholic--Dante--or Anglicized--Milton--Churches, you're OK, you can view the story from the perspective of a fantasy world of allegory...Satan doesn't carry the emotional sort of baggage in Milton's work that he might for a Christian reader, but I can still see him and get his opposition to God as being a symbol of defiance and, as Satan is such a classic character, I can understand both that he's supposed to be evil and likely is seen as being evil by many Christian readers, but to me and other readers, Satan comes across as an anti-hero for the sort of defiance and revolutionary ideas that Milton himself felt should be expressed, and so Satan's banishment from Heaven can be seen as a good act of God or, on a secular level, a view of what happens to revolutionaries that failed in their cause, and now must dwell upon it.
Christian or not, I can read into the stories of Dante and Milton and take them as fantasy.
Your story is science fiction, and yet it's trying so hard to be an allegory for a view of government and religion that you hold that it story becomes a tool for the message, rather than the message being a tool for the story, and so it erects a sort of wall between the story and the reader when the story itself seems secondary and only a vehicle for preaching (a bit ironic, considering your topic.)
All in all, I didn't feel as a reader I could make a suspension of disbelief big enough to overcome the implausibility of all of this, and the way in which your story is told doesn't help this situation; I would suggest, then, that you might want to try and spend more time telling us HOW we are introduced to this world, HOW things this implausible came to be, and be sure to makde it clear, logical, and at least faintly-feasible to the reader that this COULD happen in a real society as they know it, or, if you want to take away the realism aspect of it and tell this as a sort of modern fantasy, than I would suggest you treat it as such.
In either case, the heavy-handedness of the message and the story's subservient relationship to it ultimately hurts the story and undercuts the message.
The characters aren't exempt from this. While I will say I think you have a decent and reasonably-plausible character in Peter, the characters around him are so wooden and fake-seeming in a great deal of their dialogue--the Father of the Church comes to mind here, I understand you're trying to understate and underscore a sinister sense about the whole upload procedure and torutre, but the dialogue seems eitehr stock for what you would expect from someone trying to write a religious figure or else stock-villain-speak--and as a result, while we might identify and be able to relate with Peter on a basic level, you never develop him enough to have that be anything but basic--although iwith a word limit I can appreciate the difficulty--and with no other characters we can see as being anything but cardboard cutouts and a story that's essentially an implausible cardboard cutout for a message you want to send, we have a hero, but no journey or quest with which we can go, no locations we can share with him that feel anything but contrived, and no one we can talk to that doesn't sound completely scripted.
So we're left with a character and a two-dimensional universe to nowhere, in the end.
In addition, stylistically, I personally dislike the idea of starting of a story with the introduction of a character's name--it's stock and cliche by now, it's been done in short-story and nvoel writing for the past 200+ years, and as Modernism has begun to move away from that--and Post-Modernism has as well, but due to my viceral hatred of Post-Modernism, I'll stop talking about it, lest this go on for another 50 pages--it now seems simplsitic and cliche to introduce a character just by dropping his name at the beginning of the story. Think of it as a challenge, the opportunity to reveal your character in a way that the audience, maybe, wasn't expecting. Consider a movie--a character doesn't just walk onscreen and say, "Hi, I'm Joe Smith, and I'll be your protagonist this evening."
Maybe have us follow Peter in a typical day around his house. Consider Moby Dick--in that, Captain Ahab, certainly the most memorable character, doesn't appear until Chapter 35, if I recall, and all the tiem he's NOT there, people on the ship are talking about him, asking each other if it's true he has a scar, and what he's like, and if this happened, and this, and so onand so forth...it builds up the character extraordinarily well, and so, when we finally DO mee Ahab, not only has his world and ship already been well described by others--so Melville doesn't have to waste Ahab's time and dialogue giving exposition from his tragic hero--but he now has an air about him already, the reader's already heard things about him, and so they already have an anticipatory, tense, excited feeling to see Ahab finally there, and see if what's been said is true. Likewise, imagine if you spent a couple of pages just taking us on a tour of what this house in the future is like...show the mother and the father interacting with appliances or items that are commonplace to them, maybe, but new to us, and so by watching them, we learn about the characters, the world, and the exposition of how this technology works all at once. Have them be chatting about Peter's Uplifting for a while, how "great" it is, and how "proud" they are of him for this and that and whatever else, and so now you have both a setup for the Uplifting, so we wonder what that is and what it's like, as well as some context for this world and a buildup for Peter as well, one far more engaging that his jsut being decared the protagonist in the first lines of the story.
And I think I'll stop there, since really, if anyone's still reading after all of that, they were reading for the express purpose of hoping my ramblings would cure their insomnia (if it did, folks, you're welcome.)
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"MUTE" IS FOR PUSSIES AND RETARDS....
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