YankeeInRaleigh wrote:
Not boring, seems a pretty good synopsis.
Although, I feel like i've found a few plot holes/inconsistencies about your story from reading this letter, sorry if this stuff was asked/answered in a different thread, I feel like i've heard something about this story before.
1) why on earth would the government mandate that people cannot die? That seems really far from reality, we already have enough trouble caring for the people we have, how could we extend life indefinitely, while adding new births to the population and achieve any sort of sustainability?
I think with the constant push for technology and medicine that extends to life it really isn't that far fetched. Think of Terry Schiavo and all the people that wanted to keep her plugged into a machine indefinitely. In the case of my story, instead of being vegetables, people are as conscious as they've ever been. Instead of being hooked up to the machine, they're just stuffed into another container and made to live another life
One of the aspects of this future is that the birth rate has slowed dramatically with the government mandating birth control and limiting pregnancies. Instead of simply putting everyone back into the same container (i.e. a clone of themselves) they're made to use a government provided "blank," a healthy cloned body, genetically modified to be healthy, so while personalities don;t change at least the appearances do.
Part of the point is to show a negative side to extending life, and part of that is in the stagnation as the amount of fresh faces, new ideas, and new people begins to decrease.
YankeeInRaleigh wrote:
2) If this guy is so good at helping people kill themselves (just re-read he "performed the most successful suicides"),which doesnt make a lot of sense right now, since clearly it isnt a suicide if they can just remake him somehow. I would think a lot of people have successfully killed their human selves by now, only to find themselves alive again in a new body, to really commit suicide in this scenario he'd have to destroy the backup, so i'm just not sure what you're talking about in regards to suicides here.
He's only killing himself. He's not a futuristic Jack Kevorkian. In fact, he doesn't much care about anyone around him. It is a suicide in the sense that he is killing off a physical form, even if only to be reincarnated in a new body a day later.
You've essentially described the (simplified) plot of the story. In order to truly die, he must destroy his back-up, both the file itself and the physical stick (think flash drive). He's basically been killing himself out of boredom, knowing that he'll simply be revived later, but with the emergence of Havoc and The Reapers he begins to see a way to get to his backup file and really end things.
YankeeInRaleigh wrote:
3) Are you going to explain the science behind transferring consciousness from a 'backup' into a new human body? I know it's fiction, and we're supposed to have a bit of suspension of disbelief, but I rather dislike when authors just gloss over this stuff, like "and we use that machine in the corner for all the (currently) impossible science stuff which we're not going to explain any further" , thats annoying.
Anyways, good luck getting this out there, let us know how it goes!
I tend to subscribe to the Joss Whedon - Firefly-esque style of science fiction, in that the technology isn't really very important. I don't think that show was weakened by the prospect that a spinning cylinder in the engine room equated to interstellar travel and artificial gravity. So I guess that's a 'no,' haha. I do have a decent amount of computer knowledge, so I try to give a sense of "here is the basics of how this works," without getting lost in it and inventing a glossary of made up terms requiring a novel in themselves to understand (i.e. Star Trek).
I think a lot of sci-fi shows tend to be this way. Star Wars, how do hyperdrives and lightsabres work? They just do. In fact, I almost feel that trying to explain things is a negative (hello midi-chlorians).
Thanks for the comments, I don't mind people pointing out things that are confusing or may potentially be plot holes.
As an unknown author once said, "When people submit that things in your story are unclear, they are most often right. When they offer suggestions at how to fix them, they are most often wrong."
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