>”and that the few who do are now even more implausibly superhuman at chipping tunnels hundreds of miles long out of solid rock.”
No, there have just been a lot of them over a very long period of time. Each made a little progress on the tunnel before dying out.
>”Look at Biosphere 2 or efforts at engineering stable closed ecosystems: it is not easy!”
This is not a true closed system.
>”and in the long run, protein deficiency as they use up stores, lose a bunch of crops to various errors (possibly contaminating everything), and the soil becomes exhausted.”
Indeed, it doesn’t last. Our dispute here is then merely one of how many years.
>”It’s fiction, yes—high-concept world-building fiction which lives or dies on the plausibly of the world-building which it goes into extensively.”
It’s horror fiction, specifically. I speculate you read a lot of hard scifi. Hard scifi is like a blueprint for the future, the focus is plausible details. Horror is more like a literary nightmare. Things only need to make sense to the degree that dream logic makes sense, but unravels if you pry at it enough. That is a feature, not a bug.
>”it’s a bad title because there’s a thousand things named that already, and there’s plenty of ways such a prison-society is doomed (eg shadow-people-worshipping cults) without invoking exotic and probably fraudulent rodent studies.”
Only if the purpose is to maximize plausibility. Mouse utopia is something most readers from a wide variety of backgrounds will already know about. It reads instantly, and sets expectations for parallels. I compare this to the gun store scene in the original Terminator. Why would the T-800 want a pistol with a laser sight? What does a robot need help with aiming for? The laser sight’s purpose was visual symbolism, to communicate a sense of near futurism to the audience and that Arnie’s character is a sophisticated but stone cold, precise killer.
The rest of your post is basically “Why didn’t you write it like I would write it” to which I say, because I am not you. I may not write to your taste, there are undoubtedly many who do. I will take what useful advice you included under advisement but put down most of your sticking points to a difference in our preferences and philosophies of story telling.
Each made a little progress on the tunnel before dying out.
Which is impossible: if each one made a little progress, how did the later ones make a little progress as well when the task is so much harder due to the extraordinary distance? Did they learn how to teleport? Build a little high-speed levitating railroad to get to the end of the tunnel for the day’s supplies? Ask the Russians how you supply a front line which is ever further away...
This is not a true closed system.
Indeed, but as written, the resets take place after everyone has died, which requires it to be stable for decades or centuries, which is wildly unlikely when Biosphere 2 couldn’t keep it stable for like a year.
Things only need to make sense to the degree that dream logic makes sense, but unravels if you pry at it enough. That is a feature, not a bug.
This is bait-and-switch: “I’m going to do high-concept SCP SF worldbuilding literally set in a high-tech underground planet of vaults and focus on the details extensively all the way to the end—well, except when I get lazy and don’t want to fix any details even when pointed out with easy fixes by a reader, and then it’s all ‘oh it’s only horror fiction, it was never meant to be in a spirit of hard sci-fi, I’m not you, and I wrote it like I wanted to, there’s no arguing taste’”. Yeah, that’s great, but I read it in the spirit conveyed.
(And even with all that, that doesn’t excuse endorsing scientific myths like Mouse Utopia: yes, Mouse Utopia makes a great story—that’s why you know it in the first place! because it’s bullshit but it’s a great story! Now the question is, why do you not care and feel no shame at making the reader more wrong, rather than less wrong?)
Because the purpose of horror fiction is to entertain. And it is more entertaining to be wrong in an interesting way than it is to be right.
>”″I’m going to do high-concept SCP SF worldbuilding literally set in a high-tech underground planet of vaults”
I do not consider this story scifi, nor PriceCo to be particularly high tech.
>”and focus on the details extensively all the way to the end—well, except when I get lazy and don’t want to fix any details even when pointed out with easy fixes by a reader”
All fiction breaks down eventually, if you dig deep enough. The fixes were not easy in my estimation. I am thinking now this story was a poor fit for this platform however
Because the purpose of horror fiction is to entertain.
And it is more entertaining if the reader is sold on the worldbuilding instead of thinking to themselves ‘decades? has this guy ever done his own grocery shopping? does he realize how little food a standard PriceCo warehouse contains?’, and buy into the high-concept SF before the twist reveal ending that it was horror all along and the world-building and Robinson Crusoe stuff was a trap that the reader fell into just like the characters in every loop do.
And it is more entertaining to be wrong in an interesting way than it is to be right.
Arguably true of Mouse Utopia (I’m not saying it’s not interesting or entertaining, I’m saying that it is false and I think you are doing a minorly bad thing by endorsing it), but not the others, which are neither interesting nor right.
I do not consider this story scifi, nor PriceCo to be particularly high tech.
You don’t consider a story of mad science societal engineering across millennia of underground generation-ship-style arcologies, with implied brainwashing or cloning tech of some sort, and literal invisibility cloaks, to be ‘high tech’?
The fixes were not easy in my estimation. I am thinking now this story was a poor fit for this platform however.
That is one way you could react to criticism, sure: not make a single fix and leave. If you only want adulatory feedback, then yes, I do not think the LW platform is for you.
>”and that the few who do are now even more implausibly superhuman at chipping tunnels hundreds of miles long out of solid rock.”
No, there have just been a lot of them over a very long period of time. Each made a little progress on the tunnel before dying out.
>”Look at Biosphere 2 or efforts at engineering stable closed ecosystems: it is not easy!”
This is not a true closed system.
>”and in the long run, protein deficiency as they use up stores, lose a bunch of crops to various errors (possibly contaminating everything), and the soil becomes exhausted.”
Indeed, it doesn’t last. Our dispute here is then merely one of how many years.
>”It’s fiction, yes—high-concept world-building fiction which lives or dies on the plausibly of the world-building which it goes into extensively.”
It’s horror fiction, specifically. I speculate you read a lot of hard scifi. Hard scifi is like a blueprint for the future, the focus is plausible details. Horror is more like a literary nightmare. Things only need to make sense to the degree that dream logic makes sense, but unravels if you pry at it enough. That is a feature, not a bug.
>”it’s a bad title because there’s a thousand things named that already, and there’s plenty of ways such a prison-society is doomed (eg shadow-people-worshipping cults) without invoking exotic and probably fraudulent rodent studies.”
Only if the purpose is to maximize plausibility. Mouse utopia is something most readers from a wide variety of backgrounds will already know about. It reads instantly, and sets expectations for parallels. I compare this to the gun store scene in the original Terminator. Why would the T-800 want a pistol with a laser sight? What does a robot need help with aiming for? The laser sight’s purpose was visual symbolism, to communicate a sense of near futurism to the audience and that Arnie’s character is a sophisticated but stone cold, precise killer.
The rest of your post is basically “Why didn’t you write it like I would write it” to which I say, because I am not you. I may not write to your taste, there are undoubtedly many who do. I will take what useful advice you included under advisement but put down most of your sticking points to a difference in our preferences and philosophies of story telling.
Which is impossible: if each one made a little progress, how did the later ones make a little progress as well when the task is so much harder due to the extraordinary distance? Did they learn how to teleport? Build a little high-speed levitating railroad to get to the end of the tunnel for the day’s supplies? Ask the Russians how you supply a front line which is ever further away...
Indeed, but as written, the resets take place after everyone has died, which requires it to be stable for decades or centuries, which is wildly unlikely when Biosphere 2 couldn’t keep it stable for like a year.
This is bait-and-switch: “I’m going to do high-concept SCP SF worldbuilding literally set in a high-tech underground planet of vaults and focus on the details extensively all the way to the end—well, except when I get lazy and don’t want to fix any details even when pointed out with easy fixes by a reader, and then it’s all ‘oh it’s only horror fiction, it was never meant to be in a spirit of hard sci-fi, I’m not you, and I wrote it like I wanted to, there’s no arguing taste’”. Yeah, that’s great, but I read it in the spirit conveyed.
(And even with all that, that doesn’t excuse endorsing scientific myths like Mouse Utopia: yes, Mouse Utopia makes a great story—that’s why you know it in the first place! because it’s bullshit but it’s a great story! Now the question is, why do you not care and feel no shame at making the reader more wrong, rather than less wrong?)
Because the purpose of horror fiction is to entertain. And it is more entertaining to be wrong in an interesting way than it is to be right.
>”″I’m going to do high-concept SCP SF worldbuilding literally set in a high-tech underground planet of vaults”
I do not consider this story scifi, nor PriceCo to be particularly high tech.
>”and focus on the details extensively all the way to the end—well, except when I get lazy and don’t want to fix any details even when pointed out with easy fixes by a reader”
All fiction breaks down eventually, if you dig deep enough. The fixes were not easy in my estimation. I am thinking now this story was a poor fit for this platform however
And it is more entertaining if the reader is sold on the worldbuilding instead of thinking to themselves ‘decades? has this guy ever done his own grocery shopping? does he realize how little food a standard PriceCo warehouse contains?’, and buy into the high-concept SF before the twist reveal ending that it was horror all along and the world-building and Robinson Crusoe stuff was a trap that the reader fell into just like the characters in every loop do.
Arguably true of Mouse Utopia (I’m not saying it’s not interesting or entertaining, I’m saying that it is false and I think you are doing a minorly bad thing by endorsing it), but not the others, which are neither interesting nor right.
You don’t consider a story of mad science societal engineering across millennia of underground generation-ship-style arcologies, with implied brainwashing or cloning tech of some sort, and literal invisibility cloaks, to be ‘high tech’?
That is one way you could react to criticism, sure: not make a single fix and leave. If you only want adulatory feedback, then yes, I do not think the LW platform is for you.