Not all soft sci-fi on the web is created equal. Occasionally, I take a chance on a story and then review it. I am a harsh grader but, regardless of my rating, please show this author some love.
Today I am reviewing a story read by NarratorHFY (author unclear). Minor spoiler warning.
Story overview
Humans are exempt from standard safety procedures – this is why. They can fix anything with WD40 and Dack Tape.
Story idea
This was a fun idea. It took a comedic, albeit comic-cook-like, approach to contrasting the human attitude of “just get it working” and contrasted it against the HR-like need for rules that must be followed.
Show vs Tell
This story could have easily become 100% tell. Instead, there is a delightfully high degree of show. I’m giving this 3 stars with an extra star because the story also shows through character.
HFY
“Why Humans Are The Only Species Allowed To Skip Safety Briefings” is strong in the farce… Um, I mean HFY. It relies on the comedy of the set-up rather than highlighting human strengths directly, it scratched the HFY sci-fi itch nicely. The HFY concept here is that humans are good at improvised solutions to complex problems. The “all other species follow the rules” counterpoint was required for the comedy to work but it does not work too hard to earn the FY part. I’m giving this a respectable slightly above-average score of 3 stars.
Narrative causality
Given the story formula of set-up and pay-off, there was very little here that had the opportunity to break narrative causality, but it went ahead and broke it anyway. It does so by being unclear about past and present which is forgivable for the fun but could be tighter from a purely objective story -telling perspective. The story gets an entirely neutral score here.
Worldbuilding
“Why Humans Are The Only Species Allowed To Skip Safety Briefings” has surprisingly good worldbuilding for a comedy. I appreciated that the author did not try to cram ten bajillion types of aliens into the story but chose just a few that were different enough for contrast but few enough that we could revisit them several times to round out the idea of each race.
Overall the world fit the concept in a way that lets the story breathe.
Time frame and tense abuse
One of the story’s weaknesses was the confusing use of tenses. The story starts with first-person present-continuous but flips to third-person past tense in what I think was supposed to be a flashback via video footage. I got the impression that the footage finished but we stayed in the third-person past. We ended in what I think was in the third-person present.
In short, the tense selection was flabby and weak which detracts from the story. If you mix tenses you should do so carefully and clearly demark between the two. Additionally, if you start in first-person you had better end in the same first-person. While a little head-hopping can be good for comedy generally it should be avoided.
This issue with tenses made the story much harder to follow than it needed to be. While each set-up and punchline worked regardless the weak tense selection spoiled the flow from one to the next.
Third-person past tense both limited and omniscient perspectives and first-person past tense are by far the most flexible and forgiving forms. Present tense can feel more like a movie which attracts writers to it but it is fraught with traps and pitfalls. I’m not saying don’t use present tense; I am saying if you use it be extra vigilant and use it consistently.
Update: On another listen, I notice that the narrator is far more consistent and we do finally return to the first-person present tense before going to the past tense for the conclusion. I’ve updated to a whole star but I am still no fan of this aspect. Present tense is hard to write conclusions in so I do understand.
Dialogue
I was a big fan of all the dialogue in this story. Each character felt like they had their own voice with the possible exception of the humans which felt nicely alien given the viewpoint character. The dialogue shines despite the common tropes of Internet writing. I will never understand the Internet’s allergy to the word “said”.
- The words the characters say – top marks.
- Dialogue tags and wrappers – tries far too hard.
- Action mixed with talking – average to good.
Overall, I’ll give this two stars but I’m adding an extra one and a half for the dialogue itself because I really liked that part.
Characters
The author of this story truly knows what they are doing when it comes to forming three-dimensional characters. Each alien felt like their own character with a unique voice. While the humans were not quite as distinct this works so well for the story. The slight blur between characters made the humans feel slightly strange and eldritch which was exactly right for the alien perspective.
The author sets up tropes for the human characters and then executes those tropes extremely well. This is to the benefit of the comedy aspect. The human awareness of their own “magic alien” attributes could have tanked a lesser story but, given the lean towards satirical farce, this works beautifully.
With time, the author may be able to take their character writing to even greater heights. This story gets a well-earned four-and-a-half for character.
Visuals
The images were more of that AI-generated rubbish but the video editor clearly was somewhat more selective so that the images seemed to fit the story. Their AI game is stronger than most. As I have said before, I am often put off by AI art (especially poor AI art).
Subtitles
I’d say that the chances are the subtitles were AI-generated. There were clear miss-hearings and random colouration that only detracted from the story.
A little more attention to detail would have picked up on the AI tripping over the alien names.
The creator of the video should preview their videos before rendering. For example, “no, they’re exempt from those two” gets the right they’re/their but then gets the wrong to/two/too. Another example, “…right on Q” – weeks no. That should be “…right on cue”. Trust me, I’m dyslexic and spell things wrong all the time and even I noticed those two.
One and a half but only because this video’s subtitles were marginally better than those of my previous review.
Narration
I’m fairly certain that the narration was AI. It had some good inflection but a human reader would have done a better job. That said, there were no bad pronunciations that I noticed. So, that’s good.
As I have said before, a human reader can bring out more of the comedy in a way that AI just cannot match at present. Even imperfect human reading can aid comedy storytelling better than even a well-trained AI of the current generation.
I’m giving this a perfectly neutral score.
Comedy
In this review, I’m going to rate the comedy separate from the story. My reason? Because I want to.
This story had a lot of funny in it. Some of the comedy shone through whilst other parts were strangled somewhat by the tense use. I’m going to rate the comedy a solid four stars.
Things I didn’t like
In this section, we start with five stars and deduct one for each thing I didn’t like (or half if it has some redeeming quality).
My biggest complaint is that the past and present via sloppy use of tense and period framing was muddy at best. It does not entirely strangle the story but it irritated me no end. This alone threw me out of the story at several points.
The story starts with first-person narration to an unknown listener (us maybe?) who is quickly forgotten as we move into present-tense narration aboard the station. From here, the narrator’s strong opening voice fades never to return. It is not the worst in the world but I did not enjoy it.
Change of scale with no explanation. Half a star off for this one. We start with 300 species but the story scales to feel like we are dealing with about four or five. The story worked well at this scale and should have perhaps started there. It would have been better for this to have been one of a number of talks at a wider stay conference perhaps a panel about “Why Humans Are The Only Species Allowed To Skip Safety Briefings”.
For those keeping score at home, this puts the rating at completely average.
Things I loved
Spoilers – duh.
- creative solutions that give our insurance providers existential crises
- …how to make emergence repair tools out of snack wrappers
- We don’t talk about the rubber duck
- …and something humans call WD40
- a temporal paradox in the mess hall
There were more bits I liked but five stars is the most you can get
Things to consider in future stories
This is a no-score section where I try to turn something in the story into an object lesson for writers. In case you had not noticed, I’ve been quite fixated on tense confusion because nothing ruins a story faster.
Choose your tense carefully. Each one locks you into a different set of limitations.
Past tense – this gives you the greatest freedoms. If in doubt, this is the one to choose.
Present tense – this locks you out of past tense except for flashbacks. If you start in present, you have to end in it too.
Future tense – Outside of prophecy and advanced time travel, you should probably leave this one alone.
There is no such thing as a “wrong tense” there is only the question of consistency. Being inconsistent is about as close to being “wrong” as you can get. Break all the rules you want but do so consistently and on purpose.
Denouement
I want to talk about the ending now. Many Internet stories struggle to come to an end. This one seemed to know what it wanted to do but it stumbled rather than ran into it.
Part of the problem with this ending is that we lean into the future with past-tense writing from a present-tense story. The ending itself felt like it fit and rounded out the story well. The execution left something to be desired.
As I’ve already graded on tenses, I’m not going to let that influence the score here too much. It was a good ending idea and it felt fitting.
Final score
Now we come to the bit where I do some maths. I rated in 14 areas with a total of 43 points for a nice round total of 3 and a little bit.
This story was a good effort with some great comedy moments so I am going to round up to 3.33. I hope the author keeps writing stories and growing in their craft.