ugh. this is tough. tough, tough, tough.
certain: much like.. well, everyone.. i was thrown off at first. scratch that. i was consistently thrown off when the rhymes schemes dropped dead for prose before resuming again. as a story, this was great. as a topical piece, this was great. as prose lightly influenced by dashes of rhyming, this was great. your ending showed what the whole picture could have been. everyone knows what you could have done here and you went a different direction. it wasn't the paragraph format that caused problems. this wasn't a topical "text" verse - or any kind of rhyming lyrical fabrication for that matter. it was prose influenced by poetry. i loved your story, though not on Frank levels of emotional attachment.. maybe i would have if you'd taken the time to fit the format and flesh it out. i am really torn on what to do with this. it's beyond unconventional.. it's outside the bounds of what makes this a topical league. i don't know that it can even be considered.
nyc: you have technical and vocabulary skills, though with a much more concise approach than vividlyvague and others like you. the subject matter is a personal problem for me as i find sci-fi writing, even when serving as an allegory, to be very difficult to follow when genre-specific terms are brought in for the sake of sticking to the genre. i shouldn't hold that against you here because i know it's personal preference and we should be somewhat objective. it does hurt my take on this because i got lost frequently. not because of a lack of understanding (total astrophysics nerd here), but due to the induction of scifi lore without the needed explanation as to what purpose it serves to the story (other than using nontraditional terms for rhyming). i actually found vulgar's vote to be very beneficial to my understanding of your intentions - you owe him a beer for that. the story, taken out of genre context, was a creative take on the topic and the metaphor-within-an-allegory cautionary tale is always impressive when pulled off successfully, which at the most basic level, you did here. i just hate the genre.
i really want to go against the grain and vote certain here. however, this is a text topical league, with boundaries around what is expected of a verse. keyword verse. in the context of the AOWL, that means rhyming lyrics as the majority of the prose. it didn't happen here. for that, i can't in good conscience send a vote Certain's way.
v/ nyc
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