It’s a contrast between an ambitious all-encompassing alien approach and an exercise in the restrained description of minutiae. Perhaps Vulgar or Just Write or others can attest there can be a fair bit of “sitting here for a while” and small tasks during day to day military work. It gives an atypical reading to ‘this is it’ – rather than ‘this is it’ as something to become expectant or anxious about, the ‘this is it’ becomes like a resigned ‘this is it?’ It’s a pretty interesting critique of some of the enlistment propaganda surrounding the military-industrial complex, but the issue is whether this well executed conceptualization works well enough to overcome the restrained language and lack of stylistic frills the creation of this overall tone required. I’m going to vote yes but no. While it was a great, tightly constructed concept, in comparison it was not effective enough, it’s a bit annoying because timeless had a lot of looseness that Certain eliminated with his strict imagist style, and while it may appear that timeless was more complex/ambitious and put in more effort in reality it was probably more difficult to write with such minimalist restraint. I’m also biased towards anything alien related, especially when the narrator is an external force moralizing about familiar things. Alien moralizing is always effective because it reframes the familiar in an unfamiliar way. Good experimentation by Certain that fell a bit flat, perhaps to be more effective it could have been even slower if possible, have even the whole ‘action’ just about a single task like rolling over from one side to the other in the hospital bed or something. Don’t know really, it’s difficult. Certain was engaging but not really that effective, while timeless was effective but not nearly as engaging on a thematic level as Certain. Voting for timeless.
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