Date: October 9th, 2026 3:23 PM
Author: Manually Patching Allaire
You can write, which is good and not as common as you think.
What I like about this work is that you've found an interesting angle on a subject that's been done to death and is going to be hammered even more in the future. I think you manage to move beyond a utopia/dystopia dialectic and that you provoke thought without dictating an answer. So much fiction, speculative or otherwise, relies upon the implications of when something goes wrong--this sort of assumes a world where everything is going basically right, but it's still raising problems and conflict and questions.
What I don't like is:
-1: It doesn't pass the "why am I reading this?" test until we get to the third chapter/segment. After that it clicks into place, and I got more interested. I'd rearrange this and have everything happen in the story in the order it chronologically happens. That's a rule of fiction I believe in. There are absolutely reasons to break it, but I don't think it adds much here.
-2: This is more personal preference but it just winds up a little too sterile and formal for me to be invested in it. It's all washed out and somewhat passionless, and I suspect some of that feeling is what you're going for.
-3: It needs overall trimming and compression. But then, most things do.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5911183&forum_id=2#50180713)