Jan 25, 2025
This was not bad. I think if you touched this up and reworked some things, depending on what happens in the contest, you should seriously consider querying agent somewhere who might look at this. Some of the things I found pretty displeasing about this might be a big plus to certain readers and editor. Just my two cents.
The complexity of the story is a bit hit or miss for me. There are some parts that are kind of cool like the undeclared reappearance of supposedly dead characters and the way that you mess with perspective, but I think there are other things that I simply do not care about. I think the obsession with underscoring/bolding individual letters is a bit too on the nose and I do not care for it. I was going to comment that I got interested in the actual site that you set up. I saw the password and assumed a Base64 encode and continued on with the story (I was on the train and intended to log on when I was home), but by the time I got back I found myself losing any interest in looking for the site.
Finally, from a plot perspective I don't think it's really all that difficult to follow, but I think you shoot yourself in the face by really plastering the themes of the book in the dual epilogues. It's almost like you didn't really trust the reader to "get it" and kinda gave a quick handholding session at the end just for safe keeping. I think you were going for a more bold entry, and then you played it too safe which kind of faceplants the ending for me.
Speaking of too safe, I also think some of the monologues and interiority is really heavy handed. I'm gonna assume you read a bit of Deleuze for this, but the psychology (and philosophy) feels all over the place and not particularly coherent. On the topic of themes, the whole "people can change" motif is fine but it gets layered on pretty thick by multiple characters and the drama verges on overdramatic in the second half. I'm not sure if this is trying to overcompensate for the fact that the characters are very dry in the first half, but it feels that way.
On the parallel setup. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this, but I think the lack of variety between the chapters gets really exhausting. At multiple points, I felt like I was reading essentially Endless 35. The back and forth between what is effectively two simultaneous and very similar (yet very divergent) stories is kind of interesting, but it becomes really predictable. There were multiple times where I would roll my eyes because the endings of one chapter would be replicated in the next, with the only real difference being which characters are participating in the plot. For a plot that was meant to be a bit more complex, that it was so foreseeable really pulled me out of the experience.
What might actually have helped was if Arufa/Marsia's stories were segmented into two continuous parts, Arufa's story first, then Marsia's next (or the other way around, idc). I think this would solve two birds with one stone by firstly, giving you way more time to flesh out their characters (I'm not going to go two deep into this because this was already a really long comment, but they are *very* dry and don't really feel like characters to me, they just receive the plot that you've written them in), and two, it keeps the stories fresh when readers experience it twice in one sitting. The way it's currently done has some interesting formal layering to it but as a reading experience it just feels like reading a mirrored version of the previous chapter which is really boring after a while.
Anyway, all that being said, I'll just reiterate that if/when you touch this up, I'd really encourage you go search for someone to look over your manuscript. There's some interesting stuff that I don't think authors in sci-fi fantasy are really playing around with and you could maybe catch someone's eye. Best of luck with whatever writing you do next.
