Salvation War Criticism Thread

[Darth Raptor]

it's always hard to take a story seriously when half the character names are the names of forum posters

what about 'the targeteer'??

[Gandalf]

I tried reading Armageddon, and I got to "Broomstick starts uprising in HELL!" before I realised that I had better things to do.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

uni creative writing courses suck unless you're taking them with a professor who actually gives a flying fuck

take that from the president of my college's creative writing club (me)

i'm in a cw class right now and it's pretty cool

i can't write any of my horror / fantasy / sci fi stories since the prof has confessed to only being really familiar with realist fiction and lyrical poetry but that's okay

the main problem is that i'm too lazy to write enough and there are several incredibly flakey girls in the class who have shocked me by being the first people i've ever met to actually talk all the time ever in melodramatic cliches its crazy

[Pick]

Yeah, I'm averse to including cameos and stuff. It's not really my style.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

i include 'cameos' if by 'cameos' you mean 'steal and mix/match names and personalities of people i know for minor characters for easy flavour and three-dimensionality without substantial effort' and that is not what the sdnet version means

[Pick]

Yeah, that's pretty different. Although I still don't use people I know for characters, even minor ones, because real people... sigh. Just, just... sigh.

[Ford Prefect]

Man, it's a pity you didn't take up the idea. I must confess I'm not familiar with your writing but I wouldn't be surprised if you could have produced something a lot better than the version of Armageddon that actually exists. The fact you apparently find a story where the mighty humans effortlessly beat the crap out of the stupid Angels and Demons to be unappealing is very encouraging.

someone give me smugdog so i can insert it here

Anyway, the concept is potentially interesting because it represents a gigantic paradigm shift in our understanding of the universe (or at least it should do, just to make for a good story). Ultimately Stuart is resolving most issues by having them shot with missiles, but what if it comes to the point where you can't just nuke them into submission? Surlethe made the point to Zab in the original thread that we don't know whether demons could be harmed in conventional ways. Stuart made the decision to have them be a non-threat, and apparently is aiming for a more internal form of conflict later on (ie. what do we do with these two dimensions we just curbstomped). As the author, that's his decision to make, though I guess I just don't find rolling up worthless enemies due to unsurmountable tech advantage to be extremely uncompelling. Even something like New Mobile Report Gundam Wing had the decency to oppose a group of unstoppable super robots who can survive their own self destruct sequences with an effective world power that was threatening, charismatic and reasonably competant.

These decisions don't matter. I think Stuart's biggest folly is to go at the concept from a position of omniscience, focussing on the entire world and a great number of different positions. Personally, I would have probably attacked the problem from a singular position. There's probably a reasonable amount of drama that can be drawn from the experiences of one athiest trying to reconcile the existence of Almighty God the Creator. Distance the character from the warfare between chariots of iron and completely supernatural entities from a world where the physical laws move to the whim of an imprisoned demigod. Make them a part of a think tank formed to design a response to the invasion from another dimension, so that they must actually respond to questions like 'what does this mean for our cosmology' and 'what does this mean for us' without violence. And so on.

[RedImperator]

I probably would have approached it in the same way. I like writing from the perspective of the little guy caught in the gears; even my spaceship captains' decisions are mostly limited to "go where the big shots say and hope your computer is better than the other guy's computer".

I've been thinking about this more, and it seems like Armageddon is trying to tell three stories at once:

1. God exists, and He's hostile. Cue cosmological mind-fuck.
2. Fat, comfortable, prosperous 1st world experiences total war for the first time in 60 years. Watch an entire society get turned on its head.
3. Demons exist, but they're exactly like the Bible says--monsters with pitchforks. They're not bulletproof. Demons, readers learn the Power of Science when bronze age weapons and tactics meet the US Army.

#3 is a short story. In fact, Harry Turtledove already did this short story, set in 1916 with the two French soldiers on the Western Front as protagonists. It turns out WWI is so bad that they don't even notice the Armageddon. They think it's some kind of lame German trick. In the end, they kill the locust-scorpion-horse things with machine guns.

#2 is epic military sci-fi. You could turn that into a series and make a career out of it. In fact, John Ringo did (he made a botched, stupid mess of it, and actually let Tom Kratman write something besides his manifesto in the woods, but he's laughing all the way to the bank).

And #1 is the standalone novel that wins you a Nebula if you do it right.

Armageddon tries to do all three, so you wind up with a total war on God and his bronze-age angels who aren't bulletproof. It winds up squandering the premise of #1 (seriously, substitute, say, xenomorphs for angels and demons and tell me if the story turns out any different), bogs down #2 with side tangents into the cosmological mind-fuck that don't matter because the solution to every problem involves shoving a missile up its ass ("Hey guys, Uriel's mysterious telepathic death power has seriously upended everything we thought we knew about physics!" "LOL who cares dude? We lased that motherfucker."), and beats #3 to death.

Stark was talking earlier about how audience shapes storytelling. I think it would be a real interesting challenge, on SDN, to get an audience of atheists to accept a God who is actually as powerful, alien, and dangerous as you'd expect God to be--never mind the writing challenge of actually making that story work.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

ATTN: everyone. Since now we're getting into 'What would certain people write when faced with the premise of Armageddon' I now feel comfortable writing a 'Well in my fanfiction' smugpost.

If I were asked to write Armageddon, ie, Revelations or some kind of God-Man War in the modern day, I'd probably just say something like 'Watch Supernatural, lol' since I wouldn't really want to write that story, as I don't much care for writing about modern-day tanks or jets or geo-politics or the blast radius of a harpoon dick-strength level 8 missile or shit.

If someone was all like 'What would be the closest thing you would want to write?' then I'd definitely split it into several different kinds of stories. Like the others here, there are stories of personal horror and personal salvation that I'd like to write based on my own Absurdist beliefs being hit by Jehovah existing, and there are stories of little people caught up in Cosmological Tsunamis that I would find fascinating, but neither of those are the stories I would write for SDnet.

There are basically two stories that I would write that I would write for this site, and they're both ideas that have been swimming in my head for a very long time, and I would write them for SDnet specifically since they're both intended to be 'EPIC!!' type stories that I'm fairly certain that I couldn't write even on a diet of cocaine and Sartre.

The first would be a very Skeptic/Gnostic version of the Left Behind series, with all the omens and signs of the Book of Revelation coming about in a slightly noir near-future (read: cyberpunk for a guy who doesn't want to write about supercool hackers or say the word 'Cyberpunk'), wherein the heroes will be Heroic Christian Good Guys for the most part, but as the war goes on and the world falls to the Anti-Christ (a self-made businessman and philanthropist, charismatic, friendly, whose actions seem ruthless and Utopian but pragmatic and necessary in the wake of the Rapture, he'll probably be used as a pov character to make internal monologues about trying to understand the truth of his being destined to fail and be destroyed, and, as the literal Anti-Christ, will end up wanting this cup of poison taken from him), their actions will become more desperate, brutal, and eventually they'll look just like psycho fundy terrorists, even though from the context of the story they have what amounts to solid physical proof that they are warriors for Yahweh and Sword-in-Mouth Jesus, and then things take a turn for the crazy when seven-headed things come up.

the second, the one which would actually follow the idea, not of the Apocalypse, but of Man coming across and fighting the Supernatural, would be a Space Opera where Venus turns out to actually be Hell (ie, literally the Morning Star being the realm of the Morningstar). And there would be a lot of junk involving Masonic conspiracy theories being right. That sort of junk.

But right now I frankly prefer writing my pastiches of Camus Absurdist short stories and neo-noir pulp Absurdist short stories.

[Pick]

It's strange. I don't know how I'd go about doing a story on this premise whatsoever; I avoid divine aspects in my written work like the plague. Even in the ones that have religion as a component, it never features prominently. I guess I just find it troublesome from a thematic point of view.

[thejester]

I wouldn't rewrite it...I'd just got read His Dark Materials again.

[Instant Sunrise]

TSW is actually an experiment to see if sci-fi fans would read a book that is 100% exposition.

ps. "[These clouds] were black, jet black, as black as Yahweh’s heart.” is still the worst piece of dialog i have ever read. no joke.

p. sure that the subplots to nowhere, masses of expository dialog and horribly slow pace contributes to its laffeaux wordcount.

as a reminder:
Approximate Total Number of Words in "The Salvation War: Armageddon": 292,663
Average novel: 50,000+ words
Ulysses: 262,496
Atlas Shrugged: 645,000
KJV bible: ~820,000

[Ford Prefect]

I probably would have approached it in the same way. I like writing from the perspective of the little guy caught in the gears; even my spaceship captains' decisions are mostly limited to "go where the big shots say and hope your computer is better than the other guy's computer".

Honestly, this has probably become one of my favourite avenues to deliver a protagonist. The most recent thing I've written is basically about some kid who gets way in over his head, and by the time he realises he can't get out. While the most recent War of the Worlds wasn't fantastic, having Tom Cruise just being some dude trapped in things much bigger than he is was definitely the right decision. That's probably more distant than I would make the protagonist of this hypothetical alternate-The Salvation War, as I still feel the need for a protagonist to be vaguely useful, but the basic premise is sound.

I've been thinking about this more, and it seems like Armageddon is trying to tell three stories at once:

1. God exists, and He's hostile. Cue cosmological mind-fuck.
2. Fat, comfortable, prosperous 1st world experiences total war for the first time in 60 years. Watch an entire society get turned on its head.
3. Demons exist, but they're exactly like the Bible says--monsters with pitchforks. They're not bulletproof. Demons, readers learn the Power of Science when bronze age weapons and tactics meet the US Army.

While I think this idea has plenty of merit, I think that The Salvation War basically skips the first point entirely. This sort of thing, a war between earth and hell, and a war between the earth and heaven, should be cosmologically incredible. It should shake everything, absolutely everything, about humanity down to the core. We're suddenly not alone in the universe, we are accompanied by angels, devils and gods. Even as an athiest I see this has being thematically important to maintain: we are living the apocalypse. Except there's nothing cosmological about it. The demons of firey hell are useless: the pose precisely zero threat in the face of supersonic airpower, long range accurate missile weaponry and nuclear warheads. It's not a war, it's practically pest control. Heaven, the domain of God Himself, is perhaps even worse: as you say, the true antagonist of the piece is a two-bit gangster, a pusher who runs a black market of illegal drugs.

The latter is somewhat novel. However, I personally think it completely fails at delivering true Raging at the Heavens. Humanity is not perpetuating a war against the house of the Creator, the centre of the universe from which reality was spun, they're fighting a war against a small South American country that they're having trouble getting to. The whole thing is practically a game, not a struggle for the safety of our immortal souls. Jung's complaints are valid in this respect too.

Stark was talking earlier about how audience shapes storytelling. I think it would be a real interesting challenge, on SDN, to get an audience of atheists to accept a God who is actually as powerful, alien, and dangerous as you'd expect God to be--never mind the writing challenge of actually making that story work.

I just spent my entire shift and travel time actually thinking about this, how to execute a war against the abyss which humanity simply cannot win through conventional force and still make it compelling for the average reader here (or on Spacebattles, which is arguably a bigger challenge). I mean, Jesus, even the delivery of God's message could cause the breakdown of entire countries and incite violence all the way across the globe. Think that Flashforward pretty much demonstrates how this sort of thing should go down. And this is before Satan of Wrath shows up to take over Washington D.C and use the blood of it populace to grease the wheels of the infernal warmachine.

[Rye]

I probably would have approached it in the same way. I like writing from the perspective of the little guy caught in the gears; even my spaceship captains' decisions are mostly limited to "go where the big shots say and hope your computer is better than the other guy's computer".

Yeah. When I look at it, it's more like a fuckload of plot and description with minimal characters jammed in to try to make it a narrative. To draw an ironically chosen comparison, I would point towards early soviet cinema in contrast to Hollywood. Hollywood has the star model, and narratives built around, essentially "idolising" one character at a time to identify with. The soviet cinema rejected that on ideological grounds (since obviously, it's not very collectivist) and had crowds and unknowns dictating masses of plot and action in montages. That's sort of what "Armageddon???" reminds me of. There are attempts at character, but as you said earlier, they're pretty much threadbare and dictated by their plot purpose, it's got a lot of cart before horse-ism. (Also, on a personal note, the three question marks piss me off; reading the title makes me imagine a fat guy with a monocle incredulously asking whether it is Armageddon or not. The fat guy's last name is probably "Wilberforce" too.)

Stark was talking earlier about how audience shapes storytelling. I think it would be a real interesting challenge, on SDN, to get an audience of atheists to accept a God who is actually as powerful, alien, and dangerous as you'd expect God to be--never mind the writing challenge of actually making that story work.

I agree. Hell, if you read the link Bean posted, see my posts in that thread; I'm clearly being the "black sheep" for arguing that angle.

[Uraniun235]

p. sure that the subplots to nowhere, masses of expository dialog and horribly slow pace contributes to its laffeaux wordcount.

as a reminder:
Approximate Total Number of Words in "The Salvation War: Armageddon": 292,663
Average novel: 50,000+ words
Ulysses: 262,496
Atlas Shrugged: 645,000
KJV bible: ~820,000

maybe we should ask stuart if he's secretly a fan of fantasy novels

[Pick]

oh please

300,000 words is, what, half a clothing description in Wheel of Time?

[Uraniun235]

haha

no there's actually a couple of WOT books shorter than that


there's also several that are longer than that

[Duckie]

I'd just focus on the succubi fucking people in the mouth.

I really don't want to read armageddon to learn how this works, so are they hermaphroditic or girls with dicks or what? Isn't the modus of succubi to get pregnant by seducing men and birth to demons?

A penis would be kind of counter to their purpose in being, even as an optional attachment. I guess they could possess both parts and just do eachother, but then why are they succubi?

That's about 20 seconds of thought, I'm not going to think about this any harder.

[tim31]

I think it was described as 'succubus collects seed, transfers to incubus, some plot happens, incubus bangs a hottie, profit' or some such.

[Darth Yan]

In PAtheocide the 2nd of 4 beasts is causing so much damage that's is implied they'll have to Spoiler

nuke Jerusalem to kill it. Also, Uriel came pretty damn close last time. Another 30 seconds and he might have succeeded. Plus bowls of wrath 4 and 7 are implied to be serious shit (Detroit and Sheffield x 10, and the ultimate earth quake possible. Plus it also stated that by the end of Armageddon, humans were perilously low on ammunition, and they're still having trouble replenishing it.

[Pick]

I think it was described as 'succubus collects seed, transfers to incubus, some plot happens, incubus bangs a hottie, magic???, profit' or some such.

hey man get your facts straight

[Ryan Thunder]

"Dogs are supremely logical creatures" made me nearly do a spit-take.

[Lagmonster]

Man, when did this thread get all serious?

I'm quite seriously toying with moving this thread to fanfics with its more reasonable or interesting criticisms intact, as a "TSW Criticisms Thread". It seems to me that Stuart's story has something of a home on this board and discussions of it merit a wider audience.

Edit: Parts of this thread. Minus anything that references penises.

[Duckie]

Naturally anything serious can't belong in testing, and nothing using the word penis can be acceptable outside of testing.

I'm glad that puerileness is a requirement for serious posting eh?

[Pick]

If you move it, I expect you're preserving it, but you're also going to stifle it. There's a cost/benefit involved.