1. Midway through, I realized that music software here is similar to The Entertainment in Infinite Jest, hence the reference to Samizdat. Obviously there are the usual parallels with wire-heading as well.
2. This was my first detective story and was really hard to write! It's difficult to balance dialogue, action, and exposition dumping, and I'd probably rebalance this if I were to do it over again.
3. If I were rewriting this, I'd probably try and remove all internal narration from the protagonist, in keeping in line with the fact that they're non-sentient/a p-zombie. It made sense to have an internal monologue for the Sentience story because it was explicitly written by James Perez and addressed to his daughter. But a third-person story written by an omniscient narrator probably would omit a non-sentient character's internal thoughts. Alas!
4. No plans for a further sequel to this world for now. But a future spinoff would probably be third-person narration, and have only internal thoughts/feelings for the sentient characters but not the non-sentients. I think there are some interesting meta-narration styles to explore here that are beyond my reach for now :)
I really like this and think you ended up managing 1 very well. I agree with 3 being a problem though - as is, the non-sentience feels more an informed ability that lets people discriminate (and affects the music thing) rather than a real difference, there should be something to make it feel like a real difference.
I like the world you built. But I feel 3 posts is too short for that. For me, there were too many coincidences in this post.
I enjoyed how it was done in Bayeswatch by lsusr with several independent posts to introduce the setting before starting the story ark. Since you named a character "Vi" you might already know it.
Thoughts:
1. Midway through, I realized that music software here is similar to The Entertainment in Infinite Jest, hence the reference to Samizdat. Obviously there are the usual parallels with wire-heading as well.
2. This was my first detective story and was really hard to write! It's difficult to balance dialogue, action, and exposition dumping, and I'd probably rebalance this if I were to do it over again.
3. If I were rewriting this, I'd probably try and remove all internal narration from the protagonist, in keeping in line with the fact that they're non-sentient/a p-zombie. It made sense to have an internal monologue for the Sentience story because it was explicitly written by James Perez and addressed to his daughter. But a third-person story written by an omniscient narrator probably would omit a non-sentient character's internal thoughts. Alas!
4. No plans for a further sequel to this world for now. But a future spinoff would probably be third-person narration, and have only internal thoughts/feelings for the sentient characters but not the non-sentients. I think there are some interesting meta-narration styles to explore here that are beyond my reach for now :)
5. Thanks for reading!
I really like this and think you ended up managing 1 very well. I agree with 3 being a problem though - as is, the non-sentience feels more an informed ability that lets people discriminate (and affects the music thing) rather than a real difference, there should be something to make it feel like a real difference.
Oops, sorry Jameson.
I like the world you built. But I feel 3 posts is too short for that. For me, there were too many coincidences in this post.
I enjoyed how it was done in Bayeswatch by lsusr with several independent posts to introduce the setting before starting the story ark. Since you named a character "Vi" you might already know it.
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/TjdhvTSptCYakw3Lc
Thank you for the feedback, and for the fiction rec!
I haven’t heard of Bayeswatch before (and also haven’t read stuff on Lesswrong before) but will give it a read, it looks intriguing :)
One day when I have more time I’ll come back to this world and flesh it out more. Until then, onto different worlds and different short stories!
Thanks, as always, for reading!