Scifi Thriller Opening

ColGray

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Opening from my current WIP. It's a scifi thriller / murder mystery. It's aggressive and potentially too aggressive.


********************


Is ten seconds of video enough to convince a dozen strangers that murder could be a public service? Is eight seconds enough? I want to find out. I need to find out. Should I find out?

Good people perform acts of service, which this would be. A positive service—for humanity—ergo, if I act and obliterate this nostalgia-is-my-personality mustache twirler and his aggressive heterosexuality, I am a good person. No, the best kind of person: I am a martyr and my cross is named, `Kyle`.

“I just like the feel of it, you know? It’s analog. There’s a tactile nature to it,” Kyle says, slipping a thumb behind one buck leather suspender strap and admiring the very short, very naked and very, very hairy woman displayed on the glass plate in his other hand. She’s standing, a vision of alluring 1890’s French bouffantary, wearing nothing but ankle high black boots and a coy smile that whispers in seductive tones that Daddy issues are timeless. She poses, one shoed foot on a drab carpet and the other raised and resting on a milking stool, like the staged camera caught her moments before leaving the house on a Tuesday, all rolling eyes and Edwardian sighs, one hand flapping dismissively at being seen in this old thing.

I am St. Claudia the Sufferer, patron saint of Great-Great-Grandpa’s Porn Stash.

“This is a real woman’s body,” Kyle adds in a constricted voice that announces, he’s a good guy. He gets it. “It’s just her, you know?”

“I know what a real woman’s body looks like,” I say, and motion an arm down my body. “I happen to own one.”

This is a lie, but Kyle doesn’t know that and he’s too busy blushing and stammering an apology, his eyes lingering on the picture of a woman only slightly more dead than him.

I could grab the glass plate, snap it and stab. Addition by subtraction. The world didn’t need more Kyle’s, generally, or more of this Kyle, specifically. And he was, what, twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? That’s death’s door for a Kyle. They’re like fruit flies and generational musicians: Kyle’s die young. There are no octogenarian Kyle’s and, if this Kyle is any indication, I know why.

“No, I just meant there’s no airbrushing, AI touchups or tweezing. It’s just her.”

“In the front, maybe,” I say with a snort and wait for Kyle’s confusion to build and grow until the pedant is ready to burst and then add, “Victorian women were famous for bleaching their poop holes. Queen Victoria had a dark star so white, South Africa had to make a new class of citizen just for her. It’s true—look it up!”

I am a merciful death doula and I cradle Kyle and tell him to breathe and do those little staccato he-he-he breaths. We sit at the head of the class and I cradle his bony ribs and horrid choice of couture and tell him to breathe. He-he-he. Hiiiiiss. Good, yes, keep going. You’re doing so well! I run a proud, encouraging hand over the sallow skin of his neck, the shard of glass in my other hand and grin back at the class with a face that tells everyone else, This is crazy! We’re crazy! I don’t know what I’m doing any more than he does!

I know what I’m doing. I have killed Kyle six-hundred times and gone undetected in all but two—but once was on purpose. I have pushed, stabbed, shot, electrocuted, defenestrated, poisoned, tripped, overdosed, shoved and kicked Kyle to death. He is a weak, easy kill and I enjoy public service.

But killing him changes nothing and tonight is not about indulging.

Lauren, an electric blue drink in each hand and the fake smile she wears at these things tugged down and taped in place, snakes through pockets of attendees with single-finger waves and acknowledging eyebrow arches. The party’s music smooths and shifts from an abomination of pan flute acid house into a symphony of unanesthetized cat neuterings played over pitch shifted Bossa Nova.

I can’t. Not again. Tapping my watch, the track moves from torturous to three percent above abysmal and only a few attendees look around at the sudden change.

I am Claudia, bringer of death, shatterer of trust-fund DJ’s.

“South Africa wasn’t under British rule?” Kyle protests with bland, flat eyes.

I snort. “Yeah, if you believe that.” Confusion weasels across his face. “You know the hair's all fake, right?” I touch an oily finger to his precious glass plate, knowing the consternation it causes. “Merkin. Lice and fleas, you know? They shaved everything—top to taint—and wore wigs. Hey, lemme ask, do you often walk around loft parties showing women your Victorian porn?”

“Actually, it’s pornography, not porn,” he corrects, pushing up his brass rimmed glasses.

“Hey, I got us drinks!” Lauren says and gives me a one-armed hug and a drink and flashes an inviting look at Kyle and his bush woman. Lauren’s hair is blond and straight and forms an impeccable curtain of shimmering gold that angles and announces her taut jaw line and hints at ears. Every strand of eyebrow matches her hair. Her pores are tiny and closed and the whisper of summer’s freckles adds to her cheeks. Yves Saint Laurent Rouge Volupté in Nude Lavalliere graces her lips in a soft rose with a soupçon of gloss that says, I eat with this thing.

She looks like this each night.

She is bloody and still and dead each morning. She lies face down in a warm bath. She hangs from a belt in a walk-in closet. She is modern art rendered on sidewalk and fire escapes and stair landings.

I have found her corpse hundreds of times. I have followed her. I have killed each of the thirty other attendees. Still, she dies.

But Kyle … Kyle is the key. Definitely. Maybe. I think. Everything comes back to him. Every night starts with him. When everything resets, I am with Kyle and then Lauren glides over and we begin.
 
(tl;dr: good writing, not for me)

I think the technical bits of the writing are fine. It's a bit slow but the voice is very well done. I personally wouldn't read it: The narrator sounds violently misandrist and I don't do too well with graphic violence and with psychopathic protagonists (main reason I don't watch Dexter, though I understand it's a great show). So I wouldn't want to go on a whole book journey with the first person character presented here.

But I suspect that for people who like this sort of thing, it would be an engaging start. I'm guessing the SF bit comes in from the multiple universes/timelines implied here, but I wouldn't read it for that.

As a complete aside, I've become gunshy of stories that are labeled as SF because they have multiple universes/timelines but otherwise are ... well ... not really SF. And there seems to be a glut of those. Perhaps I'm using the wrong keywords to search ...
 
Super helpful! Thank you!

I wouldn't have thought of misandrist but, yeah, i can totally see that based on the first few pages. I get the psychopath, as well, though i was aiming for raging ADHD (rabbit holing, shifting focus from events in front of her to an idea that catches her attention, focusing on inane and broadly irrelevant details, deeply aural). I can refine on that.

The story mainly -- and entirely, for this section -- is a simulation. She rewinds the simulation and tries different lines.

The MC is a human wired into a system exploring hi-res models of real crime scenes, some of which are murder and some of which are things like art thefts, and she can don cognitive scans of the real people involved--no multiverse, but totally get where that comes from. She has a partner and they solve crimes together but she can't remember conversations between real world and sim world so he's her conduit. The end of the chapter is her revealing to the reader that her partner isn't her partner, but her jailor; she doesn't have memories of the real world because she's hard wired in and knows her life depends on remaining outwardly ignorant of this fact. And then a new case starts.
 
@ColGray Could I consider this an example where a punchy opening might promise the wrong things? Will there be this tone throughout the book?

I take Altered Carbon as a good example of how to start if you are going to be mind shifting (to coin a term) a bit: IIRC Altered Carbon starts off in the main narrator's voice (the one we'll be with the whole journey) and makes it clear that this sleeving thing remains as alien to him as to us.

If the general voice of the story is quite different from this opening, then you might be effective in dropping a hint at the start, without revealing much. However, unless gore is central to the story, I wouldn't put it too front and center.

Altered Carbon has a prolonged torture scene that was well written but not for me. Fortunately it was in the middle of the book, so I just skipped it and enjoyed the rest. If Blake had opened with that, I might have thought the whole book was like that and just thrown it aside.
 
Smartass ADHD is definitely the tone throughout, but it's never really about killing someone--and even the opening, i think/hope, it's not really about killing someone so much as melodramatically bemoaning being cornered by a choad at a party and imagining the ways to kill them. And then actually having done so--because it's a simulation. I'm pulling the camera back with intentionality, but there's never on-page gore.

The tone does shift as she adopts different people's cogs--there's a younger teen, there's an older grandmother, a widower, a bro/thrust-fund baby, etc.-- but the conceit is in place before that happens. The personas modify her personality, they don't replace it.

The main case they work is about preventing a murder when a security algorithm predicts that a person will die. There's "gore" insofar as there are three main locations the body is predicted to be found and probabilities around how she's killed and the MC is looking through those, watching, rewinding, overlaying, etc. What does it look like to investigate a 99%+ certainty murder, but only had probabilities for how and indeterminately who would kill them?

My goal post is something like Murderbot meets Boboverse investigating crimes
 
If it's a simulation and not actually time-travelling assassin, maybe best to clue the readers in up front? Like @msstice said, as is you have broken promises/ bait-and-switch problem as it stands.

Opening as it is does not really snag me. MC comes off as a sociopath, presented as planning actual murder of some party dude just for being something of an annoying d-bag. Kind of thing that could work for a short story (see "Cask of Amontillado") but would not want to read a novel in that person's head.

However, if you pitched me story about smart-but-socially-inept detective solving cold cases through immersive simulation, that idea interests me more.
 
Lose the first paragraph rhetoricals. I wanted to stop reading there, but went on and was rewarded.

It's all kind of a mess, which I take it you were after. I don't think it reads like ADHD, though. More of a stream of conscious from someone struggling (or delighting) in defining themselves. And that's part of the 'problem' - all the self referential stuff comes off as narcissistic rather than tortured.


A lot of it makes no sense. I don't know why Kyle is receiving lamaz from the MC while she considers stabbing him, and it feels like that detail is never going to be held to account.


The very, very hairy thing seems like an oddly judgemental comment for a women to make about the pubic hair of another woman. Are we supposed to assume the photo is of a Victorian wookie, or just that the MC is so wrapped up in recent self-grooming trends that a normal human is bizarre?
 
The very, very hairy thing seems like an oddly judgemental comment for a women to make about the pubic hair of another woman. Are we supposed to assume the photo is of a Victorian wookie, or just that the MC is so wrapped up in recent self-grooming trends that a normal human is bizarre?
Haha! Had to read that twice because initially I thought you'd invented a new slang term for a lady garden, then Chewbacca finally clicked into my mind.
I was thinking "Wow! A wookie"
 
I really like the opening paragraph. The rest is too much for me, and I can't really add to what others have said.

One specific point:

I am a martyr and my cross is named, `Kyle`.
"cross" confused me, as I thought at first (given the mention of sexual identity earlier) it might be a psychological term for some kind of alternate personality. I don't know if I would have got the meaning first time in a different context, but I don't think I associate martyrdom with crosses, more with stoning or arrows.

(And a very picky point, those backwards apostrophes -- the key at the top left of the keyboard. Single quote marks should be the standard apostrophe key.)
 
To be blunt, the combination of writing style and subject matter make me feel that the piece is trying too hard to be edgy. Sorry about that, because it's well-written and deep in character, and I don't want to sound rude. But ultimately the character feels rather superficial, and I wouldn't stick with it because I'd find her tedious company.

A friend of mine once described Neuromancer as "a brilliant novel with a fifth of the words deleted at random", and I can't help but feel a bit of this here. I realise that this sort of abbreviated prose is a cyberpunk "thing", but a phrase like "She is bloody and still and dead each morning" in an SF novel deep in character makes me wonder whether this is literally true thanks to science, or whether it is the character's way of speaking. It doesn't slow me down much, but it slows me down enough for some of the reading experience to be lost.
 
It's all kind of a mess, which I take it you were after. I don't think it reads like ADHD, though. More of a stream of conscious from someone struggling (or delighting) in defining themselves. And that's part of the 'problem' - all the self referential stuff comes off as narcissistic rather than tortured.
Struggling and delighting in (re)defining themselves, might be the most succinct description of the MC. Some narcissism is intended--she's good at what she does and bored and frustrated--but full on narcissist wasn't my goal.
The very, very hairy thing seems like an oddly judgemental comment for a women to make about the pubic hair of another woman. Are we supposed to assume the photo is of a Victorian wookie, or just that the MC is so wrapped up in recent self-grooming trends that a normal human is bizarre?
I guess... why does it have to be an extreme? People-- men and women--judge others based on appearance all the time and the character is deeply, repeatedly judgmental--of men, women, music, clothing, etc. Judging other human based on appearance, chosen or unchosen bits, is deeply human.
 
To be blunt, the combination of writing style and subject matter make me feel that the piece is trying too hard to be edgy. Sorry about that, because it's well-written and deep in character, and I don't want to sound rude. But ultimately the character feels rather superficial, and I wouldn't stick with it because I'd find her tedious company.
Legit, exactly what I was checking. It felt like i was at an 11 or a 12 but i haven't shared or shown it anywhere and wanted to check myself. Definitely too extreme!

A friend of mine once described Neuromancer as "a brilliant novel with a fifth of the words deleted at random", and I can't help but feel a bit of this here. I realise that this sort of abbreviated prose is a cyberpunk "thing", but a phrase like "She is bloody and still and dead each morning" in an SF novel deep in character makes me wonder whether this is literally true thanks to science, or whether it is the character's way of speaking. It doesn't slow me down much, but it slows me down enough for some of the reading experience to be lost.
That's interesting -- I wouldn't have tagged Neuromancer with that style, but i can see it. Gibson's prose is sparse and Neuromancer is, generally, terse but, I'd argue, the book is elevated by what isn't said but only implied. There's a lot of Elmore Leonard to his style, but he's not as abbreviated as, say, Raymond Carver.

I'm using / attempting to use polysyndeton to create a rhythm to the words -- the affectation of stringing together words or phrases with either 'and' or 'or'. I would tag that as lit fic in the last 20 years (Dave Eggers, Otessa Mosshfegh make great use of it) and Spec Lit (Atwood, Octavia Butler), but i think it works particularly well when a book is read aloud/spoken.

Would you have wondered if the bloody and still and dead was true if it wasn't SF? Is genre expectation driving that question or is it something on the page? Because I'm aiming for literal -- Lauren is literally dead every morning -- and wondering if I'm giving the wrong impression earlier?
 
The plot, prose and style of this is so far out of my comfort zone I need hiking boots and a week’s supply of Mars bars to get me anywhere close to it, so it’s safe to say I’m not one of your intended readership! (And I had to laugh at the idea of your being confused by my piece – a model of elegance and clarity, naturally ;) – when this is so bamboozingly opaque, not to say impenetrable on first read! Actually, even on second and third read in parts, as I still don’t understand the bit about helping him to breathe and the class watching.)

Anyhow, for what it’s worth, I’m with Swank in saying the opening para put me off – rhetorical questions are tricky things, especially at the beginning – but in my case persevering didn’t bring a change of mind and heart. I also found the use of pornography so early on, no matter how tame, rather distasteful with Kyle’s near-salivating coupled with the dismissive description of the woman. (Yes, everyone is judgemental as you've noted in a later post, but for me at least this rang as near-misogynistic in its gloating.)

The idea of multiple worlds didn’t occur to me, and I put the frequent murders down to some kind of role-play/simulation/fantasy, but that could well be because I don’t read much present-day SF so I don’t know what’s commonplace now, but it's perhaps best to make it clearer earlier on. And although I wouldn’t have labelled the main character as misandrist (I’d put her down as an equal opportunities hater), the words “sociopath” and “psychotic” weren’t far from my thoughts on first read.

Anyhow, I’m a nit-picker, so some points that will undoubtedly be of more use to you than the above:
  • I am a martyr and my cross is named, `Kyle` – no comma and no quotation marks needed, and as HB says the left hand one leans the wrong way. (If it’s of interest I read this as shorthand for “the cross I have to bear” but it still rather surprised me as an overt Christian reference in a futuristic SF work, but that may be a matter of UK-US differences of education and expectation.)
  • that announces, he’s a good guy – again no comma needed but if you want to set it off, you’d need a colon
  • The world didn’t need more Kyle’s, generally, or more of this Kyle, specifically – again the commas aren’t needed; the apostrophe at “Kyle’s” is wrong, it’s just “Kyles” since it’s a simple plural, and since the text is present tense that “didn’t” rather stands out, as does the he was what in the next line, so you might want to think about what you're intending there
  • Kyle’s die young. There are no octogenarian Kyle’s – again, no apostrophes here for the plurals
  • six-hundred times – no hyphen, two separate words
  • pitch shifted – conversely, a hyphen is best here to create a compound adjective, and the same for brass rimmed
  • trust-fund DJ’s – again no apostrophe, it’s just a plural
  • “South Africa wasn’t under British rule?” Kyle protests with bland, flat eyes – is he protesting if it’s given as a question? And as a stylistic point what relevance has his eyes to the perhaps-protest?

I'm using / attempting to use polysyndeton to create a rhythm to the words
I love that rhetorical technique and use it a lot, so its presence here didn't worry me, but (a) I think it needs to be used in character and (b) a little of it can go a long way, and I end up taking some out to avoid overload, so perhaps watch how often it's used in the entirety of the work.

Anyway, hope some of that helps. Good luck with it!
 
Would you have wondered if the bloody and still and dead was true if it wasn't SF? Is genre expectation driving that question or is it something on the page?

I don't think I would have done, no. A while back I read This Is How You Lose The Time War - I basically thought it was all purple prose and little substance - and it contained a reference to releasing "defanged superbugs" into a jungle. It took a while before I realised that these were artificially weakened diseases and not giant insects with their teeth pulled out. Perhaps it's just me.
 
it contained a reference to releasing "defanged superbugs" into a jungle. It took a while before I realised that these were artificially weakened diseases and not giant insects with their teeth pulled out. Perhaps it's just me.
For me it would be dependent on the context. If this was a fantasy where giant insects with fangs had been encountered before, I would have thought one way. If this was all white coats and microscopes and the word "Genomic" thrown around then I would know it meant weakened or altered bacteria vs virus. I'm thinking most people would figure this out even if they hadn't read "superbug" in the popular press, so I'd say this was a writing failure, not a reading one.
 

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