FIRST PAGE: Sci-Fi & Romance
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KYOTO
I.
“The unusual results of the latest experiments with neutrino have returned us at the beginning. For more than a century the limited speed of 299.792,458 metres per second … or 186,282 miles per second … which is as we all know defined by the speed of light, was considered the maximum speed at which all matter, energy, and information in the universe can travel. However, as first the OPERA experiment showed and after it the whole string of others: ICARUS, BOREXINO, LVD, and MINOS, neutrino seems to travel even faster. With this a cornerstone of the modern understanding of physics is seriously shaken. And today’s generation of physicists is presented with an exceptional challenge: how to explain this? How drawing on these results can we understand the universe? None of us knows the answer to this yet. But I believe that none of us who are present here on this conference, and many of our colleagues who are not with us today, can really relax until we find the answer.
“Let the game begin.”
Loud applause accompanied me when with these words I ended my presentation and walked of the stage.
It was the third day of the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics held in Kyoto, Japan, this November. Its primary purpose was the presentation of reports about the experiments with neutrino, the elementary particle which about a year ago put the whole physics community on edge. It breached the speed of light and since then this became the main topic in the world of my profession.
II.
My report was the last one during the morning schedule and after it there was a pause for lunch.
I was in Kyoto with my four colleagues from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, or shorter: Fermilab; a research centre which main task was to explore what the universe was made of and how it worked. As a theoretical physicist dealing with elementary particles I had been splitting my working time between Fermilab and the University of Chicago where I was a professor. Darrell Bradshaw, my best friend, who was also with me on this conference, was in the same position. I had got this job mainly thanks to him because through my collaboration with Darrell the administration of the UChicago followed my previous work in Sweden.
I didn’t actually start my career as a theoretical researcher of the secrets of quantum mechanics. In my small Swedish institute in Gothenburg, where I previously worked, we were practically oriented, doing researches and projects for different customers, mostly in the field of computing technology. My earlier theoretical contributions to the science of physics were actually carried out in addition to my regular work. The exploration of the essence of existence always interested me and this was the real reason why I had become a quantum physicist.
“You were great, Christer, especially your last sentence: ‘Let the game begin’. You have probably got the idea for it from the Harry Potter movie, haven’t you?” said one of my four colleagues, Frank Thomson, as we were leaving the conference room.
“Actually, yes. I know them by heart. My children were tireless in watching those movies.”
“You would remember everything even if you saw them only once; your memory is outstanding,” he noted.
“‘Let the game begin’ is an excellent expression. Research teams worldwide will be falling over each other now to find the solution to this problem. This conference is in fact an official declaration that the light speed has more than obviously been breached,” commented Sharon who was walking beside us. Sharon Page was one of the leading scientists at Fermilab and my close friend.
Before we were able to leave the building, a young woman had stopped me. Slim figure, straight short red hair, a “Press” badge. “Professor Sandersson, I’m Kathy Woodward, BBC news. Your lecture was truly inspiring even for us non-physicists. Could I have an interview with you?”
“Our schedule is pretty full. Right now I’m heading for lunch…”
“I know. I was actually wondering if we could meet in the evening. Then we’ll both have more time.” She gave me a contact card.
“I would very much appreciate if you would call me.” She was watching me straight in the eyes. Then she slightly smiled, turned and walked away.
Tom Hutt, another colleague of mine, silently whistled. The others were snickering, clearing their throats and such things.
Tom peeked at the card. “A card with her private cell phone number on it. And what did she scribble here?” He stretched his neck. “The name of her hotel … and even the number of her room. Oh, man, I can plainly see what kind of an interview she has in mind.”
Nothing pulls me into the story here.
What you’ve done well is incorporate bits of his personal backstory in – he’s Swedish, working in America, has children – (I thought the comment about his eidetic memory was a bit clunky: it felt like Frank was saying it for the reader’s benefit.)
However, I don’t feel anything about him, because it’s all just factual. We don’t find out whether he’s happy about the applause he gets, proud of his turn of phrase, wistful about the way his children have grown up – the page is (and possibly this is characterisation) emotion-free.
The first chance I get to feel anything is at the end of the page where a reporter gives him a card, and his colleagues turn into 13 year olds. Possibly she is hitting on him: I don’t know what information a reporter would normally give someone. But because he doesn’t react to their juvenile comments (and perhaps he does, in the next paragraph), my first feeling is that I don’t like him very much.
I think I’d like the page better if my first impression of Christer was more favourable.
Good luck.
Hi author, thanks for sharing.
First problem I see is the speech. My eyes started glazing over as soon as your MC started explaining what the speed of light is. I have never been to a science conference, but I can’t see most speakers wasting time defining things their audience should already know.
Then there’s the last line. I’m not sure why you think it’s important, but I can’t see why it’s there at all or why anyone would immediately associate it with Harry Potter. “Let the game/games” begin is a really common phrase. And frankly, the call to action at the end feels rather meh. I initially missed it completely and had a suggestion here that you add one.
And finally, this kind of feels like a speech to open a conference with. The MC doesn’t seem to really be giving any new information to the audience, which I’d assume is what most speeches in the middle of this type of conference are.
Following the speech with an info dump about your MC is a mistake. We don’t get vital info, such as the character’s name, until way too far down the page. I’d suggest working on spreading out this information throughout the book or reconsidering whether the audience really needs to know it at all.
Also, is your MC male or female? If this is supposed to be ambiguous, well done. Otherwise, this needs a bit of work. (Christer feels like a nickname.) I’d actually been assuming they were female until the reporter showed up. (And that doesn’t rule out well known lesbian.)
Then there’s the description at the top of this entry of this book being SF. It really doesn’t give an SF feel. I think this could be fixed if the science at the beginning felt more ground breaking, but as is, it feels like I’m about to get a romance staring a hunky(?) scientist and a cute reporter.
And finally, a minor issue, but it bugged me. “My children were tireless in watching those movies.” Did the kids grow up or is this first hint to a tragic back story? (Note, my mind went to the latter immediately. Not everyone’s will, but something to consider.)
Anyway, best of luck, but I wouldn’t keep reading, especially if I was looking for SF.
I assumed Chris was a woman, so I’m going to refer to her as a she. In fact, I was so sure Chris was a woman that I saw the reporter as a sign that she’s gay, so you have this issue on the page.
There is nothing going on here. The speech is a bore. “Let the games begin” is not followed by any interesting games, but by backstory. You need to get something happening sooner:
“In short, colleagues and fellow Physicists, the speed of light is not the limit. With Neutrinos, we don’t know how fast one can travel. Let the game begin.”
Loud applause accompanied me when with these words I ended my presentation and walked of the stage. My report was the last one during the morning schedule and after it there was a pause for lunch.
“You were great, Christer, especially your last sentence: ‘Let the game begin’ said one of my four colleagues, Frank Thomson, as we were leaving the conference room.
Derrell, another colleague said, (Sci-fi version) “Does this mean Planet X is only so many days of travel away? Making it possible for us to visit/aliens to come to earth?
(Suspense version) “I heard some shady characters were asking for your hotel room. Faster travel would really benefit the enemy.”
(Chick lit version) “Did you check out that hot tech in the third row?” I sighed, my career might be soaring after this speech, but I still couldn’t get a date.
(Romance version) “What are you doing after the evening seminars? Darrell purred in the voice he usually uses on lab techs and grad students.
Anyway, you get the idea. You can give us an idea of where the plot is going in half a page. And you should.
I couldn’t get past the grammar issues to care about the story much, e.g it should be ‘returned us “to” the beginning’, “299.792458” since we don’t use commas after a decimal point, either “neutrinos” or “the neutrino”, ‘a young woman stopped me’ without the “had”, etc.
The MC doesn’t tell us why the neutrino’s travelling faster than light is important, what implications it may have. Hence, the ‘let the games begin’ doesn’t have much of an impact.
I’m guessing the Science Fiction aspect comes from the fact that the experiments related to the neutrino’s speed have been contradictory in real life, unlike here.
I also thought the MC was a woman until the last para. The dialogue also seems really unnatural to me. The Harry Potter thing seems forced. I would not read on. I had more fun reading SAO’s different versions of dialogue.
Hi Author. Thanks for sharing.
You lost me with the big speech. While it’s important to the story, starting off with a lot of scientific stuff is something Michael Crichton could pull off, but not here.
I agree with the rest of the comments, so I won’t repeat what’s already been nicely explained. Because I don’t have a hook on this page (and because it is First Page, and a critique) I started looking for nits to pick.
While not an expert by any means on the Swedish language, I’m not sure they’d use the British spelling of ‘centre’. I don’t believe Sweden was ever a British colony, so the British spelling doesn’t seem correct for a Swedish person to use.
There are some really strange sentence constructions. “I had got this job mainly thanks to him because through my collaboration with Darrell the administration of the UChicago followed my previous work in Sweden.” This makes no sense. It needs grammar help, maybe some commas, or quite possibly could be worked in some other way…or not at all. Is it really important enough to take up first page real estate?
There’s a stilted quality to the dialog, and you could lose the speech tags. This sentence in particular, since it’s hinted later she’s hitting on him:
“I would very much appreciate if you would call me.” She was watching me straight in the eyes. Then she slightly smiled, turned and walked away.
She looked me straight in the eye, or she watched me. She gave me a smile that…I couldn’t read; gave me mixed signals; gave me a clear signal; turned up the corner of her mouth in a beguiling way that made my stomach flutter. Something other than slightly. Read Stephen King’s book On Writing for his take on adverbs. (To paraphrase: “The road to hell is paved with them.”) Slightly does nothing to help us understand how she smiled.
Capitalize “News” in BBC News. “…reports about the experiments with neutrino, the elementary particle…” Either neutrinos, plural, or the neutrino.
There are a lot of “oh, by the way” instances of telling us something you as writer feel us as reader needs to know. (In TV shows it’s when the doctor says something like: “The patient has pneumonitis.” And then turns to the pulmonologist, which is, by the way, a specialist in lungs, and says, “Oh, by the way, pneumonitis is inflammation of the alveoli. That differs from pneumonia in this way, blah, blah, blah…” The other doctor already knows this, but the audience might not. It’s a clunky way of telling viewers, and readers, information.
“…the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, or shorter: Fermilab; a research centre which main task was to explore what the universe was made of and how it worked.” Your MC isn’t going to think about where Fermilab is located, much less the city and state. I was waiting for the zip code to show up. He’s probably going to call it Fermilab in his thoughts. The rest isn’t necessary, or could be worked into conversation somewhere else, possibly with the reporter, in a more organic way.
There’s not enough to pull me into the story and want to keep reading, even though this is right up my alley. There’s too much to wade through to get to that little tiny hook at the end. And then that hook’s not sharp enough to hold me. This fish has gotten off the line.
Choose a different way to start it. If you need the technical things, bring them in in chapter two.
I remember when I finished my studies I was THRILLED I didn’t have to look at any boring maths/science stuff anymore. So when I read for fun I don’t want to be returned to tertiary science #101…
“Let the game begin.” – Is a much better opening sentence.
I want to add that all of the nits I picked, and much of what everyone else wrote can be changed. There’s nothing in writing that can’t be rewritten, or edited, or rearranged.
I’d like to read a blurb for the story, to learn what the SF aspect of this story is. Like I said, this is my favorite genre, and I’d like to like this story.
Thank you brave author for posting.
I agree with a lot of the comments. I think your story may start somewhere else – in this section there’s no conflict and no goal – I don’t know what your MC wants and that makes it hard to care about them. And right now it reads more like a contemporary than SFR – I’m assuming something’s going to happen with the neutrinos that will make it more SF, but there’s no sense of that yet.
Good luck.
@Lostshadows – Yes, my children are the Harry Potter generation, and I wouldn’t have made a connection between that phrase and those movies.
I’d have vaguely thought it was something to do with the Olympics.
Also ‘tireless’ is an odd word to use to describe watching movies, because it’s not a thing that particularly requires energy. I read it to mean ‘my children never tired of watching those movies’.
I assumed it was an intentional choice – to show by Christer’s choice of words that English isn’t his first language – but it’s a risky strategy because the reader might read it as a poor choice of words on the part of the author.
I had a lot of trouble with the premise since neutrinos do not travel faster than the speed of light. The Opera Experiment, when it was repeated with the loose fiberoptic cable fix, the apparently faster than light effect disappeared. Other, so called faster than light, experiments were shown to be phase velocity which does not carry mass or information faster than light.
I wanted to add that I’ve read all the HP books several times. I think I’ve seen all the movies at least once. I didn’t recognize the phrase. Reading that it’s from HP didn’t help me, it just told me there’s a reference I don’t get, which doesn’t hook me in. If I had know the phrase, telling me it’s HP would have been redundant. At some point, you have to 1) make the phrase your own, and 2) trust your reader.
I have been to an unfortunate number of physics conferences. The speeches are never that interesting, and even more rarely do the end with invitations to hot reporters’ hotel rooms!
That being said, I think the main issue here (aside from the oddball Harry Potter reference) is all show, no tell. That’s a particularly tough road when you’re playing with a topic that you’re audience by nature isn’t going to know much about. But it reads a little bit too much like a CV rather than a novel. I would cut the first three paragraphs after the break; weave this in over time, rather than data-dumping it all at once. I come from a technical writing background and I think that’s one of the harder things in writing fiction for those of us with linear brains: my nature is to write a concise and well-circumscribed block of information; it turns out, that doesn’t work in fiction. Based on your topic matter, I’m guessing that might be some part of your background too?
@Carol McKenzie:
Dear Mrs. McKenzie,
It is me, the author, N. Bergström (my penname), writing the reply.
Well, I’m very glad that all of you took your time and made such a throughout analysis of the first few hundred words of my book. I took all your comments to hart and will do my best to correct the entry into the story. You asked for the blurb, so here is the assessment, which the Kirkus Reviews had written. I also have to say that I am not a native English speaker and the book had not been edited yet when I sent it to the Kirkus Reviews.
“OVER THE EDGE
Part One
Bergström, N.
Manuscript
BOOK REVIEW
A hunky Swedish physicist and a seductive Slovenian architect struggle to overcome their troubled pasts and find love in this first installment of an international romantic series.
Swedish Christer Sandersson, a brilliant quantum physicist and charmer, splits his time between the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, and a professorship at the University of Chicago. Separated from his children and their mother, the rich and ruthless Pernilla, who have remained behind in Sweden, Sandersson obsesses over the strange behavior of neutrinos in recent experiments. Researchers have observed the subatomic particles breaking the speed of light, defying Einstein’s theory of relativity, and upending modern physics. Meanwhile, on holiday in Austria, Sandersson finds his heart captured by the enigmatic, sensuous Sasha, a Slovenian architect with a troubled past. They abandon themselves to a wild affair that Sandersson, now painfully vulnerable, hopes will lead to the altar. Continuing his mesmerizing research, Sandersson suspects that an unknown force in the human psyche may determine the behavior of neutrinos, and even reality itself. He devises a radical experiment at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, whose results leave observers speechless. As he gropes his way toward a new theory and Sasha assails his heart, he descends ever deeper into the rabbit-hole mysteries of subatomic life where Einstein himself threw up his hands. Despite his gifts as a physicist and lover, however, Sandersson the narrator often falls short—his spotty English mars the text. Phrases such as, “I only watched her, with my hearth in my throat” and a character “whipping away her
tears” distract from an otherwise compelling tale. Nevertheless, Bergström anchors our interest almost unfailingly with two of the most intriguing questions known to humanity: What is the nature of reality? And how does observing affect the observed?
Though marred by linguistic missteps, this heady mix of luminous minds, scarred psyches, wild passion, and universal mysteries make Bergström’s novel a solid debut.” — Kirkus Reviews
Sincerely yours
N. Bergström