Hey there.

Here are my thoughts on your story for the Lodestar competition. I hope you'll find my rambling thoughts useful, and if you have any questions in regards to my review, please don't hesitate to ask.

"John ate his processed protein slurry like he had every day." - Solid opening. It not only gives us the protagonist, but also set the dull and dreary tone fitting to his monotonous life. The rest of the opening paragraph nicely adds to the tone and setting as well.

"They had wandered off into the desolate landscape of this world, dying as the poisonous atmosphere slowly killed them." - Nice. I like how you get the necessary backstory in as briefly and efficiently as possible while also using it to show the MC's peril.

"but he was grateful for the spare parts." - Huh? What spare parts? I think maybe you're referring to the left behind pressure suits, but it's not really clear to me.

"a very convincing hallucination of Tom Roberts, the mission commander, stated." - This nicely fleshes out the MC and his situation and his descent into madness. I think it's great that this is set up early, so that we know what the story will be about. It sets the right reader expectations.

"He wore street clothes and had entered through the airlock during John's breakfast." - Maybe it's just me, and it's hard to say how I would've reacted if I hadn't read the story idea first, but I think this indicates a little too clearly that John isn't imagining things. Again, it might just be me, and even if it isn't, there are probably a thousand ways to tweak it. One way could be omitting the part about how Tom entered (maybe John just didn't notice), or maybe describing why John might imagine Tom in his street clothes instead of his pressure suit (they could've known each other before the mission or something like that).

"It was really beginning to wear him down." - This is telling the MC's emotions directly, which, in my experience, never really comes across well. I would much rather be shown, even just briefly, how it's wearing him down.

"You swore you would hang in the longest but this is getting ridiculous!" - This is a nice point. A character in the situation like the one John is in would need a good reason to stay where he is and keep trying to survive. I'm not sure this is enough to convince me, but it's a good start, which keeps me invested for the time being.

"Tom, any luck getting through to him?" - This also very strongly indicates that John is not imagining things. Again, perhaps too strongly. If other readers agree, this might be a problem with the tempo at which the reveal is occurring. If it turns out to be a problem for several readers, the only solution I can think off is cutting away one of the two former crew members so that they don't have this discussion, but that's not to say there aren't other or better solutions.

"Maybe we should fix the radio" - Nice detail. I was starting to wonder if no one had contacted John through the radio.

"He was shocked when he entered the main habitat" - This, too, is telling of the MC's emotions, and it reads stilted to me, which is really to bad, because the writing has been more than solid so far. Here, I think it would work better if we were shown how John reacts or thinks when being shocked instead of just being told what he feels.

"John felt tears coming." - Minor details, but "John felt" acts as an filter, reminding us that we're reading a story about John not experiencing the events ourselves. The story is otherwise pretty close to John and inside his head, so cutting the filter could help keep up that close POV and strengthen reader immersion. Something like "Tears started to form at the corner of his eyes" (or something like that) gives us the same information without the filtering.

"He had promised himself not to engage with the images..." - This also helps a little with explaining why he doesn't leave and can't be convinced by the "hallucinations". Though, I'm still not convinced that they wouldn't be able to persuade him. Have any of the actually tried to explain what's really going on?

"They had been in suspended animation for months and even at sunlight speeds, it would take a century for help to come." - Huh? The timeline seems off here. Why would it takes centuries for help to arrive if he was only in suspended animation for a couple of months on the trip there? Wouldn't he have died of old age before arriving?

"The poisoning must have begun to eat at his brain." - I like how he's still trying to explain away what he's seeing at this point.

"A new looking structure" - This is a very vague description which doesn't really tell us anything about what he's seeing.

"There was a glass front door like what John remembered a convenience store to have." - There are other examples throughout the story, but here's another one of how filtering creates unnecessary extra distance between the reader and John. We are in John's head, so we don't need the "John remembered". You could simply say "like what a convenience store used to have."

"What he read left him shocked." - Again, telling the character's emotions doesn't really bring them across to the reader.

I'm not really sure what to think about the ending. On the one hand I like the twist. On the other, though, there really isn't any foreshadowing or ambiguity until this point indicating that the hallucinations were anything but real, so it wasn't really a satisfying twist. I mean, if I had been 60% John was on Earth, this would've been the perfect ending. But I was 100% percent sure, so it mostly just pulled me out of the story.


Overall
Overall, the sentence level writing was solid. There were several instances of direct telling of character emotions and unnecessary filtering, but I wouldn't even get around to comment on nitty-gritty stuff that if it wasn't because the writing was otherwise solid.

You stayed very true to the story idea, which I think was a good choice, because the idea was almost a full story in itself.

I especially enjoyed the opening paragraphs where you set the tone nicely and delivered the necessary exposition in an effective manner. Later on, the plot did start to fall somewhat apart for me, which leads to the one or two major issue(s) (depending on how you look at it, since they're really both about information) that I did have with the story as is.

I had a hard time believing that no one had tried the obvious method of explaining to John what was really going on. It seems like the first cause of action anyone would take.

The other information issue I had was the one I mentioned earlier with everything pointing towards the hallucinations being real people, which also made the ending twist feel off. It could very well just be me, so it's probably a good idea to compare my reactions to the information flow with that of other readers.

Anyways, I hope can use at least some of my feedback.





My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .