Today we see that being translated from another language doesn’t make your book’s errors less distracting.
What I gleaned about the stories: We only ever seen reflections and reproductions of our own face, which scares us less than it might.
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Note: This is a short story collection, so the rules are slightly different from standard Immerse or Die: instead of reading on every time I lose immersion, I stop reading that story and move on to the next one. As usual, I stop reading after the third WTF.
Analysis: The first story started with a relatively common experience and lead me through the protagonist’s brief thoughts on it. Then, as I was empathising with the way the protagonist was approaching that sort of situation, the author revealed that this wasn’t what was actually happening now. However, unlike the accidental disjunctions between mental image and new fact that can often destroy immersion, this was a deliberate choice by the protagonist to lead the reader astray; as such it both deepened my understanding of the character and provided a more effective contrast between the mundane and the unexpected.
Analysis: The second story opens with: “You know what time it is?”, I ask. The rogue comma was a double whammy: when attributing dialogue, only a closing full stop is replaced with a comma; and the comma sits inside the speech marks if the tag follows the speech. As the front matter mentioned this collection was translated by the author, I wondered if it was a direct transcription of a valid construction in the author’s native language; however – while I recognise the competence of anyone who can write in more than one language – the test is immersion not overall competence, so I scored accordingly.
Since the start of a story is where the proof-reader is freshest, an error in the first line raised the spectre of others later in the work; so I moved on.
Analysis: The second sentence of the next story was: I rather use my energy to keep my ass up, staying open for you. The first clause, while seeming to lack a verb after I, was comprehensible. The second threw me. Without any context in the first sentence, I didn’t know what was being kept ready for whom: was this a shopkeeper waiting for an expected customer or the flight controller of a space craft trying to sneak a ship in during the night watch?
[Note from Jefferson: Funny. I read that quoted line more literally, and took it to be some kind of explicit sex scene.]
With the missing word already suggesting that descriptions might need effort to untangle, I wasn’t primed to give the benefit of the doubt, so I moved on.
Analysis: The third story opens with an interesting description of a spacecraft from the perspective of some Vikings, portraying the Vikings as puzzled, uncertain, and yet not merely fearful savages. However, the following paragraphs of: It was… They thought… and so on. buried this image beneath the dust of a witness statement.
My interest in Vikings vs. Aliens lost, I pulled the plug.
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I don’t understand your meaning in #3. I haven’t read the story myself. Can you clarify?
Thanks.
The story opens with an interesting emotional trigger: seeing something outside one’s existing knowledge. And the metaphors in the initial few sentences did a great job of showing the characters trying to fit this new thing into their world.
Repeating patterns such as most sentences being Noun Verbed… if used with intent can portray a rhythm or lull the reader into a relaxed state so a sudden event has more impact by contrast; however, here the sense of sameness directly contradicted the characters’ previous struggle to understand something outside their frame of reference, and thus deflated the tension.