h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Her Cartographer - A12609542
Author: GreyMouser - U3467975

Something slightly different from my normal style and of a distinct unsavoury flavour...

Amazingly enough DOESN'T involve any time travel this time. Whatever next (or before)!

distinct --> distinctLY

(oh, it's late, that's my excuse )

Hello greymouser

Very unsavoury and gruesome. I loved it !

Thanks Chips!

you're welcome

Blimey! I was beginning to wonder where exactly it was leading - didn't expect where it did lead.

A delightfully unsavoury , bedtime story.

Many thanks,
Waz

Glad you all enjoyed it! It was one of those stories which I started on a whim and had no idea where it would lead almost until it was done. I think the end paragraph needs a bit more work but there you go...

More work... what do you have in mind? To increase the unease you're left with at the end over this cartographer guy? There is a chill at the sense of his self absorbedness that hits you after the humour that goes before. Humour with eewwww factor, that is.

No, noting major. The last few sentences feel a bit awkward to me. I just want to tidy them up a bit.

Very good indeed. (Though I did see the twist coming, more or less correctly. The title was a big clue. I think male readers may well see it coming, while female readers might just not want to)

If you want some crit, I'd say you've got two inconsistent personality traits in your narrator-character here, and you could improve the piece by sticking exclusively to one or the other.

One is the smell/taste-seeker, which is a very earthy and physical concept, creepy because it turns intimacy into something disgusting and invasive. The other is the detached and self-possessed 'cartographer', who explores women dispassionately. The title conveys that idea and so (stylistically) does the last paragraph.

One character is hot and the other is cold. I think you're unsure about the last paragraph because you've changed character at that point.

Either one is powerful. My limited expertise in the area tells me that this Entry will freak out every woman that reads it. I think the hot character is more original than the cold, but the cold is more challenging as an exercise in writing (because it's easier to disgust people on the page than to unsettle them).

This is minor crit, though. The piece is extremely good. Your narrative is good, the description is very good, particularly the way you layer it so as to progressively violate the reader's comfort zone, and the dialogue is pretty good too.

You can write. Your SF is good, but I reckon this shows you should explore outside SF for a while. SF is another soft option writing-wise (deus ex machina comes built-in when you can defy physics). Also, if you're interested in taking writing beyond the hobby, SF is way too crowded a genre.

Keep it up. One of the best reads in weeks.

Pin

Thanks for the feedback Pin

You're not the first to point out that the title does give it away a bit. I'll try to think of something else...

GM

Very nice. By which I mean very nasty

I agree about the title, though I do like it - made me think of John Donne (and Ben Jonson):

"License my roving hands, and let them go,
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O my America! my new-found-land ...
To teach thee I am naked first; why than
What needst thou have more covering then a man?"

'To His Mistress on Going to Bed' ... or 'Mistris' in Donne's spelling - it's certainly got that hard-bitten quality. Could you play on something like that?

Hi Trin

Thanks for the info - will inject them into brain, stir gently for a day or so and see what pops out!

Cheers

GM

Great stuff, GM!

Siding with Pin on the ending, I think the reason you find it weak is that the hot becomes the cold by way of an apology (" I sigh, apologetically, to no one. Once I had tried explaining but that had only made things worse...")

Once you remove the apology, the transition between the hot and the cold becomes sharp. The protagonist appears in all his purity (some would call it inhumanity), unrepentant, stubborn. That transition then becomes unsettling, all the more so if you flesh out the dispassionate evaluation of 'you don't matter, your tastes do'.

my approximately 2 cents
~ db

how is it possible in a piece like this to miss
the fountains of venus - that first taste of life,
the gorgeous ebb and flow of the primal tidal
stream, the suck and tiny gurgles, nose nuzzle,
smacking lips, the coming up for air - what is
woman that man is mindful of her - this is not to
knock neanderthal at the gate - I am not repulsed
by the approach, in fact someone had to say it for
there are few voices raised these days against the
politically correct and yours, determindly, places
woman where she belongs, rich and fertile as the
forest floor, flesh caught in toils that man can
only guess at - mind locked up in its bloody tower
yet words free to flow : science fiction it is not
- now have a go at that other undiscovered conti-
nent : me [my ilk] - cheers m'lady, cheers

ardea cinerus

ps - i don't care if i'm wrong about your sex -
its the masque that matters - whichever - you wear
it well

er, yeah...

...thanks, I think...

my gender: um, sorry but you're wrong.

GM

yr anonimity is preserved - I haven't a clue what
I'm talking to - I said it matters not - your story
still stands on its feet - and the human condition
being what it is, I don't consider it unsavory - see
the Welsh use of blow-fly maggots to clean wounds
and imagine being a maggot or one of the nurses who
handles them

sorry GM - I see now where I was at sea which, unfortunately
is so like me - not so much to get it wrong but not to get it
real - blame it on the ghoulish sense of anonimity that shrouds
so much of h2g2s correspondence - most of my working life I dealt
with editors at a distance: first by galley proofs, letters, fax
and by telephone - then finally by email - but gender was never masked : need I ask you to examine the guises - names that remind
me of my young daughter's MSN communications cute by far and safe
from ethnic and gender cleansing - cheers

Ardea cinerus

Hi Greymouser. I have both good and bad news. We would have loved to give this a Front Page place in selecting it for the <./>underguide</.>.

It was both nominated and seconded but the Editorial Policy decision was that, going by BBC Guidelines, it goes too far in a 24/7 broadcasting medium to be able to give it that prominence.

We would like to give it a place in our UnderGuide 'under the counter' section (A2669187) where it would be in some honourable company. It doesn't compensate, but those are the restriction we have under the BBC and the entry is still, as far as UnderGuiders are concerned an UnderGuide entry.

It's a shame, it would have been a good addition to your existing UG entries and a contrast to both!

Many thanks for posting it, and for the fascinatingly unsavoury read.

I hope this doesn't put you off posting more.
UGeds

Hey, no problems! Glad you liked it.

Yes, please do put it "under the counter" (in discreet plain brown paper wrapping?)

No, it hasn't put me of contributing - which reminds me, I really must sort out something else to put up.

Cheers

:GM: