I have only read up as far as the bit where Diodoros is introduced,as I am about to leave the house, but already I am thinking that you have said hypaspistai and autokineton too many times...
why not say Guard or Soldier some of the time? or shortened versions of the words? if someone is saying a word alot,they are likly to use a shorter word just to save their breath...

I have never been a fan of explaining stuff in the dialogue...especially where it is something that the characters already know or if it on a tangent..I mean, would the guy really go into the full explanation of how the icarus works yet again? I would have thought he would have just said "Dude, the bag ripped"

back ground information therefore, (in my not so humble opinion) should be in foot notes or Dune style excerpts from books and stuff.)

and now you making me late because I can't stop reading damn you...

i commented on this when i read scott's short story (at some point)! the exposition between characters who should already know what's up. it's like the show myth busters, when they have to totally stage their reviews/explanatory dialogue to keep the audience up to speed.


i haven't read the chapters yet, though, so in this case i cannot comment.

I like it. I'm not finished with it yet, but so far it's great. Keep going!

PS: A preliminary test of formatting it to be published clocks it in at around 50 pages with the same font size of Microscope, and 35 pages with a smaller, but much better-looking font size. I really do hope you finish it and agree to Lulu-fying it, as I know a few people who would actually enjoy reading a real story. :P

Obviously you need to continue this, if not to do anything else but sneakily insert a Latin word somewhere in the story, thus gaining whole bunches of free advertising from all the history geeks pointing it out in public. You'll become famous"

On a more serious note... I suggest taking out everything before chapter 5. It's not about quality... well, OK, it is. The scene with Lykias cutting ropes in the airship is very strong and very much worth it to put in before all that exposition. The kind of reader you're aiming for here can figure out what's going on just as well, at least if you take out the references to Peithon and the other characters who now haven't been introduced yet. Once you've gotten the reader wondering whatever Lykias is up to anyway you can concentrate on actually telling who Kassandros and his friends are. You can make use of the text in chapters 1-4 then.

Regarding exposition, btw, you've got a bunch of good technobabble here. The batsign, I mean photurgos, was cool, and I especially liked this paragraph:

“The steering system is my invention,” he said proudly, “based on work by Archimedes, Kallidas, and, of course, yourself. The steam from the aeolipile is obviously available to produce motive force, the same way it does on an autokineton. We can take advantage of this aspect of the steam’s energy entirely separately from the other, allowing us to make it do double duty. Essentially, we’ve connected a turbine to an aerohelix, modeled after the Archimedean screw and the nauhelix used on the atmosnhes, but with a few modifications based on your work in fluid dynamics. By pulling on some ropes, which unfortunately I can’t show you down here, the driver adjusts the direction which the aerohelix is facing. When the force provided by the aerohelix is stronger than any opposing winds, which is most of the time, we can steer the aerodyne in the right direction.”

This looks pretty much like I think my LJ looks like to someone not well versed in computer science :).

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