So, last night I ventured up to the Glasgow SF Writers Circle, new story in hand. I had to ask everyone to shout at me as my hearing isn’t so clever these days, but when they did get round to shouting at me, I was pleasantly surprised at what they shouted.
They liked it.
Oh, there were one or two niggles, most of which I will sort out, and a handful of which I thought unjustified. There was quite a bit of discussion over the ending, because some of them thought it clearly showed an “end of the world” scenario, whereas others weren’t so sure. That pleased me immensely, as that was exactly the ending I had been aiming for – ie nobody knew whether the alien ship heading towards Earth was planning to fry everyone in sight, or open up its hatches to a brave new world.
One problem which caught their attention was the fact that the latter stages of the Niffen Enigma were solvable by mathematics in base 10, perhaps not reasonable given the utter alieness (alieness? is that a word?) of the Niffen Fragment itself. This was a mathematical problem which I already knew about, but I couldn’t think of a way round it. So thanks to Hal Duncan, who was at the meeting, and who came up with a non-mathematical solution, which I shall incorporate in due course.
After a redraft later this year, I’ll try submitting Niffen #2 to a magazine or two. Fingers crossed. Watch this space.