Read it Later story count: 99 (+4)
Words read this week: 25,555
You can blame certain people at the last Worcester meet for my RiL list heading perilously close to three figures again! Admittedly, it would help if I'd been able to review the normal number of stories over the last few weeks, but there we are. Anyway, I hope this will be the last three-fic edition of Ponyfic Roundup for quite some time. Today's trio are as follows:
In Creeping Twilight by Shilic
The Iridescent Iron Rat by horizon
The Third Alicorn Conspiracy by starfox64x
★: 0 | ★★: 1 | ★★★: 1 | ★★★★: 1 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I enjoy an average amount scores two stars.
In Creeping Twilight by Shilic
Twilight Velvet
G4; Dark/Horror/Mystery; 7k words; Oct 2022; Teen
Twilight Velvet looks to escape writer's block. Instead, she finds obsession.
You don't get many Twilight Velvet stories, so this Ancestral Tribute entry caught my eye. Set before her marriage and children, though she's dating Night Light, it uses the long-established fandom convention of Velvet being an author. We see her thoughts in journal format as she is gradually more and more troubled by dreams of what we soon find out is Tambelon. It's well put together and I like Velvet's characterisation as she struggles with... well, spoilers... though even for a writer her journal feels a bit too wordy and (as a result) the fic takes a while to get to the point. I still like it, and I find the ending highly effective, just maybe not quite as much as Ghost Mike did. ★★★
The Iridescent Iron Rat by horizon
Other and Spike
G4; Sci-Fi/Adventure/Crossover; 9k words; Feb 2015; Everyone
Equestria's golden age of Harmony has virtually eliminated crime, but one of the few "rats" who can still slip through the cracks is planning a billion-bit heist. If only he hadn't made the mistake of stealing from a dragon …
Inspired by Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat stories, though we're told familiarity with those is not necessary. The fic is set in the fairly distant future, in a far more technologically advanced Cloudsdale.¹ "Jimmy the Grey", our pegasus narrator, starts off by cheating Spike at a stall. He notices, and this leads to a chase, then a solo heist adventure. It's pacy, it's entertaining, its protagonist is charismatic and there's heaps of world-building including a novel kind of magic. I can't help feeling I'm missing just a little from not knowing its inspiration, but that aside? This is all-round great. High four. Easily recommended, and a real shame there's no sequel. ★★★★
¹ horizon couldn't have known this at the time, but I imagine it as somewhat similar to G5 Zephyr Heights.
The Third Alicorn Conspiracy by starfox64x
Twilight, Celestia, Blueblood, Luna and Other
G4; Adventure/Slice of Life; 9k words; Feb 2012; Everyone
Twilight curiosity sends her out in search of a third Princess, and a third Alicorn.
Written before Cadance came on the scene, this is inevitably a very dated fic and one that could not be written (without heavy AU-ness) today. Twilight wonders exactly how Blueblood is Celestia's nephew, given Luna was banished in the Moon for a millennium. She pushes for answers from all three of them, finding a notable reluctance on the part of the Princesses to discuss the matter. When she eventually discovers who the third alicorn is... well, let's say you'll find a creeping realisation coming over you and think, "Oh come on, really?" Yes, really. I can't say more without spoiling the ending, but it's something that annoys me more than amuses me. The fic has an excellent thumbscore balance (+101/-2) but sadly I can't really recommend it. There are far too many sloppy little typos, too ("Prinec Blueblood", "Nightmare moon"), as well as a little annoying head-hopping. A lowish two at best. ★★
Next week, I will at long last be getting on to the Thousand Words Contest II fics! Not all of them, since there were a quite ludicrous number of entries, but those that got an honourable mention or a prize – you can see the list on the contest blog. Short as these fics are, I'm not up for writing 39 reviews in the space of a week, I'm afraid. I'm going to review over several weeks, starting next time with the nine honourable mentions:
Allegiance by Moproblems Moharmoney
Peanut Gallery by TheDriderPony
Lake Day by GrangeDisplay
Twilight Makes Coffee by Kodeake
Mortissimo by Incandesca
The Good Art by TCC56
Thus Testifies Twilight by Accurate Balance
Canon Perpetuus, Canon Perpetuus, Canon Perpetuus by JimmySlimmy
Dis/0rd3R by TheInfamousFly
I have to admit, I kind of want to read that last one just to find out who the "oh, really?" is c_c
ReplyDeleteThe Fimfiction comments give it away, so you can find out without reading the actual fic if you prefer.
Deleteoh
Deleteokay
yeah, not super original there :B
Not even in early 2012, tbh
DeleteI read the Stainless Steel Rat books a long time ago, and enjoyed them immensely, so I went into horizon's story ready to be critical if it didn't live up to the source inspiration. It's on my "Excellent" shelf, which is equivalent to a four-star rating. Tons of fun, which is all I really need in light reading any more. I would also have liked a sequel or two.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you had fun with it too. If "Excellent" is your four-star shelf, what's the five-star one called?
Delete"Top Favorites" is for the five-star fics.
Delete"The Big Bookshelf" is for everything else I've read. I don't think it shows up for anyone but me, but an upvote makes it a three-star fic, no vote means a two, and a downvote means it's a one-star. Purely subjective, of course!
That last time I read a well-liked (actually, highly acclaimed) fic of horizon's that was a take on a popular book series, it was Watch! Watch! which really didn't gel with me at all, and only scraped a Decent out of acknowledging its strengths even though they were rather lost on me. Iridescent Iron Rat does seem more agreeable (being readable on its own and not being a fic trying to ape a stellar author's style and falling short in a subtle but pervasive way helps, no doubt), and does have 4-star ratings from yourself and iisaw, so I'll give it a go regardless. Hard to say no to a fic that is reportedly just a ton of fun with no string attached!
ReplyDeleteI don't recollect much of In Creeping Twilight by now, though I do recall it was a rating straddler for me. Now sure what made me pull the trigger on being generous, could have been the dicy average it was surrounded by as will happen when reading all entries for a contest, you get a lot of whiffy fare. But I'll stand by the rating I gave then.
In any case, 9 fics next week! Haven't seen that since… the last Thousand Words contest, I'm wagering. That'll be something, eh?
For me, Watch! Watch! still rates slightly higher. I think it actually appealed more because he didn't simply slavishly copy Pratchett's style but deliberately wrote it in a slightly different way but where the homage was still obvious. Of course, it doesn't work for everyone, as it didn't (fully) work for you, but that's ponyfic for ya!
DeleteNine fics, sure. But still only 9,000 words total. ;)