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Red Rain Foreword/Afterword

“Red Rain” is a CyberPunk novella I wrote at the turn of the decade (both the calendar’s and mine – I was approaching 20 at the time, and it was the end of the 80s). You can read it in either a text version (223 KB) (may contain inconsistent line breaks) or an HTML Version (228 KB) (no paragraph indention, but looks better), or continue reading for my self-defensive commentary.

I must have spent more than a year on it, deriving great fun out of writing it, and later a lot of agony out of trying to “fix” it in different ways. I hope I’ve finally given up on it, and I’ve decided to post it online, in its original form, spelling errors and all, figuring there’s not much else to do with it.

I think this can still be kinda entertaining if you don’t mind nonexistent characters, pornographic violence, prudish sex scenes, angst and shocking thesaurus abuse.

This story showcases some of my worst writing faults at the time, including my tendency for gratuitous description. It also demonstrates the obviously devastating effects of exposure to William Gibson at an impressionable age, and the dangers of going overboard with the cyberspace metaphor. Strangely, I think most of the fun in the story comes out of experiencing it like a sort of virtual reality love/sex/violence/death fantasy trip, which does put the crap characters and really impossible “dialogue” into a context that actually makes sense.

It’s also painfully obvious that I had no firsthand experience with sex at the time. At least that’s my excuse.

I just updated this intro page to include a Wordle word cloud for the story:

red-rain-wordle

Moore and Scarlet are the main villain and (anti-)heroine, respectively. Like just points to my fiendish fondness for simile.

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