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>Paying someone minimum wage that has minimal skills and could be replaced by a machine isn't really fucking them over.
I agree, but that is the case of an economic transaction where the worker is being fairly paid for the amount of goods or services that the worker is currently producing. Where the employer treats their employees with respect for a job well done.
I'm commenting on the cases where the boss exploits and takes advantage of the worker for their own personal gratification. Where the worker is being abused and harassed for being in a lower status position.
I'm not sure if most of the readers noticed between all the "meaningless brutality and misogynistic depravity" in the dystopian world of "Indentured: a New Beginning", but there is a lot of modern day social commentary written in a satirical manner.
Some examples:
1) Lien Tang's abuse is a commentary on how current universities exploit their teaching assistants and often treat them like crap. How hard they are worked and how hard it is to live on the low pay. And all the university politics and favoritism they have to put up with.
2) The slut-machines at the fast food sandwich shop is commentary on how a lot of fast food workers are fucked over in their jobs while being paid a minimum wage.
I am sure that many of you have spotted quite a bit more social commentary in the story.
If anyone posts any examples of other social commentary in the comments, I will let you know if that was my writer's intent for that part of the story.
>Wow, that was quite the explanation. Thanks so much. I seen why you skipped right to the fun stuff. Again thanks for this crazy well thought out story. Anxious for more.
When world building in a fantasy or science fiction story, it's very easy to fall into the trap of a bunch of exposition up front explaining to the reader about your new world. I prefer to use a light touch by showing how the world is different, instead of telling how it is different.
For example, the introduction of "Indentured: a New Beginning" is showing Tom interacting with a typical college student and reading her community service brochure was to show the reader that they were in a similar, yet significantly different, world than ours and gave hints on how it was different.
That way I was able to skip right to the fun stuff and get the story moving along.
>The story continues to outrageously over the top (super fun). It would add some depth if we got some backstory on how this behavior became not only acceptable but mandatory. Keep it up!
Here is an overview of the background:
There was small team of scientist, that worked in a government Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory, whose mission was to develop biological counter-agents to bioterrorism attacks.
The team were secretly all members of the Female Liberation Front (FLF): an organization dedicated to overthrowing the government, eliminating the money system, instituting complete automation, and eliminating the male sex. (reference: Valerie Solanas's "SCUM Manifesto")
They develop an easily transmitted virus that would infect only women and then kill any Y chromosome containing spermatozoa or male embryo that were within women. (reference: the world of Whileaway where all the men died from a plague in Joanna Russ's "The Female Man")
The virus took less than a year to spread all over the world. Within two years, the number of boys being born was practically zero. Meanwhile, the virus jumped the species barrier to other mammals. First to cats and dogs, then to cattle and horses.
A world-wide effort was formed to find a cure. It took twenty-three years to develop an expensive and highly technical procedure to use on a woman, or female mammal, to be able to get pregnant and carry to term a male child.
During this time of crisis, underground liberation teams of FLF were taking control of feminist grass roots organizations for the purpose of taking control of governments around the world as men became an insignificant percentage of the electorate.
Forty-two years after the beginning of the Crisis, irreputable evidence of the creation of the virus by FLF and subsequent taking over of governments by FLF was released to the world by a daughter of one of the key FLF founders. There was an uprising by the oppressed men started by Jean-Pierre Marteau against the FLF controlled governments, which was years later named the Glorious Androcratic Revolution.
Jean-Pierre Marteau issued a manifesto of the Fist and Arrow that said it was through female sexual agency that men lost the Mandate of Heaven. And only by raising an androcratic regime on the backs of women will men demonstrate that they are sufficiently virtuous to be given supreme authority to force females to obey, serve, and satisfy men with the use of their orifices.
After the revolution, about half the men supported the idea of an androcratic regime to organize society. The other half wanted to go back to a pre-Crisis society and they were called Equalist.
>Engulf, your technical writing skills are first-rate, yet you have chosen to write a plotless tale of meaningless brutality and misogynistic depravity.
I will have to take exception to that. If you look really, really hard; you will see there is a plot in the story. LOL
>My advice: A bit more delving into the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of the various characters would add some spice to this tale.
While I also enjoy stories with lots of interior monologue, I am no Proust nor Virginia Woolf. Instead using psychological realism for characterization, I prefer readers to make their own judgements based on the character's actions and their interaction with other characters.
>Oh yeah, wanted to complement you on your "correction" of the Greek classics. I had belly laughs. It hurt, but in a good way.
Thanks, I had a lot of fun writing that part.
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