A Son of the Rock

Surf Town by James Bloomer

This one’s about a retired surfer who refuses to perform on the new artificial waves produced and controlled by the Mesh, a collection of human minds connected by some sort of neural equivalent of the internet. He is in love with the female star of the Mesh Surf Pro Tour. I’m sure you could almost write the rest yourself from here.

The idea behind Surf Town is fine, if a little trite, but the execution is lacking once more. Plus the whole story badly needs proof-read. Words are missing, others repeated at too short an interval and some of the sentence structures leave a lot to be desired. We also have in the first sentence the neologism skool but later in the story the usual spelling appears. And there is a “span” count of three. (Shudder.)

One more complaint: in a future this far away (such a Mesh is not a likely near future development) the word dude as an appellation will surely have vanished. Its use here is an over-clumsy attempt to convey shallowness of character, made worse by being repeated ad nauseam.

You’ll have guessed I wasn’t impressed.