Lester Curtis wrote:Kind of a fun story, but the dialog wasn't very good, not very natural sounding. Should have had more contractions.
And we never got to find out what the HW/WM marking meant. Maybe the author is saving that for a sequel.
I'll start a discussion here, and say I didn't see very many places for contractions. "Naturalness" of dialogue is a bit of a tricky subject for me. Dialogue doesn't need to be "representative of 60% of Americans with Basement Laboratories", it just needs to describe one set of characters. So in a way that puts more responsibility on the writer to make sure he's not just borrowing "tropes" for dialogue, but that he's aware of parts of tone etc. For myself, it just felt a lot like old-school Campbellian pre-Golden Age style, ... which is fine if you like that sort of thing. Sometimes a writer becomes what he reads, so if he grew up reading all that stuff, that's how he's gonna write.
For trivia, "no one" is named P. C. Van Slyke. (Percival Charles? Paul Conrad?) So again it harkens me to an era when someone pen-named A. E. Van Vogt was writing.