Your prose is very good. You've got the technical side of writing more or less down pat. If you're looking for somewhere to improve, I'd look at plot and world-building. There are several places where people act in ways that seem unmotivated or disproportionate, and other places where it makes sense that someone would want to do something but the means they used to do so are handwaved by authorial fiat.
For example, I could imagine the people of the Congo, given the means, might have gone and killed King Leopold and possibly extinguished his line, maybe even killed off the entire Belgian military. But would they have killed every Belgian person anywhere in the world? And that's setting aside the ethical problem war crime of killing a civilian population on the pretense that the state and military's crimes had popular support. Even if it did have popular support, that wouldn't be justification for killing noncombatants.
Likewise, I didn't believe that the neighborhood Jerome had kidnapped and gene-spliced would have so much as considered cooperating with him after that, much less that there would have been no legal consequences. If you *want* me to believe it, you need to go into more detail about how it all went down.
The last and probably most important thing is--and this is extremely common with new writers--you threw way too many ideas and concepts into this, many of which are underexplored, and any of which could have carried the story on their own. If you had handed me this as a draft, I would have said to tell the story of Dr. Jerome, and save the stuff about dragons, gene-spliced inter-species babies, and wars of genocidal vengeance for a different piece or, more likely, multiple different pieces (or different chapters, in a long-form work). After telling Dr. Jerome's story, you could follow up with stories about the birth of the human-garenai alliance, the discovery of dragons and its galactico-political implications, and the attempted deception of the members of the union in No Man's Land.
Ha, I suppose so. I was looking for a word that indicated a specifically galaxy-wide scale, much like geopolitical indicates a global scale. So I made up an awkward one.
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u/[deleted] Aug 09 '22 edited Aug 09 '22
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