In the foreword to "The Stand," the revised edition, Stephen King says that his answer to the question "how do you write" is usually "one word at a time."  He compares it to the Great Wall of China—"one brick at a time, but you can see that motherf*cker from space."

However, a lot of writers have to plan, and I’m sure Mr. King might write unconsciously but he also reads broadly, gathering images and ideas and information to form a gestalt. 

And planning a story is not easy.  What’s it about?  Who are the main characters?  What motivates them?  Is it in first-person or third?  Do I want the intimacy of the character’s thoughts, or an omniscient narrator?  What’s the genre?  Sci fi? Fantasy? Literary? Horror?  What will the story mean in the end?

In MODOC, the main character and principle narrator is an Artificial Intelligence meant to be in a war robot, and instead implanted into a cat droid that’s meant to care for disabled children.  In the future of 2110, the economy is too interlinked for war so humans have to fight aliens on distant planets to quench their thirst for blood, and they need robots to do it because sending marines takes to long at sub-light speeds.  Faster than light travel is just so expensive, you see.

It’s a trifle amusing to see the cat-bot’s bloodthirsty thoughts and frustration with its lack of violent capacity—it doesn’t even have claws.  But the amusement wears thin as the bulk of chapters are full of expository, "telling" text that info-dumps the history that led to this future (the global economy was too interlinked for war to be profitable, and now Churches and the Wealthy rule in Theocracies and Plutocracies).  Even information about the characters is expository, as MODOC watches a video and tells us all about its new human owners.

The problem, as always, is such details are so much more effective when they are shown instead of told, revealed through dialogue and action instead of stale narration.

And the problems grow from there—I personally rarely enjoy stories of sentient AI, because of the unlikelihood of programmed computers ever gaining real, human-like self-awareness—stories can never adequately explain how it could be possible, relying on lightning or power outages or accidents to bridge the logic gap of how binary code could become "alive."

Well, this AI narrates like a well-educated sociopathic human, not a programmed war droid—and on its first few days of life, long before it would have any access to human literature or history.  How it has this knowledge, which is unlikely in any of its hardware or software, is inexplicable—so it makes for mildly amusing narration but not anything particulary believable.

A more humourous style might have been a revolving narrator perspective, where the little boy wonders why his cat toy is so aloof, the mother wonders why it keeps trying to claw at the doors with non-existent claws, and the war bot keeps locking onto the humans as DESIGNATED TARGETS, and then realizes AMMO DEPLETED in bloodthirsty, heartless programming narrative.  Making it sound so human just doesn’t make sense.

Though having it trapped in a harmless body is kind of fun for awhile—like Dr. Doom stuck inside a toddler.  Maybe that would be a better story.

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