Okay, so I read “The Spacer and the Cabbages”. Brace for micro-review! I hope it won’t be painful to see your work dissected, and I hope I’ll manage to say something interesting about it. The standard caveat is that I am not a writer myself, only a voracious reader, so for all I know my suggestions are completely unworkable. Really they’re just random musings anyhow.

It was a good premise, and the notion of the war being inevitable was thought-provoking. I felt the half-suggested idea that it was caused by human isolation needed to be made more obvious; I mostly got that from the fact that we had two human characters who shared a common language but had such different outlooks on life that they could barely interact, let alone cooperate.

The postscript needed to be better integrated; dropping a major detail like the fact that the human navy has been killing enemy civilians en masse in that manner is easy to miss, and it changes how the reader is likely to feel about the piece.

I did find the spacer’s heavy usage of slang to be a barrier to reading. I had to go over passages twice to figure out what he was saying, and it slowed me down. It was delightfully done, so I didn’t really mind; usually what he was saying was something hilarious, which made that worth it. So I’m of two minds about it, but on balance I’d tone it down.

I don’t know that the spacer’s actions were justified, but then, that’s kind of the point. There were certainly other ways he could have gotten out of the situation, but they were closed off to him because of his in ability to consider relying on other people for help. The most likely way was to work with the scientist to communicate with the cabbages and try to get across the fact that they were in distress. Then they could have waited for the cabbages to radio home so as not to interfere with that, gotten the jump-start, sent their signal, and everyone ends happy. But it’s precluded because he can’t conceive that the scientist’s concerns about talking with the cabbages are even relevant to him. The scientist is as much of an alien to him as the cabbages are, and that’s the entire point. And it’s a thought-provoking point. It reminds me of Gordon R. Dickson’s thing about splinter cultures forming – who can doubt that if Republicans and Democrats had the opportunity to migrate to separate planets where they didn’t have to deal with each other, all else being equal, they would do it and never look back?

I am reminded of your comment about Analog not liking depressing endings, and I can see why they’d have a problem with this piece, that being the case. I can’t read editors’ minds, but I think if the piece left less up to interpretation and explicitly offered a suggestion as to what we should conclude about humanity based on the inevitable-war thing, that would make it stronger. This particular story did sell, and rightly so as it was a lot of fun, but I’m guessing if you’ve got rejected ones, they’re partly for that reason, so I thought I’d throw the suggestion in there. 🙂 Even “The Lady or the Tiger” offered interpretation so the reader doesn’t have to guess what the author was trying to say. (Of course, that particular piece offered several competing interpretations… which is fine! But the number should be nonzero.)