Quote:
Originally posted by jjw:

My personal view is that your friend is boxing himself in, kinda like starting at the end and doing flashbacks to fill in the causes. I once thought the easiest way to write a mystery was to write up an interesting story, a murder or some such, and then mix up the chapters with the last chapter in front, etc.
Cheers Jim.

You're probably right. He may be flogging a dead horse. 'After the facts' stories don't usually work well. Niven did it in 'Ringworld' where large parts of the story were about investigating the remains of a long dead civilization. But he can write, and carried it off. He works very well with astronomical scale and the sheer size of things was mind-blowing. In relation to mixing up chapters, not SF, but have you seen Momento?

Blacknad.