David Scholes is a science fiction writer who was active on FictionPress.com
(the sister site to Fanfiction Dot Net) from 2008 to 2013.
His works provide examples of the following tropes:
- Benevolent Alien Invasion: A theme in several of his stories is advanced aliens making contact with humanity, causing notable improvement to the human condition.
- Evil Lawyer Joke: The main character of “The Tribunal” praises the Galactic War Crimes Tribunal for not using lawyers “to get the slime bag off or his sentence reduced”, not realizing he is telepathically linked to his whole species. Everyone, except for the lawyers, nods in agreement.
- Higher-Tech Species: The Brell appear in most of the short stories, supposed to represent a race Older and Wiser than mankind, but in practice their Omniscient Morality License is rather
unintentionally questionable. - Last of His Kind: In “The Ship”, the Brell sacrifice themselves to protect humanity from a hostile Alien Invasion, with only one survivor appearing to the United Nations to bring the news, and to perform a ritual that imbues humanity with the “greatness” of the Brell.
- Meaningful Name: “The Tribunal” gives us Zdalin Tihler of the ZaniZovet Federation. You don’t think he maybe might be the villain?
- Whole-Plot Reference: “The Last Dreadnought” is similar to the H. G. Wells novel In the Days of the Comet — both stories have life on Earth improve, seemingly magically, by the proximity of an extraterrestrial object. But in Scholes’s version, the effect is temporary as the craft leaves the solar system, and things return to normal, but humanity now knows it can do better.
- Writer on Board: Wrongful imprisonment is definitely a Berserk Button for Scholes, with him even writing “The Clean Up” just about the Brell freeing the wrongfully convicted, and several other stories have a former prisoner as the protagonist.
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