Young Writers Society

Title: The 9-Task Challenge
Genre: Dystopian/Science Fiction
Brief Summary: Olixen, a 14-year-old girl, accepts a challenge to complete 9 tasks in return for a generous reward.
Problem: I don't know if this is something that I should really get serious about writing, if it's a good idea, what should be improved, and if it's worth the time and effort to write it.

Here's a longer summary for those who are interested:

After World War 3, so many places were decimated by nuclear bombs and other wartime atrocities that everyone was forced into Europe, since it was the only country with livable conditions.

The government has very little time and money to focus on inner-city crime, as their job is to provide shelter, food, and jobs to everyone, since they are all now refugees. Not a single house remains untouched, and while the middle-class and peasantry has been forced to survive on the streets, stacking debris for shelters, the rich have profited off this and become millionaires, controlling virtually all of the town's currency.

Many of them also enjoy holding contests for the poor, promising great rewards for whoever is the victor of a brutal fight-to-the-death battle. These are rampant and legal, and there is oftentimes no better option for the starving people on the streets.

When Olixen sees a poster offering a grand reward and splendid living conditions if she can complete the 9-Task Challenge and defeat her other oppponents, she is immediately intrigued. Ensuring that her family will be safe in her absence, she packs her bags and leaves. It seems too good to be true, and Olixen has every confidence that she will get the reward and return proudly to her mother and brothers.

But will she survive the 9-Task Challenge?

Would this be a good storybook? A good novel idea? A good role-play? Talk to me here.

I think it sounds interesting! I could see it being a novel (can't really give my thoughts on storybook/RP, since that's outside my wheelhouse). My main issue at this point is that it feels a bit derivative. That's not your fault so much as it is that we're currently saturated with dystopians and on top of it being a crowded genre, it's a somewhat limited one. For that reason, I would suggest finding a 'hook' that sets it apart. Maybe instead of finding a poster for this challenge, she gets some kind of golden ticket for it and the story becomes Charlie and the Chocolate Factory meets [insert YA dystopian novel here]. That's a super weird idea, and an ironic suggestion when I just criticized the concept for being derivative, but I'd read the heck out of it all the same. XD

I dunno. I guess, at the end of the day, my main concern is the whole thing feels a bit too Hunger Games-ish. But if the 9-Task Challenge is centered around something weird and unexpected, something that recent dystopians haven't done, then that could negate the comparisons. (A tall order, I know.) Also, I'd make sure the setting isn't too similar to that of other high-profile dystopian work. Then I think you'd be off to a promising start.

Yo, what's up! I'm procrastinating, so I figured I'd drop in and try to help you out here.

Keep in mind that this post is basically going to be a full critique of the plot and setting you've presented before me. Treat this more like a review than anything -- I'll be going fairly deep into what works, what doesn't, and why it doesn't.

BIG DISCLAIMER: No matter what I write in this critique, I want you to promise me now -- before you've read any of it -- that you will work on this story and try to write it. I want you to promise me now that you will make this story, you will make it better, and you will turn it into something that will make me eat my words.

I would LOVE that.

What works?

Obviously in this idea, you're playing with the concept of human desperation. That's always an interesting angle -- what would we, the readers, do in this scenario? Would we make the same choices as the main character? It opens up a lot of room to push us to our moral limits, to show the main character pushed to her moral limits, forced to make decisions that she (and we) would find impossible in everyday life.

I like that. A lot.

What doesn't work?

I'll take this piece by piece.

After World War 3, so many places were decimated by nuclear bombs and other wartime atrocities

I can see this. "Word War IV will be fought with sticks and stones", etc. It's an interesting take on the world, a society fraught with the aftermath of nuclear warfare that leaves everyone hanging on this thin thread, trying to retain what was once normality. It could be played in a very interesting way.

...that everyone was forced into Europe, since it was the only country with livable conditions.

Nope.

See, in real nuclear warfare, we are aiming for the most powerful countries and alliances. In general, that includes: the US, China, Japan, western Russia, India, and the EU. That is, the European Union, or the unified powers of most of the countries in Europe.

Europe is extremely rich, as far as continents go. (And yes, it's a continent, not a country.) It's one of the richest regions in the world, due to its notorious history of colonization and practically claiming everything as its own ("the sun never sets on the British Empire" etc.). It's home to a number of the most powerful countries in the world, speaking on a scale of warfare etc. Consider: most of World War I and World War II were fought entirely in Europe.

Why is Europe the part of the world that survives WWIII? It's more likely that it would be the Antarctic that survives, or Oceania (Australia + New Zealand + others). From the very first sentence, there's such an obvious problem with the setting that I find it hard to believe unless there's been an immense shift in power between the present and WWIII.

The government has very little time and money to focus on inner-city crime, as their job is to provide shelter, food, and jobs to everyone, since they are all now refugees.

My first issue is this: The government does not provide jobs. Jobs are a naturally-occurring product of society. You're selling something? You need people to help you sell it. You need people to help you package it. You need people to help you deliver it. Those are all jobs. Cleaning is a job. Taking care of children is a job. Making food, making clothes, construction -- reconstruction, since this is post-war -- all of those things are jobs. Anything you can think of is a job, and almost none of it is provided by the government itself.

Secondly: Where is the food coming from? If the government has to provide it, where do they get it from? Do farms still exist? If so, there are dozens of jobs right there, since farm work is extremely strenuous and involves a number of people. Do the governments own all the farms/food sources, or are they independent?

Shelter is the most realistic thing for the government to provide after a disaster, but you've given us the impression that this society (wherever it is in the world) was the least touched by the war. If it's liveable -- not been touched by troops or nuclear bombs -- why does the government have to provide shelter? Is it only providing shelter to the refugees, or does it have to find new places for their own people to live?

Also, which government is this? What country is this actually set in? You tell us Europe, but there are ~50 countries in Europe, five of which are transcontinental (part in Europe, part in Asia) and two of which are actually located in Asia but which are politically considered European.

Going by statistics, picking a random point in Europe, it's most likely that this story actually takes place in Russia, considering Russia makes up approximately 40% of Europe's land mass.

Moving on:

Not a single house remains untouched, and while the middle-class and peasantry has been forced to survive on the streets, stacking debris for shelters, the rich have profited off this and become millionaires, controlling virtually all of the town's currency.

Okay, first you called Europe a country, then it was a city, and now it's a town. It keeps getting smaller and smaller, and while I understand you want to show us a closed system, you have to pick what size you're working with. The Hunger Games took place over a fairly large chunk of the central US, but most of the story itself actually took place in an isolated environment (the Capital, the arena).

In addition, where are the rich living if not a single house is untouched? Everyone should be broke and desperate if they've all been bombed equally. Your economy can't work if the government is struggling to provide jobs.

And with all the crime, you'd think that the rich would be more concerned with hiring private security -- after all, no one else has any valuables to steal, and obviously murder isn't a huge problem in this society since there's a whole game based around it.

Also, lower-class isn't called "peasantry" any more. Sincerely, an adult living below the poverty line.

Many of them also enjoy holding contests for the poor, promising great rewards for whoever is the victor of a brutal fight-to-the-death battle. These are rampant and legal, and there is oftentimes no better option for the starving people on the streets.

See: Murder obviously isn't a huge problem here, so the rich should be more concerned with poor people breaking into their houses and stealing their luxuries. You mention that "inner-city crime" is a problem, but not what kind. Is it drug dealing? Theft and robbery? Mugging? Kidnapping, or holding business prospects for ransom? That would massively inform the kind of society you're building here.

Also, where are the rich getting these rewards from? If the economy is struggling, people aren't buying things, and jobs are provided by the government, there should be no way for them to be rich in the first place.

When Olixen sees a poster offering a grand reward and splendid living conditions if she can complete the 9-Task Challenge and defeat her other oppponents, she is immediately intrigued. Ensuring that her family will be safe in her absence, she packs her bags and leaves. It seems too good to be true, and Olixen has every confidence that she will get the reward and return proudly to her mother and brothers.

But will she survive the 9-Task Challenge?

This section is really unremarkable. It's your standard coming-of-age postapocalyptic heroine story. There's nothing terrible about it, but there's nothing great, either.

Overall?

This story needs elbow grease.

Don't get me wrong -- it's not doomed. I know that's what it sounds like from what I wrote up there. There's a LOT that's not quite right with your setting and premise, but here's the big big big kicker:

It's all fixable.

Every single little minute thing can be changed, fixed, and turned into something that works wonderfully for the story.

Like I said in that disclaimer, work on this. Pour love into it. Pour effort into it. Put your back into it. I've seen it happen before -- people can turn absolutely terrible premises and settings into fantastic stories and worlds. I can hardly believe they're the same idea, but they came about because their authors didn't stop trying to make them better, better, and better.

Make me eat my words.

@Lareine

Thanks for your time, and challenge accepted!

1. I see what you mean there, so it could be a good plot point if I moved it into some place like India. That way there's still a good chunk of land that I can work with, and I can narrow it down into smaller towns.
2. I'll edit that part a little, though my main point was that the government was so busy trying to repair and get everyone into a safe area that they couldn't worry too much about crime.
3. In the beginning, I wanted to set the scene by showing how the entire world had been affected. I then moved into where the town would actually take place, so I can see how that would become confusing and a potential problem area.
4. By poverty, I don't mean someone who has to live in a cramped apartment and gets by on minimum wage. I mean someone who gets by on $2.19 cents a day. I'm not trying to say that everyone who lives there survives on $7.50 an hour, but that "peasantry" is referring to those who survive on less than 2 dollars a day.
5. The rich were able to make money off of creating jobs, like farms, and possibly those who didn't lose everything. Rich doesn't mean now that they have millions of dollars; in this world rich just means that they have a solid house and can eat 3 big meals a day.
6. One of the things I struggle with is how to make my story different from all the others. If you have any suggestions for a clever plot twist that would make this story stand out from all the other ones, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks again for all your help!

MJ out
*poof*

I'm at work right now so I'll respond later, but what you're describing is either "extreme" or "severe" poverty. Still not "peasantry", and yes I'm still offended by the term.

Also consider that in a world completely devastated by war, the economy would have to change radically, and 2 dollars a day might be rich as hell in a place without banks.

I apologize if I offended you, but I'm using peasantry in the sense that means, "a member of a class of persons, as in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, who are small farmers or farm laborers of low social rank." That was the definition given on dictionary.com, and I didn't mean it as an insult. I will change it to "extreme poverty" if you feel that it better suits my meaning, and again, I apologize if I offended you.

You have to keep in mind peasantry is a feudal term, which means by using it you're implying you've returned to kings and nobles who own all the land, and the average worker rents from them and has to pay tribute to them. If you're using any other social structure, that term doesn't apply. Yes, it might apply in its basic dictionary definition, but if you look at it from a sociological stand point, there's more nuance to it.

That's why you want to exert caution using it, because you're implying a very restrictive class structure where the poor have almost no freedom because their lives are dictated by the magistrate.

Also, India would be wiped out, too. Most of the Old World is very rich in modern day, with India having one of the largest growing GPDs and also it used to be the richest country in the world (a third of the global wealth was in the Mughal empire, for example). It has major sources of food (namely rice) and gems that would make it a prime destroying location, not to mention the fact it's producing tons of tech. Same deal with central Africa (used to mine diamonds and rare metals used in tech, also very fast growing), East Asia (tech, luxury goods like silk and gemstones, food staples), the Middle East (oil), and some parts of Canada and the US for all of the above reasons (like Texas and Alberta for oil, the East Coast and Southern Ontario for government, California for tech, etc)

You're really going to have to look around the globe to find places that currently aren't superpowers or don't have a lot of built up infrastructure. So you're talking the Arctic, the prairies/plains, the deserts, and island nations globally, which leaves a very fragmented world. You're not going to be able to take a single country and say it escaped— and you're also going to have to account for borders kinda vanishing, seeing as nuclear war would destroy a lot.

One of my friends, upon hearing about my predicament, suggested the Greenland area. I think that would work because it's not a superpower, and more in the background, and to my knowledge, doesn't have a lot of resources.

I will also change peasantry to 'extreme poverty'. I can see your points, and I think they're very valid.

I've started to write, so it might be another week or so before I have a few chapters up that I set up on YWS, then I will be sure to post the edited versions as well until I think that it's basically publishable, although I'm not striving for a published work. I just want a novel that I wrote.

Thanks again for all your help!

Greenland would likely become inhospitable because of nuclear winter. Basically, the current theory is that all the fires will project soot into the high levels of the atmosphere and will make the whole world's temperature drop. Greenland is already barely hospitable, so you'd really have to consider whether or not any resources exist, not just "a few." Either that, or you're dealing with ice-age-like conditions.

Australia and the Plains/Prairies in North America are slightly better bets, because they wouldn't be direct targets and would have larger swaths of hospitable land. Nuclear bombs are unlikely to be carpet-bombed on whole large continents that have epicentres that could be more effectively dismantled— warfare is all about hitting where it will hurt the most.

Europe just so happens to have a very dense cluster of places that will hurt the most, so it'll be covered. But not every continent is like that, so you need to account for the population distribution in an individual country.

The individual country will likely cease to exist, but that doesn't mean parts of it won't be hospitable.

I'm also considering changing it from a nuclear war to some other mass means of destruction instead of limiting it to nuclear, since that would mean that it was a messier cleanup, and I don'[t know how well it'll work. I'm trying to think of another way that the world could be wiped out. Thoughts?

The post-antibiotic age making it that illnesses we can easily treat out are no longer able to be cleared out via antibiotics, which is a current threat (this is why you should take antibiotics as prescribed, even if you feel better! Messing up the regiment will breed superbugs that you can't clear out)

@StellaThomas could explain this more.

Illness, aliens, zombies, global warming, a bolide impact (when a large chunk of matter from space hits a planet and leaves a crater), volcanic eruption, radiation, invasive species, a giant space death ray, if anyone decides to destroy a meteor (this is way worse on the environment than us actually being hit with one directly) and other scenarios can all be possible with the right research.

Not all of these exist on the same scale of danger and reality. Of course, aliens is considered science fiction though illness and global warming are more realistic apocalyptic events. Just a list of choices that you're able to choose from depending on where you're wanting to go with this. In reality, the earth is hard to completely wipe out. Damaged? Yes. Societies collapsing? Possible. A mass means of destruction for all of the earth that we're somehow able to survive, live in, and attempt to fix? That's a bit more difficult.

@Kays
My goal in finding a suitable disaster and setting is to get the world's population down to a few thousand and then show how everyone is so desperate they would risk their lives for food and shelter, and also to have an upper-class that could take advantage of that opportunity and use it to hold contests, basically like the Hunger Games, but less official. I also wanted to overwhelm the governments so much with the refugee system that they wouldn't be able to get involved, just to keep them out of it.

Thanks for the tag. Post-antibiotic era is my jaaaaam.

First up though - Europe is a continent, not a country. Love, your friendly neighbourhood European xoxo

Seriously, though, if we're talking about somewhere unlikely to be touched by nuclear war, or most likely to survive a massive environmental disaster, why are we not talking about Africa? Firstly, it is the most resource rich continent in the world. It has a lot of natural wealth in terms of gold and diamonds as well. And if we're talking about environmental disaster, remember that if we covered 2% of the Sahara with solar panels that would supply all the energy that Europe currently uses.

And while there are many African nations that are ruled fairly, there is also a good history of many corrupt politicians creating a super-rich and leaving the rest of their citizens behind.

Plus, it would be interesting to consider people crossing the Mediterranean in reverse - Spaniards swimming the Straits of Gibraltar, Tunisia building walls to keep out migrants, etc. etc. We're in the middle of a refugee crisis right now, and you can build on the horror stories from that to build your own story, but it might be nice to subvert it. You only have to look at what's happened in Syria to imagine how European countries could be brought to their knees. And if you are considering war or conflict as the major cause, while African countries have their fair share of issues (Al-Shabab in Somalia and its neighbours, the Rwandan conflict and ongoing Burundian Civil War, Boko Haram in Nigeria) there's no "world super-power" there for anyone to bomb. Most likely, they'd get forgotten about...

But now. The Post-Antibiotic Era.

(You could work anti-vaxxers into this as well but I'm not opening that can of worms).

Seventy years ago, when Alexander Fleming dropped that petri dish in the sink, one hundred percent of bacteria were sensitive to penicillin. Good old penicillin could wipe out any single one of the bacteria that have colonised our world for billions of years. Bacteria have been around since the dawn of time and in the 1940s we found a way to kill them. All.

And seventy years later, at least ten percent of bacteria are at least in some way resistant. Currently, 23,000 people a year in America die of resistant organisms a year. My own regional microbiologist quoted that by 2050, ten million people a year worldwide will die of resistant organisms. That means dying of pneumonia, or cellulitis, or a bladder infection. We will re-enter what it was like to live in Victorian times, when a simple infection could kill you.

This isn't necessarily a Doomsday scenario like nuclear war because it's already happening. My last hospital was infected with Carbapenem Resistant Enterococcae. It is resistant to every antibiotic. There is no treatment. It is called "the nightmare bacteria" with good reason. Most people just got colonised and didn't get an invasive infection, but when someone did get an infection...

There are measures being taken. Encouraging people to finish their courses of antibiotics is a big one - not finishing it spreads resistance. Cutting down on antibiotics used in agriculture. To me the only next step is to rationalise the decision about giving our last line antibiotics to certain people - if you wouldn't admit someone to the ICU (being too old and sick), should you treat them with meropenem (the nuke of antibiotics)? I don't know. It's all very ethically ambiguous.

But hella interesting

If you combined Total Antibiotic Resistance with Anti-Vaxx Sentiment in the post-truth era, you could turn the world rampant with disease.

I'll leave now.

seriously I'm obsessed with how we're all gonna die from resistant bacteria in the very near future

I think I followed that.

So what if, in another century or so, one sickness wipes out the entire human race, except for those who are immune to it, and the only people who are immune are those with AB- blood type.

Then we don't have to worry about population, and the story takes place right after this has happened. There are no rules, governments have been demolished, world leaders have died, there is no order, and the rich are still there and able to exploit the poor.

Thoughts?