Title: Human Error

Author:NeverTrustAnAuthor

Genre: Sci-fi/Dystopian

Rating: PG-13 

# of chapters: 7 (ongoing)

# of chapters I read: 

Summary/Blurb: 

It's the year 2218.

The earth has gone to war. The remaining countries of the world have hidden their people behind steel walls and missiles.

And we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, have divided the powerful from the powerless. The advanced from the forgotten. The good from the bad.

But how long would that really last? Now the insurgo have risen. They started out as scientists seeking to make the world a better place. Now? Now the murder and destroy. Now they form monsters and mutants.

The DOD has had just about enough. The rebellion is spreading. The rumours have become reality. But the government isn't prepared to get its hands dirty. Not when the UN is about to chose a new country to destroy.

In comes project deathlock, the genetically enhanced superhumans of the world.

Can the people of maceria put their trust in a ragtag group of criminals? Can liars and cheaters save the world?

Review:

Cover:

I don't really like this cover; it doesn't really catch my attention, or show me anything that says "Human Error". It's literally just a person with geometric shapes as tattoos, and "the best of the best were not available" on their back (to make sense of this you have to read on to the blurb).

Additionally, the whole thing is in black/white, so it's a little dull on the eyes. Whenever I think of Science Fiction, I see bright blues/greens/reds, all colours associated with technology. This story revolves around super humans, battles, etc. this gives you a lot of leeway to make the cover more badass.

Finally, the cursive font doesn't really work, again, because it doesn't fit the genre. This type of font is something you'd usually see in the Romance genre (because it emulates someone's handwriting) while in science-fiction you see more 'block writing'. I suggest that you get a new cover asap. 

Blurb:

Hmm this sounds very intense. I can already tell that there will be ALOT going on in this story (fight scenes, action, explosions, please, there better be explosions), and things will be very chaotic. I'm a little skeptical about some of the things mentioned in this blurb, but I'll talk about that later.

The idea of genetically mutated superhumans has always intrigued me (everyone has wanted to be some kind of hero at some point in their lives) but because this has been done before countless of times, I'm expecting for there to be an interesting twist on this.

Genetic modification has a plethora of open doors, you just have to know which ones to open and exploit. It also seems like the people chosen to be modified are criminals...I'm not sure how good of an idea that is (unless they use sociopaths—those people would seriously be ruthless killers) but I guess I'll find out.

So the main issue I see with this blurb is the lack of a specific structure—by this, I mean that there isn't a clear-cut sequence of events in it. You open it with the Earth being at war, then America's union, then something about the UN trying to destroy countries, and project deathlock, which goes back to America. It's a little all over the place, and it does cause some confusion, especially the acronyms—non-Americans may have trouble understanding what the DOD (Department of Defense?) is.

So my suggestion for this would be to go from big and gradually home in on America. So you start with the broad discussion of the global war, then narrow it down until America is fighting the world, project Deathlock, superhumans, etc.

Now I'll go on to talk about the things that seemed a little unlikely to me (probably because of the way they were worded)

a) "The Earth has gone to war."—This immediately made me think about an intergalactic space war, when in reality, the war is between the countries on Earth. In fact, the following sentence, "The remaining countries of the world [...]" doesn't really tie to the first one. The thing about steel walls and missiles doesn't really convince me—we have nuclear weapons in 2016, God knows what we will have in 2218.

b) "Divided the powerful from the powerless. The advanced from the forgotten. The good from the bad."— Alright, here is where things start to get a little tricky. The story doesn't revolve around a single country, but around the entirety of the world itself, from what I understand. If it's America against the world, why would they create divisions within their own countries? Everybody knows that it's the poorer class, the "weak", the nobodies that have to go out there to the front-line and fight. It would make more sense for the Americans to unify themselves against everyone else, rather than create even more problems for themselves. I just can't see it happening.

c) "Now, the insurgo have risen."—Who are these people? They started off as scientists, but there is no mention as to what they currently are. Okay, they murder and pillage and create monsters, etc. but are they still scientists or...? Also, wouldn't the scientists have funding from the government or other private organisations? They really aren't an independent body.

d) "The DOD has had just about enough. The rebellion is spreading."—I'm even more confused now because I'm unsure about whether the story revolves around America vs World, or if it takes place in America alone. What do the scientists have to do with a rebellion? Why are they rebelling? Why are they destroying?

e) The United Nations isn't a body that goes out and destroys countries. It's composed of 193 nations (of which America is a part of, btw) and they seek peace in the world, not the destruction of countries. Every time there is an assembly, ambassadors from all over the world go and speak about the changes they want to make—but I don't see the UN destroying anyone. It's no an evil organisation.

f) "Can liars and cheaters save the world?"—As I said earlier, I'm not entirely convinced about a bunch of robbers/killers, being able to save the world, but I'll see how this plays out.

Also, there are a lot of grammatical mistakes (mostly proper nouns not capitalised), so I suggest that you go over those.

Bottomline–I'm hella skeptical about where this is going to go. Maybe things aren't worded that well in the blurb and the actual story will make much more sense...but I'll have to read on to find out. So let's go! 

First Impression:

This prologue did most of what it was supposed to do—it drew us in the story, gave us a glimpse of the protagonist, but it didn't give me a lot of background knowledge into this dystopian world. All I really took away from this was that these babies are taken from their mothers and 'altered', but nothing more is said about the world itself. Really, that's what the purpose of the prologue is—to include valuable information of the story (Setting, lore, etc.) which would result in an info-dump if introduced elsewhere in the story. Ask yourself: if the purpose of the prologue is to hook my reader, why wasn't I able to do that with my first chapter?

I was also taken out by the grammatical errors (which were plentiful) and the lack of realism for certain events. I'll just list them for you:

a) Setting—I wasn't really given a proper image of the building itself, which is why when Myra jumped out the building I was like...what? (More on this later). I only understood that there was some kind of incubation room, a separate room for those babies who seem to have survived the *mutation* a bunch of corridors...and that's about it. I have no idea where this building is (probably in Washington), what inside of it, etc. so you should make this clear.

b) I found it unbelievable that people didn't know what a miscarriage was. This is America we're talking about, a developed country, and for sure people have access to textbooks, etc. despite being poor. It's impossible to just gather all the information and burn it in a fire—this sort of thing would've been believable in a developing country, but not in America. People would have to be completely moronic to believe that this is a "miscarriage".

c) "the incubation chamber"—Another inconsistency. Incubation, according to the dictionary definition, is "The maintenance of an infant, especially a premature infant, in an environment of controlled temperature, humidity, and oxygen concentration in order to provide optimal conditions for growth and development." In a few words, I expected the incubation to be for embryos, not for babies that were already born.

"More like metal boxes where the test subjects were kept from birth until they walked."—they would never walk. Most of an infant's growth and development happens in the early years of life. If they remained in a cot, unable to move or do anything (babies start crawling at 7 months), then, of course, they would die.

d) Genetic modification is executed incorrectly here, coming across as very unrealistic. It doesn't happen through the insertion of random tubes in babies' bodies, as mentioned in "they had tons of needles poking into their head, toes, heart, and major blood vessels." In fact, it's clear to me that you aren't very familiar with this topic. I suggest that you document yourself well on genetic modification, because the lack of research is very obvious, even to someone like me who isn't in expert in Biology.

e) I thought that the facility was a high-tech secret one, in which the common folk wasn't allowed in. Or at least, once the baby was delivered, the mothers were carted off somewhere else, or the babies were transferred to a different building. I felt like you did this for the drama factor, but it didn't sit right with me.

f) First Myra talks about being forced to work there to save her family, yet, the next minute, she steals a baby and jumps out of a building. She knows that sacrificing her life would result in both her death and the one of her family....and as she's running she believes that the baby is dead. So the whole process seems nonsensical. Also, wouldn't the facility be surrounded by security, walls, etc?

g) When she jumped out of the building, how didn't she break both her legs + kill the baby? Unless she rolled on the floor to lessen the impact, even then—I imagine these places to have high-ceilings, there's no way that she could've survived the fall. She would've died on impact.

h) Since, as I mentioned earlier, it's unclear where this hospital-type place is located, I found it hard to orientate myself with the ensuing scene when Myra jumped out of the window. I didn't know what surrounded the facility (where it was a town, or a village or whatever) so her stumbling about into a random back alley didn't really do much for me. 

The first chapter was a little better, except, again, the events happened out of context for me. I didn't realise Christina was a prostitute until the end of the chapter—I thought she had just seduced someone, mugged him and killed him (even though it was very careless of her to just leave his body like that. She's done this before, so I would've expected her to know what she was doing) for a couple of dollars, but then I find out that there's more than that. I have no idea how advanced the place is technologically, or what town she's in—then her fighting three government officials (is that what they are) publicly in a bar like that seemed unreasonable. She mentions how she gave herself away, yet goes ahead and tries to fight anyway.

Overall—It was hard for me to get immersed in the story when there are so many plot holes related to world-building, the significance of events, and all that jazz. If you don't establish your world as realistically as possible, it's hard for the scenes to make sense, because really, a lot of this was out of context. And no, it's not a matter of writing half a page of background information—it's a matter of interweaving this in the storyline (even though you had a prologue in which you could've done this perfectly) and not raise trivial questions like "Where does this take place?" It's a shame, really, the action isn't that bad, it's just that it doesn't really make sense to me. 

Writing Style:

Edit. Please edit, or at least get someone to do it for you. There were ALOT of grammatical errors, mostly elementary stuff like capitalising names, misspelling words...these were impossible to ignore. There also wasn't a lot of sentence variety—a lot of them started the same, usually with a pronoun, like "She did this. She did that. She went there." 

Your vocabulary seems to be relatively simple, but there wasn't any redundancy in the terminology used—however, this did make the dialogue come across as a little flat. For example, Myra didn't seem like a doctor to me, she spoke too much like an amateur. Like when she talked about the Rhabdomyolysis, she wouldn't have added, "their insides are literally turning into mush". They're all experts there, they know what they're talking about. It also wasn't clear in what POV you were writing in because sometimes you head-hopped between the different characters, especially in the prologue. 

Characters:

Myra—Didn't seem to have a role in the story other than dying in the prologue to save a random child. I couldn't really understand her motive behind it. I've talked about this earlier—her family would get decimated if she went against the system, yet, she randomly decides to jump out the window to save a kid because she felt sorry for it. That doesn't seem like a good enough excuse to me, especially because there were hundreds of other babies that were killed. It seemed to me that her death was an arbitrary plot device—you had to get Christina out of there and into the real-world somehow, so you killed off a random, insignificant character without giving the reader a believable explanation. 

Christina—A prostitute it seems. Or was that just a petty insult? She kills a guy messily and disregards the fact that she left a shit-ton of evidence behind in the room and pretty much left his body open for any investigation. I'm assuming that she's the 'stolen baby'—but I didn't really feel like there was any emotional depth to her character. The issue with writing in the third person is that you lose the 'closeness' between the character and reader, something which is easy to gain through the first person POV.  That's why to make Christina appeal to your reader, it's vital that make her more human, rather than just a character. Use more emotive language, delve into her thoughts more, her feelings, etc. I need to feel connected to her from the very first chapter, and that's something that didn't happen for me. She's badass, I can give you that, but it's pretty much it. Her fighting abilities derive from living on the streets...but anyone could've guessed that.

Diamond rating ♢ (1—10): 6

There were a lot of flaws to this, both regarding the plot and writing style, and I felt like this story couldn't achieve anything more than a six, as of now. I've noticed that you've put the story on hold to do some editing, so hopefully, the issues I pointed out will be useful for you in the rewrites. Don't let neither my commentary nor rating discourage you—it's very hard to write a perfect first draft, and it takes tons of rewrites to make it 'perfect'. You have a good story idea, you just need to work on its execution.

Good luck!