Attempt #5 in my desire to write a book turned out better than expected.
Basically, I wrote a book trying to justify every fantasy trope possible.
A evil overlord realized that it was cheaper to keep a bunch of heroes around than pay for an army, so he created a program to automate their manufacture.
Take a teen from a humble background. Kill their entire family. Send them out on a quest of revenge. Success, the Dreadlord gets a person worth 100 normal soldiers. Failure means they save on funeral expenses.
I really wasn't in a good place when I wrote it, so the good parts are really effed up (the bad parts are just boring).
Here's the first chapter, if you want to check it out.
All my other attempts were fantasy based. This one is more playing around with what it would take to halt human progress for a couple thousand years
Thousands of years ago, an autocratic monarchy sent a colony ship. A torus (a giant space doughnut) 140 km in diameter, and 70 km in depth, flew through the stars, carrying a select cadre of breaucrats and several million extremely skilled engineers.
A couple weeks in (after accelerating to the point when it could be cost prohibitive to send anyone to deal with the Torus), the breaucrats were all killed, and a engineer/scientist based utopia began. This persisted for hundreds of years. Until someone decided to create a virus that makes the host hyper adaptable.
Then everything devolved and 98% of the population died, either to each other or to a legendary warrior. The slaughter placed a small group of genetic, cyborg, and AI researchers into positions of absolute power, where they formed a hereditary monarchy, for the good of the remaining colonists.
They landed on a nearby planet, where the good of the colonists was to be shoved into a massive parallel processing network that powers the Royal family's pleausre simulation, as soon as they are not maximally productive.
Our story follows an retired Enforcer, who someone attempted (and to an extent succeeded) to kill, as he attempts to uncover who murdered him and why.
Here's the first chapter, if you want to check it out.