Dystopian Worlds

To be able to write setting

descriptively.

The Hunger Games - Setting

Just as the town clock strikes two, the mayor steps up to the podium and
begins to read. Its the same story every year. He tells of the history of
Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once
called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the
fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the
brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a
shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and
prosperity to its citizens. Then came the Dark Days, the uprising of the
districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth
obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace
and, as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it
gave us the Hunger Games.
The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising,
each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called
tributes, to participate. The twentyfour tributes will be imprisoned in a vast
outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen
wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to
the death. The last tribute standing wins. Taking the kids from our districts,
forcing them to kill one another while we watch this is the Capitols way
of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we
would stand of surviving another rebellion.

Memory Palace

We climbed over a pile of rubble into one of the old hospitals at Use Town.
Hidden in the depths of the building was a door, which led down a steep flight of
steps into a tunnel that was called a tube. People once got inside these tubes and
travelled from one place to another, following lines of different colours. We
trudged along the tube by the light of a lantern, until we came to a kind of cave,
with raised banks on either side. The walls were tiled, and here and there were
embedded pieces of coloured sign, the clan colours of old london, the red and the
white and the blue.
I saw that we had come to a treasure house, filled with ricknology. There were
piles of qwerties, ancient screens whose black surfaces had a sort of half-shine, the
deep half-shine of captured light, the kind of colour we cant make any more
because weve lost the secret.
We climbed up on to the banks, and he showed me stacks of boxes, flat and
featureless on some sides, indented with complicated holes on others. These, he
explained, were pewters. They were filled with number. If we were to breathe
power into them, they would spill out the speech of dead men and pictures that
moved without a guiding hand. Beside the pewters were belts of plastic, some with
carved buckles that, as he showed me, were made to connect the pewters to the
power that the ancient lawlords had coaxed out of the earth.

 Fifty years ago, the major cities of the United Kingdom were hit by a
nuclear missile that was intended for France. Overnight the
population plummeted and those who were left were badly injured
and traumatised, people were left to starve in the streets and only
those who joined the gangs and big communities survived. Towns
like Oxford and Cambridge built walls around their city and tried to
survive as best they could. They sought to rebuild humankind from
the broken bodies and build a new Utopia for themselves
I live in the Cambridge Compound, part of the second generation
group, the Beta. My name is 42B-Eng. We are all given numbers in
the compound as the leaders tell us we must be equal. I am one of
the children, born in the laboratories and trained in the colleges.
Each of us is born with a particular talent or skill which will benefit
the compound and our name denotes what skill we have. My name
is Eng. This means I am an engineer.

 I wake up at the first echoing bellow of the klaxon. My bed is at the end of
the ENG dormitory and I am lucky enough to have a window next to my
bed. It shows the tattered green lawns of the college below and halfbroken spires of the city beyond and it is a great comfort to me to know I
have this one special thing that I have over others. It makes me feel
different to the other ENGS.
This is something the Leaders must never know. Being different or special
is wrong. It is revolutionary. It is rebellion. It is wrong and wrong must be
wiped out here. The Leaders are afraid of wrongness. Wrongness is
stamped out in us from a very young age you must always be the same,
same as the others. All are equal. All ENGS are equal.
I shove my arm into the reader and wince as my tracker for the day pierces
the skin of my wrist. Immediately my schedule for the day flashes into my
left eye and I can see that I have Propaganda for the first two hours.
Propaganda is the Leaders way of making you understand how bad it is
outside the compound. You sit for hours in front of a large screen, being
read messages and shown pictures of the outside world. You have to

What makes a good description?

Your Task
Describe your dystopian world.
It can be first person perspective but NO
CHARACTERS.
Purely setting.