Ganbei.干杯
FIRST ASSIGNMENT: Story Statement.
Orchestrate the collapse of the American empire to liberate the world from its dominance—without becoming the tyrant he aims to replace.
SECOND ASSIGNMENT: The Antagonist
Warren Steele is a dead man—but his ideology still runs the world. A three-term U.S. President turned autocrat, Steele’s policies of isolationism, economic warfare, and ultranationalism fractured global markets, emboldened domestic extremism, and triggered the global collapse that follows. To his followers, he was a savior. To the world, he was a tyrant with a smile.
Steele’s antagonist role is posthumous but potent—his shadow shapes the Global Economic Alliance’s justification for war, the martyrdom fueling American resistance, and the fractured psyche of President Wu. He catalyzes every major event in the novel. Even in death, Steele is a political gravity well: every character either serves, survives, or seeks to erase his legacy.
Steele didn’t believe he was evil. He believed he was necessary. That’s what makes him dangerous. His policies still poison nations, his face still adorns monuments, and his ghost still whispers in the ears of those in power. For Wu to win—he must confront Steele’s legacy without becoming him.
Steele isn’t just a man. He’s a philosophy of justified ruin—wrapped in a flag and sold as salvation.
THIRD ASSIGNMENT: Breakout Titles.
Book 1: Ganbei
The detonation—America collapses under the weight of its own hubris, triggering a global reckoning. War ignites, alliances shift, and the ideological battle for the future begins.
Book 2: The Below World
The U.S. has been carved up—occupied by GEA nations, each with their own flag, their own rules, their own ambitions. But human nature is to want more. Cooperation gives way to ambition. Alliances fray. Borders blur. And when nations cross the lines they swore to respect, the Below World cracks open.
Book 3: Never Broken
The reclamation. Identity, legacy, and fractured nations converge in a final, defiant stand. Hope endures, but so does the cost of survival. Victory is no longer about dominance—but who we become after the fall.
FOURTH ASSIGNMENT:
Primary Genre: Near-Future Geopolitical Thriller
Secondary Genre: Political Speculative Fiction
Comps:
2034 by Elliot Ackerman & Admiral James Stavridis
Why?
Near-future setting grounded in realism: Both novels imagine a global war triggered by escalating U.S.-China tensions, based on real-world military strategy and diplomacy—not sci-fi tech or fantasy politics.
Multi-POV ensemble cast: 2034 and Ganbei share a global scope, moving between military officers, political leaders, and civilians on both sides of the conflict.
Moral ambiguity and strategic depth: In Ganbei, like 2034, no one is fully good or evil—just trapped in the logic of empire, loyalty, and survival. The tension comes not from plot twists, but from the inevitability of collapse.
Leave the World Behind (Rumaan Alam – for tone, not plot)
Why?
Psychological tension over spectacle: While Ganbei includes large-scale conflict, it shares Leave the World Behind’s eerie, escalating dread—the sense that something massive is unraveling, and no one can quite see the full picture.
Themes of collapse viewed through intimate, human moments: Ganbei balances geopolitics with personal, family-level suffering—like Billy and his daughters, or Chuck Brown’s final act. This echoes the claustrophobic, character-driven despair in Alam’s novel.
Exploration of powerlessness, disconnection, and denial: Both books examine how people behave when the world order breaks—and the terrifying quiet before the real chaos starts.
FIFTH ASSIGNMENT:
Hook line: As the United States collapses under its own weight, Chinese President Wu launches a global reckoning to liberate the world from American dominance—only to find that in conquering an empire, he risks becoming one.
Log Line: Public hangings. Native uprisings. A global collapse. Ganbei is the story of what happens when America finally breaks—and a new world order rises to claim what’s left.
Pitch Line: Set in a fractured near-future, where the world buckles under the weight of dictatorial President Steele’s ruthless policies. Ganbei is a dystopian political thriller that weaves Native uprisings, public hangings, and global power shifts into a guttural reimagining of America’s downfall— engineered by a Machiavellian Chinese strategist, and haunted by the return of voices the nation once refused to hear.
Conflict: Wu vs. America, then Wu vs. the unraveling of his own moral code as power consolidates.
Core wound: Wu was forged in the aftermath of economic exclusion and geopolitical subjugation. He watched China suffer under the arrogance of American supremacy and vowed never to let his nation be sidelined again. But now, with power in his grasp, he fears the cost of empire—and whether becoming history’s correction means repeating its sins.
Stakes: The global order—and whether a new empire will be any better than the one it replaced.
SIXTH ASSIGNMENT:
Inner Conflict: For all his strategy, for all the nations bent to his will, Wu is powerless to protect the one thing he truly loves—his nephew. The boy’s suffering reveals the lie at the heart of control: no matter how vast an empire, no one is immune from personal loss. Wu’s torment stems from this irreconcilable truth—he can dismantle America, redraw world borders, and still fail to shield what matters most.
Secondary Conflict Scenario – Wu Realizes He Is the Addict:
Minister Li delivers the daily briefings—troop movements, dissent suppression, supply lines. Wu listens but hears none of it. He’s staring at the jacaranda photograph on his wall, taken during a walk with de la Huerta in Jalisco. He remembers that day: the filtered light, the calm, the conversation.
“We’ve feared losing them the way an addict fears losing their supply,” de la Huerta had said, “even when they know it’s killing them.”
At the time, Wu thought de la Huerta was talking about the West.
Now he understands.
It wasn’t about policy. Or revenge. Or even legacy.
It was the control. The high of total mastery. The godlike thrill of bending the world to his design.
And he loved it.
Zhi Zi’s death didn’t stop him—it only clarified the truth. He is the addict. And the garden is gone.
But he can’t stop now.
He’s come too far.
FINAL ASSIGNMENT:
Primary Setting:
Before Movement Day, the world of Ganbei is a tightrope stretched over a pit of knives.
The United States—once the ballast of global order—has become an anchor around the world’s neck. Hollowed by isolationism, broken supply chains, street revolts, and a foreign policy built on spite. It no longer leads—it lurches. Under President Steele’s America-first crusade, NATO has collapsed, the UN is a corpse, and every treaty worth a damn has been torched. The dollar is in freefall. Trade has withered. Former allies look west and see only smoke. Some have already turned east.
And in that silence, the Global Economic Alliance rises—not with parades or manifestos, but with contracts, ports, pipelines, data hubs, and debt. Their weapon isn’t ideology. It’s infrastructure. Led by China, the GEA is pragmatic, methodical, and invisible—until it isn’t. While the U.S. slaps on tariffs and builds higher fences, the GEA builds the strongest coalition in human history.
Secondary Setting: Gallows
Thousands of miles away, the past had become the present again—only now it sold tickets. Fort Smith hadn’t seen gallows since the days of Judge Isaac Parker—the infamous “hanging judge” of the Old West—but you wouldn’t have known it. The old execution yard had been gutted and rebuilt like a modern-day amphitheater. Freshly poured concrete pathways. Tiered bleacher seating wrapped around the scaffold like a shrine. Big LED screens hung from towers like the eyes of God, promising no one would miss a single moment. The gallows themselves were new—state-of-the-art steel-reinforced timbers, a digital countdown clock mounted behind the trapdoor. And above it all, cameras. Dozens. Streaming live for pay-per-view.
Third Setting: Native America
Chief Flores’s office in Oklahoma was not modest. It was strategic. Every detail was chosen with care, from the handwoven Choctaw rug beneath the war table to the twin flags behind her desk—one the new crest of the sovereign Tribal Confederation, the other the old Stars and Stripes, folded behind glass, not out of nostalgia but as a warning.
Books lined one wall—real ones. Not curated for decoration, but worn at the spines from use. The Godfather sat near the center, held together by tape and memory, its pages soft from decades of reading and study. Beside it was Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Last Stand, and other volumes chronicling Native resistance in histories the polite world preferred to forget. A battered copy of The Prince rested on the shelf, annotated in red ink, its corners dog-eared from years of strategic obsession. From a speaker near the window, the slow, deliberate notes of Aria from Suite No. 3 in D Major floated through the room. Bach on classical guitar, calm and exact. A corkboard beside her desk was covered in pinned photos, printouts, notes, logistics chains—movement of grain, power, and people. Territory maps were stacked in layers. Pre-war. Post-war. Projected five years out.
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