I'm one of the many writer who has discovered one of their manuscripts had three chapters at the beginning that didn't belong in the novel, so don't despair if you realize your true beginning is later.

Another odd thing is that I would not at all think from this that the story had been going on so long. So much exposition, and basic description. It's a bit uninteresting, but is even less promising for the story being exciting once you get into it. Why no action yet?

What's "GS"? It's hard to get engaged with the story when one doesn't know.

Landers presumably knows who "they" are, and it would be more engaging to tell us than to withold -- for me, tension in a story comes from what the MC doesn't know, not what the narrator knows and chooses to withold.

MC spends about four sentences getting out of the door and down the hallway: I think you could edit that down substantially or even eliminate it, and get to the action -- I became interested when he got to the gravity chamber.

But I lost my willing suspension of disbelief when the idea of gravity holding him to a star surfaced. If this is possible in your story, I need to build belief in the possibility. (Do you really need the qualifier about holding him to a planet or star? We all know what gravity does, and by eliminating such redundancies you can get more from your 13 lines, and engage the reader more strongly by delivering value with each word.)

I note from your note that this is actually a dream sequence, a cliche opening that will likely make the story hard to sell.

Finally, the story feels uninteresting because the narrator seems to have little interest in it: poor sentence structure, weak punctuation and a spelling mistake that gives one pause, until one realizes it's a mistake -- deify should be defy. Such problems usually deter people from critiquing stories, because they're simply too hard to read and make sense of.

Chapter one: Galaxy Station

Hyten Landers sat on his bed staring in to the darkness. A white orb hovered over the top of the door. It launched a red laser that scanned the whole room before stopping on his forehead, “Landers, Hyten: Age: 18, Years attended at the GS: 5.” The red beam retracted and a blue laser took its place, “Battles won in the Anti Gravity Chamber 126.” The white orb rotated to the other side of the room and the laser turned green. “Battles lost in the Anti Gravity Chamber, Zero.”
The orb opened and released three other orbs that scattered acrossed the room and three new Lasers latched to his neck. “ State what the GS is?”
Landers glared at the white orb, the wrong answer could mean his death. “The GS, Also known as the Galaxy Station is a space

[This message has been edited by Nicaria_ Black (edited January 04, 2009).]

I'd suggest a couple of small changes:

"that scanned the whole room before stopping on his forehead"

And

"The orb opened and released three other orbs that scattered across the room"

But they're minor, easily corrected in a subedit. I'd encourage you to write the story with this kind of energy and focus, and edit such small things afterwards.

Taking the first thirteen lines at face value, I only paused to wonder why the orb would ask a life or death question that seemed so general and easily answered? Even so, I would like to read more.

-SU

quote:

---

It let out a red laser that scanned the whole room before stopping on his forehead

---

The bolded here feels a little bit passive to me. It feels as if the object is just trudging along without a care in the world, and then decides to "let out" some lasers. Perhaps it could be more aggressively worded, to show the nature of the situation?

For example: "It shot out", "Lasers burst from...", etc..