Finn doesn’t remember much about his life before Incarceron, but besides a few tantalizing memories of his childhood, he also has fits in which he sees visions of the future, or communicates with Sapphique, the legendary hero who is supposed to have Escaped from the prison. Whenever someone dies, the prison’s mechanical beetles and rats carry it off & reprocess it into the next “cell-born” being who will come from, and return to, the prison that gives it life.Īmong the prisoners is a young man named Finn who believes he came from outside, though everyone else laughs this off as an impossibility. This is only possible because Incarceron doesn’t let anything go to waste. Actually, what dwells within Incarceron is a man-made hell of vicious gangs, superstitious villagers, bizarre landscapes, and dangerous creatures, including some animals and people who are part organic, part machine. And although nobody knows what’s been going on inside it for all these years, or even where it is, it is widely believed that the perfect society will have evolved within its walls by now. Incarceron, not to put too fine a point on it, is alive. What, didn’t I mention Incarceron? That’s only the prison where, hundreds of years ago, all the criminal types were sent to work out their aggression in an environment governed by an all-seeing, all-powerful, artificial intelligence. Next in line to be the queen is a spirited girl named Claudia, whose icy, remote father is the Warden of Incarceron. Science has reverted to alchemy, medicine to herblore and midwifery, and politics to the courtly intrigues surrounding the king or queen.
While vestiges of advanced technology continue to operate in secret, everyone by law is required to keep at least the appearance of living in the Middle Ages.
At that point a great leader, who seems to have been as mad as he was wise, enforced something called Protocol on everybody, returning mankind to a pretechnological, feudal era and freezing time there. It is a world in which human technology has advanced somewhat beyond where it is today, in which the turbulence of human progress has culminated in something called “the Years of Rage,” whose violence left scars even on the moon. This first installment in a remarkable new fantasy series acquaints us with a unique, and never fully explained, world in which futurism and archaism are strangely blended.
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