About the book…
Outside the last city on Earth, the planet is a wasteland. Without the Archive, where the genes of the dead are stored, humanity will end.
Antigone’s parents – Oedipus and Jocasta – are dead. Passing into the Archive should be cause for celebration, but with her militant uncle Kreon rising to claim her father’s vacant throne, all Antigone feels is rage.
When he welcomes her and her siblings into his mansion, Antigone sees it for what it really is: a gilded cage, where she is a captive as well as a guest.
But her uncle will soon learn that no cage is unbreakable. And neither is he.
My thanks to the lovely people at Titan Books for my gifted review copy of the new novella by Veronica Roth, ‘Arch-Conspirator’ which was published on 21/02/23.
A re-telling of ‘Antigone’ by Sophocles,this tale is set in what is explained as the last city on a devastated planet, outside the gates of the city is devastation and certain death.
Whether this is true or not, the people within the walls appear to believe it and have built their cultural identity around the future of humanity being chosen from the souls of the past, kept in a physical Archive.
The offspring of Jocasta and Oedipus, born from what is seen as an unnatural mating, where nature is key not science and the gene pool being random not selected, has them seen as ‘others’ and ‘cursed’. Following an insurrection which has left the 4 siblings orphaned and taken in by Kreon, their uncle and Eurydice, their aunt, the cage within a cage has shrunk .
No matter how beautifully arrayed it is, it is still a prison and the nature of the soul versus the vessel it is held in, is explored through the reproductive rights-or removal-of women’s bodies. They are seen as receptacles of genes to advance a chosen line, in this instance, Antigone is to be married to Haemon, Kreon’s son.
Her sister, Ismene, is to be spared this fate, whilst her twin, Polyneikes and brother Eteocles, are flip sides of the old versus new order, one throwing himself into his new role, the other plotting against it.
In this time and place, the Archive is a place for storing the ichor, believed to hold the soul, of individuals whose genes were seen as worthy of continuing to exist.
Outside the Archive, women were seen as walking archivists , empty vessels waiting to be literally and metaphorically filled.
In this context, Antigone is a lion pacing the length of her gilded cage, plotting to get out and when rebellion is suggested, the future for the main characters and humanity itself is held in the balance.
A moving meditation on what it means to be human. how we pass more than our genes to our children and how the future is doomed to repeat the past unless it is willing to be critical and face the flaws of its past, Arch-Conspirator comes thoroughly recommended by this reader. It’s my first Veronica Roth story and I will definitely be looking to read more by her.
About the author…
Veronica Roth is the New York Times best-selling author of ‘Poster Girl’, ‘The Chosen Ones’, the short story collection ‘The End And Other Beginnings’, the‘Divergent Series’, and the ‘Carve The Mark’duology.
She is also the guest editor of ‘The Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy 2021’. Veronica lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Links-http://veronicarothbooks.com/
Twitter @TitanBooks
Author
bridgeman.lenny@gmail.com