“I spent centuries longing to escape, but who can escape themselves?”
For those wanting to better understand the stories, worldviews, and messages shaping today's youth, I offer my latest review of trending books, films, and TV shows effecting a Young Adult audience. My goal is not to critique the art form as much as to analyze how the story reflects and shapes the readers' worldview. There will be spoilers.
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After the Years of Rage, all the criminals, undesirables, extremists, degenerates, and lunatics of the Realm were banished to Incarceron, a prison the size of a world. Seventy of the Sapient, the wisest of the wise, entered the prison with them. Incarceron was programmed to provide education, diet, spiritual direction, and work. It would be a Paradise.
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After the Years of Rage, all the criminals, undesirables, extremists, degenerates, and lunatics of the Realm were banished to Incarceron, a prison the size of a world. Seventy of the Sapient, the wisest of the wise, entered the prison with them. Incarceron was programmed to provide education, diet, spiritual direction, and work. It would be a Paradise.
When Catherine Fisher's Incarceron begins (and continues in Sapphique), one hundred and fifty years have passed since the banishment. The Prison is a hell. It is is alive and cruel, without mercy or compassion. Their histories note:
“In ancient statues Justice was always blind. But what if it sees, sees everything, and its Eye is cold and without Mercy? Who would be safe from such a gaze? Year by year Incarceron tightened its grip. It made a hell of what should have been a heaven.”
The Prison turns humans into beasts, then
does not forgive them for what it has made of them. Meanwhile, the Realm has
found its own dystopia. The appalling destruction of the Years of Rage demand a
draconian solution:
“We must find a simpler way of life. We must retreat into the past, everyone and everything, in its place, in order. Freedom is a small price to pay for survival… We forbid growth and therefore decay. Ambition, and therefore despair. Above all, Time of forbidden. From now on nothing will change.”
They called it Era, and it sustained a
lie. Lord Evian describes the situation well:
“We are rich…but we are not free. We are chained hand and foot by Protocol, enslaved to a static, empty world…New does not exist. Nothing changes, nothing grows, evolves, develops. Progress is forbidden. We are dying, Claudia. We must break open this cell we have bricked ourselves into, escape from this endless wheel we tread like rats…even death will be a sort of freedom.”
Two world, two prisons.
