THERE isn’t much world-building in Veronica Roth’s sci-fi retelling of Sophocles’s classic Greek tragedy Antigone. Then again, in Arch-Conspirator, there isn’t much world. A dusty dystopian city (Thebes in the original, but it isn’t clear where we are in the reboot) is all that remains after a thinly sketched environmental polycrisis has turned humanity into an endangered species.
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Or, at least, that is what a reader surmises. The citizens don’t seem to know much about the arid wilderness outside their city’s limits, apart from the fact that no one has come back from it alive. There is no mention of long-range transportation like planes or trains. And blue sky is a rare sight from beneath a poisoned cloud cover.
While it would be possible to get information from “the old internet” (accessible in dusty shops that sell odds and ends), few bother. Roth’s claustrophobic details paint a picture of an island in space and time: the inability to see beyond your immediate environs is very much the point.
But the technological backslide hasn’t been complete. Among the few reminders of humanity’s peak is the Archive, a massive Parthenon-like library filled with our species’ store of heavily edited genetic material – the “ichor”.
This is now the only acceptable method of reproduction, after a viral pandemic has disfigured the human genome so that, unless it is edited extensively, an individual’s DNA will begin to deteriorate from birth. The old-fashioned way of making babies is now taboo.
The new system has turned women into slaves of the state, even though each forced birth carries a 50 per cent risk of death. The rationale is that, for this last scrap of humanity to survive until Earth can accommodate the species again, everyone must be fastidious in obeying the new draconian rules.
Kreon, who enforces them, is a fascist who seized control in a coup that killed Antigone’s father, Oedipus. In a clever nod to her original backstory, in which she was conceived from the sinful union of Oedipus and his mother, Roth’s Antigone is stained because she was conceived in the old way. Putting his needs over society’s is what got Oedipus killed, and it drives the rest of the fast, inevitable plot as his children vow revenge.
Contrary to what a reader might expect from Roth’s popular young-adult series, Divergent, her new book doesn’t traffic in easy answers. How do you govern a civilisation in decline? This question would have weighed heavily on , who witnessed the collapse of the Athenian empire. A declining state strains the balance between the individual and their society. Fascist rule may preserve things by putting society’s needs before those of the individual; equally, a society that does the opposite collapses into a messier version of the same authoritarianism.
Roth could hardly have chosen a more timely tragedy to explore. It isn’t clear to me whether this book seems so relevant because the feeling of doom is a feature of many similar periods in history, or whether a retelling of Antigone feels particularly apposite because we are really living at the end of something. Either way, it is a great time to go back to the Greeks.
Without giving too much away, Roth’s ending offers more hope than Sophocles’s grief-burger. Not much, mind you. But it does leave the thinnest possibility that the benighted citizens of this dystopia might be missing the big picture.
Sally Adee is a technology and science writer based in London. Follow her on Twitter @sally_adee
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