Arch-Conspirator

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Roth is a masterful conjurer, summoning both classic myth and visceral dystopia to weave a breathtaking tale of love, avarice, and the timeless desire for revenge." - Ryka Aoki Antigone doesn’t ring any bells. Is that because we never covered it in school? Or is it because I wasn’t the greatest student and just don’t remember it? 🙂 Do you think it’s too sparse for someone completely unfamiliar with the source material to enjoy?

Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth By Strange Horizons - Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth By

Scott Shane's outstanding work Flee North tells the little-known tale of an unlikely partnership ... 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.

So when Kreon told us we were welcome to live in his house, I knew what the consequences would be: he would let Polyneikes and Eteocles and Ismene and me live, but we would do so at his pleasure. We would live in his house, lending legitimacy to his rule, and he would keep his eye on us. I was having a difficult time working out both the SF elements and the Greek mythology. To figure out how much of their stories they follow and how much they even know of the mythology. It leaves Arch-Conspirator feeling a bit shallow considering the depths of each of these elements individually. The only thing that kept me going was being able to also switch to the audio-book with the dual narration from Dion Graham & January LaVoy. It gave this novella a personal gripping point for me to anchor the ’emotions’ of the story. In this dystopian reimagining of the tale, humanity has reached the brink of its own end. The planet is mostly uninhabitable. There’s one city left; outside it is the wilderness. All goods are scarce, buildings are decaying, and blowing dust covers everything. The only hope for humanity’s future is the Archive, where genetic material taken from people after death is stored. A quasi-religious value is attached to these Archives — the stored samples represent immortality for the dead, a way of saving and then resurrecting their souls. Veronica Roth’s Arch-Conspirator, is something rare and magnificent—a novella of epic voice and scale. Roth is a masterful conjurer, summoning both classic myth and visceral dystopia to weave a breathtaking tale of love, avarice, and the timeless desire for revenge.”—Ryka Aoki, bestselling author of Light From Uncommon Stars For this reason, Antigone and her siblings are considered outcasts in their society, despite their parents Oedipus and Jocasta being the leaders of the last city where the remnants of humanity still cling to life. When her parents are murdered, however, Antigone and her sister are taken in by their traitorous uncle Kreon who keeps his nieces alive even after seizing the throne because of the value they represent: vessels to bring forth the future generation.

ARCH-CONSPIRATOR | Veronica Roth | Tor Publishing Group ARCH-CONSPIRATOR | Veronica Roth | Tor Publishing Group

If you're looking for a fairly accurate retelling of Antigone but set in a sci-fi world, I think you'd really enjoy Arch-Conspirator. When your time comes and you die, your ichor (soul and gene material) is extracted and stored in the archives. The prospective parents can wander the halls of the Archive and made a choice -be that looking for something like their parents or grandparents. It’s the closest thing to a designer baby that could be imaginable. Scottish lifestyle blogger, mummy of two beautiful little girls, romantasy reader, ACOTAR fan, coffee addict and book hoarder.

Arch-Conspirator

A rich retelling of the tale of Antigone! Arch- Conspirator is a short book by the fabulous author Veronica Roth. Veronica Roth is the New York Times bestselling author of 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 most recent The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth | Goodreads

Arch-Conspirator is the latest release from Veronica Roth. This novella blends heavy science fiction dystopia – think reproductive control and consciousness – with Greek mythology. It reminds me of like Altered Carbon and Greek figures and The Handmaids Tale. And I think that might be one of my issues, Roth bites off a lot in Arch-Conspirator. While I think that some of those topics work well together, by the end of this novella, I was left with more questions than answers.It was hard to imagine a time when it hadn’t been this way — when plants grew untended in the wild, maintained by their own seeds spreading; when the plains beyond the city were overrun with animals that we had not bred ourselves; when genes persisted through the generations, presenting a person with their grandmother’s brow, their great-grandfather’s jaw. Everything required effort now. Everything required editing. Arch-Conspirator is an Antigone retelling, my sorority was called Antigone so I’m familiar with her story although I wasn’t sure about all the details anymore. I love reading retellings from lesser known stories, there are so many from all the ‘popular’ fairytales and I think we use more from other stories. The story is set in a dystopian future although it took me awhile to figure that out. Roth is a masterful conjurer, summoning both classic myth and visceral dystopia to weave a breathtaking tale of love, avarice, and the timeless desire for revenge.” — Ryka Aoki, bestselling author of Light From Uncommon Stars The stifling of women is presented in the novella not only through Antigone but also through Ismene and through Eurydice, Kreon’s wife, as well as through the specter of Jocasta, whose memory cannot be banished or denied. Before her death, she was working on artificial womb technology that would have freed people capable of childbearing from the obligation to carry on the species through their own personal reproductive labor—no joke, in a world in which we are told that fifty percent of pregnancies end with the death of the pregnant person.