★★★★☆ Dark Clarke's Law fantasy

Incarceron

Catherine Fisher

I read this eleven years ago (26-Sep-2011). I have only vague memories of the plot. I do, however, have fairly vivid memories of the world -- the prison. It is what I'll call a Clarke's Law fantasy. That is, to the characters it appears that there is magic in the world. They are not wrong, but you, the reader, can see that the magic is of the form envisaged by Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". That is, the world in which Incarceron takes place is a post-technological world -- it had a technological history and lost the knowledge of how the technology works without losing the technology itself. (I frankly doubt this is possible in the long-term -- I don't think you can make any technology reliable enough that it will continue to work without people around who can repair it and update the design. But it is a common enough premise in speculative fiction.)

I also firmly remember that I enjoyed it quite a lot -- nice twisty dark fantasy. And I went on to read the second novel, Sapphique, which is a high recommendation for this one.

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