Catherine Fisher’s Incarceron: Worldbuilding vs. Character Building
Any young writer learning about their craft will discover fairly early on the dichotomy between plot-driven storytelling and character-driven storytelling. In the former, the story and its characters are moved along by the plot; things happen and the characters do things because the author needs it to go that way for the story they’re telling. In the latter, the story is focused more strongly on who the characters are and moves in accordance with where their personalities, goals, and flaws take them. Character-driven stories are almost always preferable to readers, since they pay closer attention to what makes the characters tick to make them more interesting and relatable. A plot-driven story, however, is more likely to use characters as a device to accomplish specific goals, sometimes giving the impression that things happen and the characters act how they do simply because the author says so.
This divide takes on another dimension in the science fiction/fantasy genre, where another important factor is in play; the setting the plot and characters have to work inside. Here, authors often need to build an entire world from scratch, giving us a new set of “ground rules” to work with and showing rather than just telling us how it is similar or different from our own world. The worldbuilding can be something of a narrative double-edged sword in serious works; done well, it gives the setting a very distinct personality to make the story more memorable, but done poorly, and the inconsistency or vagueness of the world and its rules will bug the readers even if the story and characters are good. This extra facet of complexity added to plot vs character can produce very good stories when memorable characters have a vibrant and imaginative setting to work within, but can also produce a common angle of an interesting, elaborately constructed world that has absorbed so much effort that the characters and what they are doing there come as something of an afterthought.
While I found it an enjoyable read, I thought that Catherine Fisher’s novel Incarceron and its sequel Sapphique were good examples of building the setting taking up more of the author’s time and effort than building the characters in it. The books use the fairly common science fiction/fantasy trope of two settings that gradually cross over as the story progresses, and both settings are quite interesting. The meat of the story takes place in the titular Incarceron, an extremely futuristic living prison that serves as both the setting and the antagonist for the majority of both books. Originally built to be a sentient prison that would create a paradise for the prisoners sealed within it, Incarceron unsurprisingly tuned evil almost immediately upon becoming self-aware, and acts as a cruel god to the prisoners. Fisher does a good job of displaying just how vast, technologically advanced, and sadistic the prison can be throughout both novels; Incarceron doesn’t have cells, but rather vast wings containing entire pseudo-societies, which it keeps fed and populated by synthesizing plants, animals, and even people from any living material it can collect. We’re shown that the freedom is an illusion, however; the prison also has eyes everywhere to remind the prisoners that it’s always watching them, and can control the weather and power to torment them for its own amusement. The secondary setting of the books is “The Realm”, a post-apocalyptic Earth that has been reverted to a medieval lifestyle in the wake of a devastating war in hopes that returning to more primitive times and putting humanity’s development in eternal stasis will prevent further bloodshed. Fisher is able to use The Realm to deconstruct the idea of fantasy worlds embracing a permanent medieval period by showing that the Protocol enforcing this stasis has done far more harm than good; recreating the medieval world has essentially crippled intellectualism, medicine, and social equality, with creative development being banned outright, modern medicine only available illegally to the very wealthy, and the vast majority of the population reduced to peasants living in crippling poverty.
Compared to the effort and character given to the setting, however, Incarceron’s cast suffers from having some fairly bland heroes. The two main characters, the prisoner Finn and the Warden of Incarceron’s daughter, Claudia, are both fairly uninspired character-wise. Finn is the typical good-hearted amnesiac who’s had to toughen up from growing up in a rough place, while Claudia is very much the intelligent and strong-willed young lady that feels suffocated by the manipulations of her family and the court in general but has to play their game. Neither of the two is particularly original or memorable, so the majority of the story being from their point of view already saddles an interesting premise with Dull Protagonist Syndrome.
Both Finn and Claudia do have the benefit of more interesting partners on their side; Claudia has Jared, a young member of the scholars known as Sapients still allowed to access technology and modern knowledge, who acts as her mentor and sole confidant. Jared is the man who figures out how most things work in the books, but he’s not just the exposition delivery system; Jared challenges things Claudia hopes for or takes for granted to remind her to be logical, and has to struggle with his loyalty to Claudia weighed against the danger he exposes himself to by helping her and the disease that will assuredly kill him within a year if he remains with her. Finn, meanwhile, has his ‘brother’ Keiro, who is arguably the most interesting character in the book. Keiro is a thief about Finn’s age who has looked after him as long as Finn can remember, but he’s much less of the traditional steadfast companion than might be expected; Keiro is callous, suspicious, and extremely dangerous, the one best-adapted to the brutal life in Incarceron, and his generally self-centered disposition and cynical pragmatism causes most of the characters to assume he can’t be trusted. Keiro is able to avoid dancing to a predictable beat through the plot, however; he’s not the loyal but subservient companion the hero often has on their journey, but neither is he the edgy loose ally that inevitably betrays everyone towards the end. Instead, Keiro proves to be a valuable companion who saves Finn quite a few times, even though he remains as harsh and callous as he starts out.
Despite a mix of bland main characters with a more interesting supporting cast, Incarceron remains a primarily plot-driven story focusing on more or less the plot threads you’d expect when one setting is a prison and the other is a medieval court; Finn and Keiro’s plot focuses on breaking out of Incarceron, while Claudia and Jared are focused on getting Claudia out of an arranged marriage with the vile crown prince of The Realm and unraveling the truth behind the former heir to the throne’s mysterious death. One reads much like any prison break sequence, although Incarceron helps spice it up by taunting and hindering Finn and Keiro every step of the way, while the other reads much like A Game of Thrones-lite, but with shallow characters and less complicated politics. Fisher does a good job of balancing the power struggle in the outside world against the struggle to escape the prison so that we don’t linger too long in unimportant subplots, but the story suffers from a general lack of surprises; you can see a number of the plot developments coming from a long way off, and the only characters that are all that hard to predict are Incarceron, which turns out to be a little more complicated than a sadistic AI trying to keep Finn imprisoned, and Keiro, who is generally viewed as a traitor waiting to happen by everyone but Finn but continues to prove a good but not nice man.
Overall, I give Incarceron a 6/10. The setting and world-building are both well-done, and several of the characters are quite likable and managed to keep me interested in what was going on, but the book loses points in that the rest of the characters don’t have a ton of effort put into them and the plot that drives everything is not nearly as creative or well-presented as the setting it’s put in. The two books are worth a read if you have some spare time, but I’d recommend just checking them out of the library instead of buying them; the setting is fun to explore, but the contents of the setting don’t have much reread value.