Incarceron: Catherine Fisher

Incarceron was a trip. It was a little slow to get into, but once I was in, I was hooked. When I mean slow, it wasn’t that it had too little action or too much narration. It was because there was a lot of sci-fi, alternate world stuff going on that was a little hard to follow at first—at least for me. It might be completely different for someone else.

But, like I said, Incarceron was a trip. Fans of Hunger Games might want to give it a try. They are completely different stories, of course, but have the same sort of vibe.

And like Hunger Games, Incarceron was a best seller because of it’s …

High Stakes

Think Shawshank Redemption, but on crack. Try breaking out of a prison that’s alive, doesn’t want you to leave, and can kill you at whim. Talk about stacking the deck.

Here’s how Fisher did it:

1. Finn aka Giles (the lost prince) finds a key and believes it’s his means to escape Incarceron.
2. He gets help from the outside, the Warden’s daughter, Claudia, who has been looking for the entrance for Incarceron her whole life, not to mention the lost prince, and has never found either.
3. The prison doesn’t want Finn/Giles to leave and leaving isn’t that easy when Incarceron is smaller than an ice cube.

I really liked the imaginative world that Catherine Fisher created. With every page, she left me wondering what will the prison do next and what “really” is Incarceron. Even though the prison was a larger-than-life place, all the work it took to develop it would have been meaningless without the stakes that Fisher created.

I think Incarceron is a good example of a balance between world-building and plot. Fisher was able to blend both perfectly and, in doing so, she crafted an engaging and enjoying story while at the same time showing us a crazy world within worlds.

For those of us that want to recreate the same in our own manuscripts, it’s important to remember that too much focus on world-building without the same amount of attention on the plot will end up destroying both efforts.