Arch-Conspirator

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Part of the reason is there were too many POV characters. Antigone works well, first, because it is a play, and second because the audience is standing outside the action observing it. In Arch-Conspirator we are put into many first person POVs. We sometimes get POV chapters from a character just one or two times. That made it really hard to connect with any one character.

Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth Summary and reviews of Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth

Veronica Roth’s Arch-Conspirtitor had all the makings of a great book. The premise is based on the Greek tragedy of Antigone , the girl who rises up alone. She will defy her uncle and ultimately dies young. There is also a war between siblings, death, and sadness. Antigone is enough of a story to base a new book on. But Roth took Antigone and added a new layer of depth to it. It takes place in a dystopia, in one of the last cities. Children are no longer born naturally but selected from existing cells and reproduced. This selection puts a limit on new humans and gene diversity. They do all this because of religion (waves hand). When you die, your gametes are harvested through a device inserted below your belly button. To not do so is the ultimate dishonor to someone.

One man, High Commander or no, doesn’t have the right or the power to declare cruelty to be morality just because something has affected him personally. There is a word for the man who tries…tyrant.’ To me it seemed like there wasn’t that much world building, which makes some sense in a novella but I’ve seen it done a lot better than here. We get multiple POV’s which was interesting and I liked getting to know the different characters a bit. At the same time, with those different POV’s I think there was also an opportunity for more world building. Roth's performance is intelligent but less emotive: set in a future dystopian world, this makes use of Creon's one-note politics and takes up questions of female bodily autonomy. I especially like the way this re-writes the previous transgression of Oedipus and Jocasta: here they refuse to have 'designer' babies by gene splicing and editing so their crime is not incest but natural conception, tainting their children in a world where the naturally-born are labelled 'soulless'. 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.

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

A] taut, defiant reenvisioning of Sophocles's Antigone.... The plot preserves the shape of the original without ever losing the capacity to surprise and, more importantly, prod reflection and recognition. This powerful tale of reproductive oppression is sure to wow." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) The ending of the story, though likely not a spoiler (this is an ancient Greek tragedy, after all), feels somewhat disappointing. After getting to know Antigone, you wish for a different ending for her. But the rather hollow victory that Kreon has, also laced with sorrow and pain, lends a decent amount of complexity to the situation. It’s not that the villain wins, it’s that no one really does. But at the same time, if you look at it a certain way, Antigone wins. Arch-Conspirator is a gut punch of a story. Roth takes everything fragile about love, everything powerful about certain doom, and blooms with it. You'll be holding your breath until the very last word." - Olivie Blake

Arch-Conspirator is a gut punch of a story. Roth takes everything fragile about love, everything powerful about certain doom, and blooms with it. You'll be holding your breath until the very last word." - Olivie Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six 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.

Arch-Conspirator - Veronica Roth

Well done Veronica Roth for writing a cool and imaginative take on Antigone, best known through Sophocles' play of the same name, following the children of Oedipus and Jocasta. This takes a very different approach from Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire which paid fine attention to the politics of torn loyalties with a hard-hitting and nuanced plot leading to an emotionally devastating ending. Not gonna lie, I probably should’ve been paying more attention in high school when my Lit class did Antigone, but hey, apparently enough got through. There’s a lot to appreciate about Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth, not least of which is how closely this sci-fi retelling hews to the original Athenian tragedy by Sophocles. I'd read Antigone in 9th grade for school, but I had forgotten what happened, so I needed to wiki it first. I really enjoyed this retelling of it, and I definitely related a lot more to this version of her than the original (from what I can remember about her at least). I also really liked the multiple POVs and the way that we were able to get the POV of everyone involved. I loved almost all the characters (and I especially loved getting to read from Eurydice's POV).I was on a balcony, nestled in ivy that grew only here, in the High Commander’s courtyard, where no amount of water scarcity in other parts of the city could convince Kreon to sacrifice beauty. People will permit a High Commander his small indulgences, I had heard him say once. It is such a difficult job.

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

It’s one of the story’s many ironies that Kreon sees Antigone as the arch-conspirator of the title, which in some senses she is and isn’t: she is kept out of the conspiracy and acts either entirely alone or with only Haemon’s help, but she is also the person whose defiance of, and unjust punishment by, Kreon shatters the stability of his regime.

Outside the last city on Earth, the planet is a wasteland. Without the Archive, where the genes of the dead are stored, humanity will end. I ended up really enjoying reading this book, and it's been great to see that I still enjoy Roth's writing, even if we've both grown a lot since Divergent. It was interesting to see her blend this sci-fi setting of a broken world with Antigone, and I really liked how it ended up working together. I hadn't been too familiar with Antigone before reading this, but after reading a summary after finishing this novella, I only appreciated how Roth used the source material even more. Despite some criticisms, Arch-Conspirator is a cool story and a really fun retelling, I only wish I felt it was all able to be more effectively juggled. Which isn’t really Roth’s fault as it would require an absolute master of literature to pull all this off in such a short space while also feeling polished and powerful. It just feels like biting off more than one can chew, though it still isn’t bad. Antigone is a great story and it was fun to see this done in a sci-fi setting.