Arch-Conspirator is Out Today!

Let us swim through the angsty seas together.

Hello!

Today is a very exciting day: Arch-Conspirator, my futuristic retelling of the Greek tragedy Antigone, is out today!

Did you read Antigone in high school? In my high school class, we read the trio of plays together: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. For those who don’t remember: Oedipus is the guy who unknowingly kills his own father and marries his own mother in a fulfillment of a tragic fate. Antigone is his daughter, the outcome of this so-called “cursed” union. In her play, her brother Polyneikes dies, and her uncle Kreon, the king, declares that anyone who gives Polyneikes a proper burial will be put to death. Antigone does it anyway. She suffers the consequences. (Again: it’s a tragedy.)

Arch-Conspirator follows that same rough outline, but instead of being the product of Oedipus’s relationship with his mother, she bears a different kind of curse: she was born with unedited genes. According to her society’s mysticism surrounding gene-editing, that means Antigone has no soul. It’s my version of the “curse” she bears.

Antigone is typically presented as a kind of ass-kicking feminist heroine, defying a system that devalues her. Those elements are certainly in the play. But what struck me when I first reread it to prepare for this retelling was Antigone’s vulnerability. She’s been told from birth that her life isn’t worth as much as other people’s because of the “curse” that she bears. In Oedipus at Colonus, she communicates some of that when she says she’d rather be buried with her father than continue on without him. And in Antigone, she’s quick to discard her life in favor of giving her brother proper burial rites.

In Arch-Conspirator, I wanted to explore this self-destructive tendency a little more than the play is able to. At one point in my retelling, Antigone tells her brother, “Sometimes I stare into the future and I don’t like anything I see.” Her struggle in the story is with how to give her life meaning—not the meaning that other people assign to it, but the meaning that she assigns to it. (“I could become something greater than my body simply by allowing myself to use it.”)

This play is a tragedy, yes. But it’s also about a young woman navigating the claustrophobic space that society allows her to the best of her ability, and finding a way to do something powerful despite being powerless.

So yeah, Antigone kicks ass. But maybe in a different way than you’d think.

I hope you love her. I know I do.

This week I’ll be on tour in Tampa, FL; Nashville, TN; Greenville, SC; and Austin, TX. More information about each stop is on this page here.

If you can’t make it out to any of those events, you can order a signed copy (before February 22nd!) here at Bookmarks.

Thank you so much to my team at Tor Books in the US and Titan Books in the UK for putting this book together and getting it out in the world! And to my editor Lindsey Hall for helping me shape it from the start. What a wonderful process this has been. <3

V

US Cover Art: Pablo Hurtado de Mendoza

Preorder Print Art: Nash Weerasekera

UK Cover Art: Julia Lloyd