Although pubished in the UK in 2007, Catherine Fisher’s Incarceron only recently hit the US, where it almost immediately landed on the New York Times Children’s Bestseller list and from there sparked a Hollywood bidding war, with several parties keen to snap up the film rights to its dystopian tale.
Variety reports that Fox 2000 won out, and are now looking for writers and a director to bring the novel to the silver screen. Incarceron itself is a rather intruiging mix of fantasy and sci-fi, about a young boy called Finn who lives in a vast, decaying prison that is virtually a living building, controlled by computers. While most of the people there have been inside for so many generations that they no longer believe there is an outside, Finn thinks that’s where he came from. He then finds a way to communicate with a girl outside the prison, who has problems of her own, as she’s been condemned to an arranged marriage in a world that computers have made to seem like a perfect recreation of the 17th Century.
It’s all sound a bit City Of Ember mixed with Logan’s Run, but is certainly an intriguing set-up for a movie.