Conville & Walsh

ESCAPE FROM GENOPOLIS opens some four hundred years from now with the secret birth of a baby boy, a ‘Natural’, in the destitute wastelands outside the city of Genopolis. Abducted at birth, Arlo is brought to live among the ‘Citizens’ of the city at an academic institution: the Inns of the Court of Chancery.

Throughout his early childhood, he is submitted to a number of complex and often painful experiments by the doctors who live within its precincts.

Arlo is a very ordinary boy, but he is soon made aware that somehow he is different, strange and – to some of the Citizens – repulsive. We quickly learn that the Citizens have managed to eradicate the ability to feel emotional and physical pain, in the belief that if they can’t change the world – by eliminating poverty, wars, famine and death – they can at least change their response to it. In so doing they have claimed control of the planet, but with disastrous consequences.

As Arlo grows up it becomes clear that forces outsides the city – some human, some ecological – are threatening the planet’s existence. There are growing fears among the more liberal sections of society that pain must somehow be re-introduced into their world so that the Citizens can become alive to the world’s problems, many of which they have helped create. Genopolis’s very survival hangs on this.

Arlo is amazed to discover that, as the ‘Project’, he himself may hold the key to the city’s future, and there begins an action-packed but truly emotional journey to discover who he really is and whether he can save Genopolis from impending doom.

A fairy tale set in a wholly believable futuristic world, ESCAPE FROM GENOPOLIS explores urgent contemporary issues, such as genetic engineering, the prospect of ecological disaster, and the division of society by money and power, in an accessible and vivid way.