The Prisoner
Carlos J. Cortes
Ballantine Books, 2009
U.S. mass market paperback, first edition
ISBN 978-0-553-59163-7
416 pages; $7.99

I owe a debt of gratitude to those intrepid folks who select the nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award – the award given each year for the best science fiction novel first published in paperback. If they had not nominated The Prisoner, I would likely never have read it. It hasn’t been widely reviewed, at least not by my usual sources, and the premise isn’t the sort that would catch my eye if I were browsing on Amazon or in a bookstore. It sounds pretty much like a thriller with a science fictional edge, not my usual fare.

And it is a thriller with a science fictional edge. Sometimes one really should read outside one’s normal range of material, and for me, this was one of those times. I enjoyed The Prisoner thoroughly. I would never accuse it of being high art, but gosh, it was fun to read. It made me hungry for popcorn, because reading it felt like watching a movie – and it is written in a very cinematic manner, and likely would make a good movie. The scenes in the sewers would be quite exciting enough for any audience.

The premise of The Prisoner is that the United States has adopted a new method of warehousing criminals who have been tried and convicted. Rather than keeping prisoners conscious but confined, they are put into hibernation and slipped into maximum security “sugar cubes” – tanks filled with a solution that keeps them alive and healthy (more or less), but needing no food, little space, and no diversions to keep them peaceful. Basically, they need little of anything except a bit of maintenance.

But as with seemingly every governmental system, this radical new way of dealing with prisoners has been abused. Each sugar cube has a center section that is supposed to be reserved for experimentation with the hibernation technique. Instead, “center inmates” are troublemakers the government wants kept out of the way – or worse. There is no public accounting kept of them, and they are kept very, very secret.

The Prisoner is the story of a determined group of people who want to bring these secrets to light. To do so, a small but intrepid trio of volunteers agrees to be incarcerated in order to gain access to the facilities. The recounting of their intubation is excruciating to read, especially when one realizes it has to happen numerous times each day. More than that, though, their escape from the facility through the sewers is an adventure worthy of a movie director like, say, Ridley Scott (who has a real touch with science fiction). It’s plain that Cortes did a fair amount of research about what happens down there below us, and his background as an engineer shows. These scenes are harrowing.

Politics takes over once the sewers have been gotten through, and this part of the tale is equally harrowing, though in a different way. The old saying is that making both sausage and legislation are equally disgusting, but it seems to me that those toiling in the vineyards of the administrative process are probably much worse. (Think of what we’ve been learning over the past few years about the Minerals Management Service, for instance.) Cortes gives us evil politicians and honorable ones, those taking risks for the good of the country and those taking risks for their own personal gain.

There aren’t any gray areas in this book, really; the bad guys wear black hats, and are easily identifiable. If you want subtlety, look elsewhere. If you just want a rip-roaring good read for a summer afternoon in the hammock, this is the book for you.