Banished sleep: A dystopian novel
After the tsunami and the civil war that tore the country apart, the Demiurge founded Machia - a luminous experimental city sealed within its own walls, where every citizen swallows a single blue pill and never sleeps again. They've recovered a quarter of their lives. They've also lost the right to dream.
Arthur Halfidre is a drimer. He records his own dreams onto cartridges and smuggles them across the city's borders, to the Outsiders - the dispossessed who live in the ruins beyond the dome. As the adopted son of the Demiurge himself, and the orphan of the murdered co-founder Daniel Halfidre, Arthur has spent his whole life inside two impossible contradictions: half-rebel, half-favorite, an outlaw in his own father's city.
But lately, his dreams have begun to twist. The drims he sells are turning into nightmares. Buyers wake up screaming. They claim they've seen images that predate the tsunami - a world Arthur has no memory of, a world he was never alive to witness. A stranger with a blue beard is following him through the streets. His oldest friend refuses to help him. And the Demiurge, his adoptive father, is smiling too widely on television.
Something is bleeding through the seams of Arthur's sleep. Something Machia was built to bury.
Banished Sleep is a literary, atmospheric debut about memory, manufactured consent, and the dreams a regime cannot afford for you to have.
For readers of Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, Margaret Atwood, and Christopher Nolan's Inception.
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