Cageworld No 3: The Tyrants Of Hades by Colin Kapp (book review).
Considering the rate at which Colin Kapp’s Cageworld books were released in 1982, he must have been working at a rapid pace. In book 3, The Tyrants of Hades, Kapp actually spends more time on characterisation. Prince Awa-Ce-Land-a is dying but also establishes a connection with the Dyson sphere/Cageworld creator AI, Zeus, who sends Master Assassin Maq Ancor, Sine Anura, Magician Cherry, and his two assistants, Taz and Carli, on a mission to reach the Uranus shell.
It takes 75 days to travel the distance between Jupiter and Saturn, and 100 days to Uranus. The Shellback is the fastest vessel in the Solaria Cageworlds, and even its crew realizes that reaching the nearest star would be an impossible task. Kapp provides information about the Cageworlds, including the massive population explosion, but one has to wonder about birth control and who governs such a situation. This issue comes to the forefront when the crew arrives at the Uranus Cageworld, where the inhabitants realize the Shellback is superior to their technology and want to dismantle it to develop their own. It becomes clear that not all humans are equal the further out you go.
They move on to the Neptune Gateworld, which initially appears peaceful, with a red-hatted individual and robot servants. However, it turns out to be anything but peaceful when it’s revealed to be a hive mind with zero growth, as colonists who realize what’s happening quickly leave…mostly. The Shellback crew is caught off-guard, and the rest is spoiler territory.
The principal characterisation lies with Maq and Sine, with the others mostly in the background after the beginning, despite some significant developments involving holograms later on. I suspect it’s probably due to a lack of space to develop all the crew members equally.
The note on just how vast the population is—over 60 million, million, million, million people spread over eight Cageworlds—must have seemed enormous when Kapp wrote his quadrilogy. However, considering the massive size of each shell, the number seems a bit on the low side. There’s surely an argument here for better birth control rather than simply making space for everyone. The only way to find out is in the fourth novel.
GF Willmetts
July 2024
(pub: New English Library, 1982. 173 page paperback. Price: varies. ISBN: 0-450-05469-1).
