My Lady Greensleeves

Frederik Pohl at his biting best: a savage satire of class and conformity dressed up as a prison thriller. In a future where your job determines your worth and your freedom, Captain Liam O'Leary runs the most secure prison in the world. He believes in the system because the system keeps people like him on top. Then the riot comes, and everything he knows collapses into chaos. The guards become prisoners. The prisoners become rulers. And the rigid hierarchy that defined every waking moment of every citizen reveals itself as the fragile fiction it always was. Pohl dissects the machinery of social control with brutal efficiency, asking uncomfortable questions about who we become when the rules stop applying. The result is a wild survival story that doubles as a pointed critique of the ladders we build and the ones we're told we can't climb.