Carrie Patel
Carrie Patel is an American fantasy author who worked as a narrative designer at Obsidian Entertainment — the video game studio responsible for titles including Pillars of Eternity and The Outer Worlds — before and during her career as a novelist, and whose gaming background is evident in the carefully constructed mystery structures and richly imagined underground world of her Recoletta series. She studied English literature and worked in various creative industries before her fiction career developed, bringing a professional storyteller’s understanding of pacing, world-building, and player/reader agency to her novels.
The Recoletta series begins with The Buried Life (2014) and continues through Cities and Thrones (2015), available on WritersReview. The series is set in a future Earth in which civilisation has retreated underground following an unspecified catastrophe, building cities in vast cavern systems and developing a rigidly stratified society in which knowledge of the past — the “Catastrophe” and what came before it — is tightly controlled by a ruling class. The novels combine murder mystery plotting with secondary-world fantasy world-building and a gradually unfolding historical mystery, all rendered in Patel’s measured, atmospheric prose. The series has been praised for its distinctive aesthetic — gaslamp underground urbanism, part steampunk, part noir — and for its quietly subversive engagement with questions of historical memory, propaganda, and who controls the past.
Patel’s narrative design background gives her an instinctive understanding of how to structure reveals, maintain mysteries, and balance the satisfaction of answers against the generative tension of unanswered questions. Her fiction has the procedural clarity of well-designed interactive narrative, but it is also genuinely literary — she writes with care and precision, and her world has the kind of internal consistency that rewards close reading. The political and historical dimensions of the Recoletta world develop significantly across the series, moving from the intimate scale of a murder investigation to the broader canvas of revolution and the contest over historical truth.
Patel is part of a generation of writers who have moved between gaming and prose fiction, bringing cross-media perspectives on storytelling to both fields. Her work in the Recoletta series is a contribution to the tradition of underground-civilisation SF that dates back to E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” and she brings genuine intelligence and craft to a premise that lesser writers might have treated as mere atmosphere.