The Price of Order is a philosophical novel-parable about a city that knows how to survive.
Bread is distributed, records are preserved, roads are maintained, the injured are treated, and decisions are made to keep private misfortunes from becoming a common collapse. Everyone acts for reasons that seem necessary. Everyone is responsible for only one part of the whole.
But what happens when a series of reasonable decisions begins to produce an outcome that no one ever intended?
A Wanderer enters the City as an outsider and observer. Gradually, he finds himself inside a system in which power, knowledge, tradition, law, trade, debt, care and individual freedom do not confront one another as simple good and evil. Each represents a different way of keeping the world from falling apart.
There is no single villain and no easy answer.
Order can protect people. It can make shared life possible. Yet there comes a point when preserving it demands a price that society no longer knows how to measure.
The Price of Order is a philosophical story about necessity and habit, responsibility and obedience, and the moment when saving a system begins to threaten the very human life it was meant to protect.