Around her are scraps of paper, some of which mention a Greek tale by Antonius Diogenes called Cloud Cuckoo Land. She has been in a circular cell (Vault One) with a machine called Sybil for nearly a year now. In Mission Year 65 (in the future), Konstance is a young girl on the ship Argos, which left Earth 65 years ago on a mission to get to planet Beta Oph2. In the Prologue and Chapters 1 - 2, the book introduces an array of characters from different time periods. The book ends with her reading Cloud Cuckoo Land to her son in the year 2146. Later, when she learns Argos is merely an intergenerational experiment on Earth (and not a ship at all), she breaks out, taking her handwritten copy of the book with her. Konstance uses her time in isolation to find a virtual version of Zeno's Cloud Cuckoo Land translation and transcribe it.
In the future, Konstance's father tells her the story of Cloud Cuckoo Land (Konstance's grandmother was one of the children that Zeno saved). In 2057, a remorseful Seymour compiles Zeno's translation into a book and gives it to the kids that Zeno saved. In 2020, when Seymour sets off his bomb while the kids are rehearsing, Zeno grabs the bomb and runs to an empty area to save the kids, killing himself. The children help Zeno to figure out that the tale ends with Aethon returning home to pass on his story (since the text is illegible toward the end). A middle-aged Zeno translates it, and adapts it into a children's play. By 2019, the book's text is illegible, but new scanning technology recovers the text. After Anna dies, Omeir deposits Anna's damaged-but-treasured book (Cloud Cuckoo Land) in the library of the ducal palace in Urbino. He then has to decide whether to stay there or return home.Īs the story progresses, we learn that Anna and Omeir end up fleeing Constantinople, meeting and building a life together. Along the way, he has many adventures (transformed into a donkey, captured, escapes, transformed into a fish, eaten by a sea creature, transformed into a crow, etc.) before he finally finds Cloud Cuckoo Land. It tells story of Aethon, a man who goes looking for a "utopian city in the sky" called Cloud Cuckoo Land. The author claims he found the tale etched onto pieces of wood in an ancient tomb. Throughout the narrative, the contents of Cloud Cuckoo Land is interwoven in bits and pieces. She ends up isolated after a plague kills everyone else on board. And sometime in the future, Konstance is a girl on Argos, an intergenerational ship that is on a 592-year-long journey with a mission to reach a distant planet. Meanwhile, Zeno is an old man who is at the library afterhours, leading a group of kids in a rehearsal for a performance of Cloud Cuckoo Land. In present day (in 2020), Seymour is a 17-year-old environmental activist who tries to set off a bomb at the local library.
Meanwhile, Omeir is a boy who is forced to join the Saracen army. In the 1400's in Constantinople, Anna is an orphan who finds a copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land in an abandoned priory library just before it is destroyed by Saracen forces. It follows three sets of characters in different time periods who all come across a (fictional) ancient Greek tale called Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes. The four-paragraph version: Cloud Cuckoo Land is about a book and how it manages to survive across time.
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