Foundryside

STATS

Title: Foundryside

Series: The Founders Trilogy (Book 1)

Author(s): Robert Jackson Bennett

Genre: Fantasy (Epic)

First Printing: 2018

Publisher: Del Rey

PREMISE & PLOT

In the city of Tevanne, technology is fueled by scrivening, magic that rewrites reality.  Four merchant houses have grown fabulously wealthy through this power.  When a thief named Sancia Grado steals an object to the power to overwrite the rules of this magic, she sets off a chain reaction of events that will rip apart the tenuous balance of power.

The plot of Foundryside is straightforward.  After the initial heist, the plot alternates between cat-and-mouse chase scenes and infiltration / heist scenarios.  While there are a handful of secondary characters who get a lot of development – Captain Gregor Dandolo of the Tevanni Waterwatch; the scrivener Orso Ignacio and his assistant Berenice Grimaldi; and Clef, the consciousness the resides within the object Sancia stole – Sancia is undeniably the main character.  She moves through an escalating series of circumstances that expose deeper and deeper layers of the magic system and the history of the world, aided by her magical gift of “object empathy” (which is basically psychometry, for those familiar with real-world ESP lore or the Blood Hunters of Critical Role).

WHAT I LIKED

Pacing was good, the action was well-choreographed (in that it was easy to follow what was happening in the fights), and exposition about scrivening and world history was delivered at a steady, easily digested drip.  Bennett takes the time to really explore the many nuances and applications of scrivening.  The wider details of the world geopolitics and how the city of Tevanne holds itself together are rather vague, but since the stakes of the story don’t really lean on this, it’s not a major issue.

One worldbuilding detail that I personally enjoyed was the exposition about what real-world scientific knowledge the setting has.  There’s a funny scene where Sancia and Gregor are educated on how sound works, and another where that’s a stunning reveal about how gravity works.  It’s a small thing, yet it really does enrich the world in a way that a lot of settings don’t do.

There were only three things that I feel the story did poorly.  However, these were aspects of elements that are worthy of praise, so I want to give due credit before I jump into criticisms.

This story is loaded with commentary about classism, capitalism, dehumanization of others for the sake of convenience or due to the seductive lure of new technologies, and how trauma can shape our perception of ourselves.  These messages are integral to the world, and they’re not subtle.  However, they are at least properly integrated into and contextualized by the world.  This isn’t a case where you need to understand real-world conversations for the story the make sense.  Were it not for the things I’m going to point out in What I Disliked, I’d chalk this up to the story simply having great applicability.  Even with the obvious intent behind the messages, though, the story is an engaging read.  My immersion wasn’t irreparably damaged by them.  I feel like even people who disagree with Bennett’s take on these ideas should be able to enjoy this story.

Bennett does a good job with crafting distinct voices and personalities for his characters.  There are a few weak links: Sancia and Clef are indistinguishable in a few spots (which is a bit of problem, as Bennett is not afraid to go several lines of conversation without using dialogue tags), and Orso’s swearing is arguably a little over-the-top in terms of execution.  Still, the end result is that most of the characters are very distinct and easy to keep track of, to the point that the speaker of randomly interjected lines of dialogue (assuming they weren’t from Sancia or Clef) is instantly recognizable without a dialogue tag.

Most of the foreshadowing was excellent.  I saw a handful of the plot developments coming from several chapters away, yet not because they were cliché.  Bennett just laid such a great foundation for them that the clues slotted into place.

WHAT I DISLIKED

Foundryside was an interesting read for me.  While I managed to build up a long list of things that annoyed me by the end of the book, they were individually insignificant.  Even as a collective, these points weren’t enough to keep me from enjoying this story.  Many of these things come down to subjective taste.

A good example of this is the religion of the setting.  There isn’t one.  There’s a lot of talk about God, particularly in the context of scrivening being akin to using the language of God to edit reality.  Outside of this, I didn’t see anything that would explain how humanity’s morality is shaped by their belief in this supreme being, nor any institutions or groups devoted to worship.  No secular philosophy is presented to fill the gap, either.  A fantasy story doesn’t need fully fleshed-out religions to be good, but this story is putting the focus on God and is making moral commentary based upon events within itself, so the lack of any sort of foundation feels incredibly strange to me.

Like I said, though, this is a matter of personal taste.  I like exploring the religions of fantastical worlds.  Understanding them helps me to understand how the characters perceive the world around them and assimilate unknown variables, even if the characters aren’t believers or practitioners.  Not everyone has this same interest, so I’m not going to treat it as an objective literary criticism.

After removing the subjective, there were three patterns that remained, ones which I do feel negatively impact the objective quality.  The impacts very small, but these are still things that I think are worth learning from and avoiding.  (I can’t really talk about these without going into a few light spoilers, so please skip to the rating at the end if you want to go into this story completely blind.)

Message Delivery

The commentary within this story is, for the most part, exceptionally well done.

The issue is the moments where it isn’t.

Here’s the problem: most of the messages of the story are integrated into the WORLD.  Not the plot.  The plot is a straightforward heist narrative that doesn’t lean on the classism or capitalism elements.  Those just sort of exist in the background.  The dehumanization of people due to technology does come into play within the plot, so the thematic conclusion that is declared at the end of the story works fine, but the dehumanization of people due to convenience is, again, mostly background noise.  I’m on the fence about the trauma message: it is plot relevant, yet it’s propped up by the messages that exist in the background.

So when a character – namely Sancia – brought a scene to a crashing halt to tell the other characters how ignorant they are about those background themes, it disrupted my immersion.  Commentary that was working perfectly well as a subconscious message was rudely pushed to the forefront, and it contributed nothing to the plot or characters.  This is why I think Bennett was going for commentary rather than applicability.  He felt it was very important to stop the plot for a message that boils down to, “Slavery is bad.  Don’t ignore it.”

What really makes it frustrating, though is that the main character is the mouthpiece of these messages.  Sancia is, by the standards set by this story, morally flawlessly.  She isn’t learning a lesson.  She imparts lessons on people who should, by all accounts, have a far better understanding of these problems than her.  Gregor – a war veteran and a member of one of the merchant houses, who left his cushy life behind to help bring order and security to the slums of Tevanne – somehow has his entire perspective of the world shattered by a revelation that he shouldn’t have needed to have.  This leads to him declaring that, rather than changing the system from within, he’d burn it all to the ground.  It’s a moment that is meant to be momentous, yet it just fell flat.

I don’t think that any of the messages within this story are all that controversial.  Unless you’re burned out from all preaching to the audience that Hollywood has done lately, you probably won’t be put off by their inclusion in the story.  I just feel like Bennett should have had more faith in his own handiwork and not resorted to grabbing the audience by the ear like this.

How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?

Remember how I said that the voices of the characters are mostly distinct?  I stand by that.  In fact, that’s the reason why Sancia and Berenice talking like Millennials baffles me.

This only happens in a few scenes, and it only lasts for a few lines of dialogue when it does.  However, when those moments did hit, my immersion just … fizzled.  It was weird and kind of uncomfortable.  I don’t know if it was the phrasing or just the way the characters were reacting to events.  I just know that, for a few disorienting moments, I wasn’t experiencing a story; I was listening to a line delivered by some young woman on TikTok.

I haven’t read any of Bennett’s other works, so I have no idea if this is something that has surfaced before.  This is the first book of the series, though.  I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’s buffed out these odd moments in future installments of the series.

Setups & Payoffs

The antagonist’s master plan was not properly foreshadowed.  Sancia just jumps to a rather wild conclusion right before the climax, and she happens to be right.  The element in question was introduced in the opening of the book.  Chekov’s Gun does technically apply.  However, with everything established in the story up to that point, there wasn’t a clear reason for Sancia to actually grab that gun.  It made the climax feel a bit tacked-on.

Content Warning

While this isn’t an objective literary criticism, I did want to highlight something that strongly affected my reading experience: the sexual content, or more specifically, the execution of that sexual content.  If you don’t care about this sort of thing, feel free to skip to the next section.

When authors write a book, they inevitably put themselves into their work.  That’s why Voice is such a buzzword in the publishing community.  Unless an author goes out of the way to scrub every bit of personal perspective from a story, we are going to learn something about the author’s world view, interests, and preferences.  Every word choice and line within the story was deliberately put there by the author, so everything was either really important for them to include, or it was something that author didn’t realize was irrelevant.

How does this play into the sexual content of Foundryside?

Well, it doesn’t serve the plot or world.  An argument could be made that it serves character, but the goals achieved in this way were so superficial that almost anything else could have accomplished that same goal.  If we already know a character is an antagonist, an unsavory person, and that his wife is unhappy in their marriage, watching him cheat on said wife isn’t telling us anything new.

Every sex act; every detail during those acts; every act of actual, attempted, or implied sexual assault; and every moment of nudity was included because the author really wanted us to experience it, not because it contributed anything.  This is particularly unnerving when one considers that Sancia (the character on the receiving end of the actual and attempted assaults) seems to be either underage or barely of legal age.  Her romantic interest, Berenice, is presented as being the same age as her, so even though nothing happens with them outside of a kiss, I am filled with the disquieting sense that their romance is buildup for a sexual fantasy about underage girls.  (One of those awkward dialogue moments I mentioned was Berenice and Sancia flirting, so in retrospect, the Millennial characterization supports the idea that this was plucked from a personal fantasy with little revision.)

My goal here is not to defame Bennett.  Again, I fully acknowledge that not everyone is going to care about this, and not everyone who does will have the same reaction.  This isn’t something that affects the objective quality of the work (and thus, it’s not factored into my rating).

However, the sexual content did leave me profoundly unsettled.  I’m honestly not comfortable reading the sequels, no matter how good they probably are.  There’s simply no reason to believe that an established author like Bennett would change gears on this sort of thing midway through a series.

LESSONS LEARNED

Pace the Exposition

Bennett had to build an intricate world with a hard magic system from the ground up.  There was every chance that he could have overwhelmed the audience with info dumps.  Instead, he delivered the exposition in small, relevant packets that were easy to digest.  I’m not going to pretend that every block of exposition was perfect.  A few were honestly quite clunky.  However, the execution as a whole is worthy of emulation.

Trust Your Work to Speak for You

I really wish Bennett had just let his world speak for itself, rather than having Sancia stop the plot to preach.  He was doing so well.  As soon as Sancia had her moment (which is practically dead-center within the page count), a lot of my excitement was deflated.  Gregor’s declaration of revolution only made things worse.

Given how the commentary on the dehumanizing power of technology landed much better, this book seems like a good example of how a theme can be bluntly presented to the audience if it is integral to the advancement of the plot.  It’s only when it’s in the background that it shouldn’t be given unnecessary attention.

Again, this may not bother people as much as it does me.  I have my personal philosophy to writing these things.  While I feel like this book has validated my perspective, perhaps others will find the blunt honesty refreshing.

Let Your Protagonist Learn a Lesson

One think that I think would have made the world-based themes land better is if Sancia learned something in the story that made her grow as a person.  That way, she wouldn’t be a morally flawless protagonist educating the audience.  We could have learned the lessons with her.

A good way to do this would have been through Gregor.  Bennett could have tweaked and built upon Gregor’s declaration of revolution.  Rather than having his worldview shattered by the revelation of the plantations, Gregor could use his new knowledge of Sancia’s background to try to win her over to his cause, to persuade her to help him change the city.  Sancia could refuse, but after the action scene that comes between that first scene and Gregor’s declaration, she could realize how important Gregor’s dream is and accept that working for him will make the world a better place.  The messages would still be on-the-nose, but at least their bluntness would be supported by being part of a character arc.

Make Sure Chekov’s Gun is Loaded

If a bigger deal had been made about the thing that Sancia used to figure out the antagonist’s plan, I don’t think I’d have had an issue with the revelation.  It just needed a bit more focus.  If you have a big twist in your story, make sure to ask your beta-readers if they were at all confused by it or if they’d forgotten the setup.

RATING: 9/10

This book was a positive experience overall.  Bennett’s a great writer.  The things I didn’t like were a matter of taste or were outweighed by the things that worked really, really well.  It’s a book full of important lessons for writers, most of which are born not out of setting a bad example to be dissected but by setting a good example to be emulated.