Writing that Alters Reality

[mtvessel]

Apr 2020
Foundryside - Robert Jackson Bennett - Jo Fletcher Books, 2018 (ebook edition)
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Maybe it's just my particular sampling, but an awful lot of recent fantasy works seem to have had female thieves, rogues or assassins as lead characters. Some examples: Brandon Sanderson's Vin in the Mistborn novels, S.A. Chakraborty's Nahri, P. Djeli Clark's Creeper, V.E. Schwab's Lila in A Darker Shade of Magic, A.K. Larkwood's Csorwe (review forthcoming!) and Lila Bellaqua from His Dark Materials. I find this a bit depressing. I get that in a traditionally male-dominated mediaeval fantasy environment, making a female protagonist a small-time crook is one of the few ways to give her both freedom and agency whilst allowing for the inevitable "special destiny" plot development, but shouldn't we be starting to tell different stories by now? It says something for the small numbers of roles that women are permitted in big commercial fantasies that the only female equivalents of Gandalf that I can think of in terms of power and accorded respect are Galadriel, Granny Weatherwax and David Eddings' Polgara, for goodness' sake. And stories with female knightly or amazonian protagonists aren't exactly two-a-penny either. Making your female protagonist small and weak might be a way of encouraging reader sympathy, but it's a subtle form of misogyny.

Well, tough luck, because here's yet another one - Robert Jackson Bennett's Sancia in his new "Founders" trilogy. Fortunately, Bennett's talent for hitting on good fantasy ideas has struck again, and makes this book an enjoyable and compelling read.

The good idea is scriving, which takes the base concept of spells as words that alter reality and industrialises it. Symbols written or carved on objects "persuades" them to act in ways that they would not naturally do. For example, a plate and a rod can be persuaded that they are in fact one object, which will cause them to fly together when one of them is activated by bringing two parts of a scriving together. To create more complex behaviours such as self-powered coaches, scriving symbols need to be combined and held in complex and delicate devices called lexicons, which essentially power nearby scrived objects. And lexicons are created and maintained by the merchant houses of Tevane, which are run by some very dubious people.

The novel opens with a tediously conventional "too good to be true" heist, in which Sancia is offered a lot of money to steal a box from a waterfront dock which she does using a range of scrived tools. Despite the lame cliché, it's an effective introduction to the world and Sancia does at least have a good reason for wanting to become rich - she is cursed (as she sees it) with the ability to "hear" the scrivings on any object that she touches, and she needs to pay a specialist to make it stop. The setup also neatly introduces Gregor Dandolo, a scion of a merchant house who is trying to set up a functioning police force and who gets involved when Sancia's scheme inevitably goes sideways.

I should say that the plot becomes a lot less predictable after that. Both Sancia and Gregor reveal hidden depths and other entertaining characters are quickly introduced including a mad genius lexicon developer called Orso and his sensible assistant Bernice. Sancia also acquires a delightful sidekick called Clef, but I don't want to give away too much about him. There are plenty of good action scenes and the ideas around scriving are neatly developed. The baddies are a little one--dimensional and the magic is a little systemless, but otherwise it's a thoroughly enjoyable fantasy with elements of cyberpunk. It's a shame that this is the start of a trilogy as I rather suspect that, like his Divine Cities trio, Bennett will have difficulty elaborating the magical system for two more books. But the characters are engaging and it would be nice to spend more time with them.

Comments

[ingaborg]

Thank you, an interesting and thought provoking review.