Locklands

This is the final book in the Founders trilogy. What an escalation of the concepts from the previous ones!

Eight years have passed and the world is now at war. It's not just a shift in tone from heist to wartime, but the world and the characters have also deeply changed. There's an immediate introduction to new concepts like deadlamps, thumpers, path plates, purge sticks. Without the previous books, this would all feel like a lot, but all of these innovations make logical sense as extensions of previous concepts.

The part of the book that sticks with me the most is when everybody returns to Giva after the first scene and are introduced to Greeter. Greeter is a "cadence" of a group of people who have chosen to merge mentally into a single identity while sharing multiple bodies. To me, Greeter and the other cadences are the heart of the novel. They represent connectedness with others, empathy, and sharing of perspective, joy, and even pain. It's what makes purge sticks that permanently prevent people from such connectedness such a tragic cure. Even the weapon of choice in the final climactic moment is connection to other people's pain.

The weakest part of this book for me is the changing characterization of Crasedes. He goes from the ultimate villain in book two to having much murkier motivations here, and it feels all too quick. I think it's possible that some of this ambiguity is meant to create tension, to parallel book two where everybody is working with Valeria even though they are suspicious of her. Maybe he's just having ptsd from his time in the contraption, but it's still surprising as a reader to hear him admit that he's just too tired to keep pursuing his goals. I think it would have helped me to have a bit more text around his interiority.

This book also gets into the final bits of Clef, Crasedes, and even Valeria's backstory. The story wraps up all of their threads together with a great sense of closure in a satisfying way. I wish I was a bit more grabbed by this plot line, but part of the issue is that my heart is always with the Sancia/Berenice/Giva one.

“No clever man with a clever tool is going to touch down on this cursed earth and make it all aright, despite all your wishing!” [...] “A better world can only be brought by what we give to one another, and nothing more.

To me, this conversation feels like the thesis of the entire series, and the continuation of the thoughts that he began with the Divine Cities trilogy.

This is obvious to notice in retrospect, but Locklands was Robert Jackson Bennett's covid-19 novel. He talks about this quite a bit in the author's notes, but it's hard not to see the parallels between the book and real life where technology was not sufficient. At least for me, this connection is part of why this novel is one that sticks with me.