Foundryside

Foundryside is the first book in the Founders trilogy from Robert Jackson Bennett. I proposed this for SFFBookClub a long while back and put it on the poll, but it wasn't picked.

It's set in an early industrial era fantasy world in the city of Tevanne. This is definitely a book about capitalism (and also slavery, in the backstory), and Tevanne is split into various merchant house enclaves which each fully run their own private walled sections of the city. Anybody not in one of these campos is literally living in the margins, without any structural support or infrastructure. One of my friends described it as feeling a lot like Murderbot's Corporation Rim. (Although any Preservation analogue doesn't really show up for another book or maybe two.)

On its surface, I think this book should appeal to fans of Brandon Sanderson, in the sense that it has a deeply explored magic system. Foundryside's magical scriving inscriptions create a fantasy cyberpunk of programmers, hackers, and magical rules lawyering. Wheels can be scrived to move forward by convincing them that they are on a hill. You can do action at a distance by scriving two objects to believe they are the same thing. That's just chapter one.

Talking of, chapter one is an incredible start, with the thief Sancia on a heist in the waterfront; for reasons, she has an ability to understand these scrivings as well as objects by touching them with her bare skin. (This has some perhaps obvious costs for her and initially feels like it almost could be a sex-averse/ace note, even if the story goes in different directions.)

If the magic system were only there in service of action and heists, this book would still be great fun. But, more than any other series I've read, it does an incredible job of escalating its ideas towards a very different world in the final book. It's very funny to compare the first few chapters of book one and book three in retrospect. It seems like the kind of place that you can only build towards rather than start from.

I think if there's a weak part to this book in particular, it's the characterization of the overall cast. Sancia is the star of this book and gets her big backstory reveal, but Berenice and Gregor have to wait for their arcs in later books and feel very one note here. Orso in particular feels like he goes from asshole to being on side with particular speed. Similarly, Gregor who is trying to catch Sancia the thief (who was ultimately stealing from Orso), ends up also quickly working together with her. There's also a minor romance element here that also feels a little surprising; it gets a lot more text and impact in later books, but here there's not much to go on in book one, even to my eyes. None of these things are unbelievable or jarring, I just want a little bit more text to support these shifts; you could argue the characterization takes a little bit of a back seat to the action and worldbuilding.

However, as much as I want more from the supporting cast, I think Sancia gets an incredible arc here. Her backstory, the climactic reveal about the plate in her head, all combined with the world itself and her self-image? An incredible moment.

As a warning, the book does end on—I wouldn't call it a cliffhanger—so much as a solving the immediate problem while many complications for the future are deployed. I think you could end here if you wanted a taste of the world and the immediate plot wrapped up, but it leaves plenty of wrinkle for the future.