“People, though, and living things… their sense of self is… complicated. Mutable. It changes. People don’t think of themselves as just a bag of flesh and blood and bones, even if that’s basically what they are. They think of themselves as soldiers, as kings, as wives and husbands and children. People can convince themselves to be anything, and because of that […] To try to bind a person is like writing in the ocean.”
-Foundryside, by Robert Jackson Bennett
I would not have immediately expected a novel about magic thievery to become one of the most impactful conversations on technology and identity of the past few years, but then that revelation is only one of many I found between the pages of Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside. Wrapped in a veneer of thrilling heights and claustrophobic pipes, slinking past enchanted bolts and under poison darts, and whispered from a city filled of thinking, neurotic objects under the gilded thumbs of domineering merchant houses is a story about human will and legacy, and the tools we invent to carve each into ourselves and others.
In the city of Tevanne, objects are enhanced through the process of scriving—the carving of sigils that rewrite how that objects interacts with reality. Tevanne is full of them, from scrived lights that hover like artificial suns to scrived weapons that fire preternaturally (a word I learned from this book! Aside…) fast or accurate. From these inventions come the wealth and power of the merchant houses, and the wastes which lay out in their slave plantations and the unprotected areas of the city. From the depths of this poverty and misery comes out protagonist, Sancia Grotto, a thief whose powers allow her the ability to literally feel through her environments and who later acquires and ally, an object, that lets her hear scrivings and argue against them.
From all of this comes a rather clever, stunning, and chilling indictment not only of general capitalism itself, but specifically of the kind on the rise all around us. There is little but semantic difference between the grand merchant houses of Morsini and Dandolo, whose wealth is built atop the ability to alter reality itself from behind walls rendering them immune to most of the consequences of their meddling, and the real life tech companies now fiddling with, among other things, AI Art and self-driving cars, and who have engineered one of the greatest changes in social interaction witnessed by any generation. When one pulls the curtain back on scriving, or technology, and sees that what lies beneath is nothing but a series of commands put there by a person forging a new reality, and then finds the easily manipulated errors not only in argument but in execution, there is a guttural sense of fright.
When one sees these things applied to people, we have downright horror.
As one Tribuno Candiano describes in text:
“What goes forgotten, though, is that those who partake in this system undergo a similar transformation: people begin as comrades and fellow citizens, then become labor resources and assets, and then, as their utility shifts or degrades, transmute into liabilities, and thus must be appropriately managed. […] We should harbor no guilt for complying with those laws—even if they sometimes require a little inhumanity.”
Foundryside is by no means the first story to tackle a kind of individual heroism against systematic oppression, though it is perhaps one of the more successful at highlighting the willingness of those within the system, especially those empowered and enriched by it, to forgo challenging it even as they become victims themselves. It is something that exists at all levels, from Sancia herself never regarding scriving as imbuing objects with a kind of mind, to the champion of justice in the story, Gregor Dandolo, consistently and somewhat unjustly pursued by the legacy of his family’s name. That kind of bland acceptance, toxic apathy, and supremely depressed reservation hangs low over the story even through its most triumphant moments. It is emboldened at once by the admission that in a world where reality itself can be altered, reality doesn’t matter, and in the next breath challenged by the simplest of concepts:
Changing one’s mind.
It is, of course, tempting for me to take a road which leads to parallels between Bioshock and then further on to something like the works of Ayn Rand. The prior raises the same questions regarding the difference between a man and a slave, and the latter raises the ultimate flawed argument about the championing of the individual. Foundryside walks a beautiful line through those arguments, spinning through webs of identity questions and the glares of imperialism and capitalism with the grace of its thieving protagonist. What Bennett presents is thoughtful care of individuals as a solution to the system problems of a world that convinces its citizens they are themselves part of a greater, society wide device.
They key to it all, if you will?: “Move thoughtfully, give freedom to others, and you’ll rarely do wrong.”
All this before even discussing the writing itself. There is a comforting, authoritative voice about Foundryside. The thieving itself plays out brilliantly, and it is certainly a story that rewards your paying attention. Planting and payoff are dance partners through a whirlwind of imaginative and endlessly layered sets, and through the story itself. Scriving as a magic system rewards and enchants the imagination—not only for its ability to alter reality but for the tools it gives the reader in trying to figure out how they would solve the problems presented to the characters. That is no small feat and the mark of a well constructed magical world, and another strong mark in my wanting to continue the series.
The characters and their repartee are living things, beautifully rendered not only in their thoughtful, or even thoughtless, conversations on reality, purpose, and humanity, but also in their vulnerability and fear. If there is one critique I have, it would be on the pacing of one romantic subplot, which felt at once quick and somewhat out of place. Everything and everyone else plays out on a grand scale, immaculately constructed and living in this ambitious, mercantile world threatening to make objects of them all.
It is those thoughts which linger when one finishes Foundryside. To emerge from the tavernas and campos and come back to a world we ourselves are shaping and reshaping everyday, to say nothing the identities we make for ourselves and others, makes us question, as Sancia does, where we find our living and our liberty. What systems are we upholding, and how much do we really understand about even the everyday objects that uphold our way of life? Whence our power, and whence our agency?
And if our answers unsettle us, well…
“’So now, today, I think about responsibilities.’ He looked out at the cityscape of Tevanne. ‘It won’t change on its own, will it?’”