(There is one exceedingly general SPOILER in this for the series as a whole, that I can’t imagine would prevent anyone from enjoying these. The comment section for this post should be regarded as a free-fire zone for all the spoilers anyone may want, though, so enter it with caution.)
I honestly don’t remember any more whether I read Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs first, and then started following him on Twitter, or the other way around. Either is plausible— the Divine Cities trilogy is excellent and put him on my “buy on sight” list, and he’s a good follow, tweeting out a nice mix of weird jokes and topical commentary.
One of the things I like about him as a Twitter-er is that he’s in the smallish group of people who tweet a lot about climate issues without tipping into doomerism. That’s not to say that he dismisses or downplays the subject, but that when there’s good news— growth in renewables, reductions in emissions— he reports it as good news and not slightly-less-bad-but-not-good-enough news. He doesn’t shy away from the grim bits, but manages to convey a sense of hope for the future at the same time.
That’s also a pretty fair description of the two series of novels that I’ve read. Both stories involve people battling against genuinely existential threats— that is, against god-level entities— and paying a price for it, but succeeding in the end. When I tested positive for Covid the other day, I joked that I was going to finish his most recent book, Locklands for the emotional uplift, which is a joke in that the book has some real gut-punch moments in it, but I was also pretty confident that it would end in a good place, and I was right.
This is the concluding volume to the Founders trilogy, which starts with Foundryside, and is set in a world where the laws of nature can be temporarily overwritten through “scriving,” writing commands on them (or on small bit of metal that are then affixed to the object of interest) in an arcane languages. So, for example, heavy objects can be made to float by scriving them to believe that their denisty is fraction of its normal value, and thieves can fly across large gaps using a “line shot” that convinces an item on their body that it is, in fact, a part of a crossbow bolt shot into the target, and needs to be over there right now.
The main protagonist of the series is Sancia, a thief working in the squalid slums of Old Tevanne, who as a slave to one of the wealthy families that rule the empire was modified in a grossly unethical medical procedure so that she can see and interact with scrivings. She comes into possession of a magical key, a tool of the ancient hierophant Crasedes Magnus, who wielded powers vastly beyond those of modern scrivers. The key is conscious, going by “Clef,” and can override essentially any scriving, and he and Sancia set out to change the world. Or at least to stop the shadowy forces that want to bring back Crasedes from changing it in their preferred manner.
These are very innovative books, in terms of the magic system and the cosmology it implies, and Bennett has worked out tons of details in a very clever way. They’re also pretty grim— each book ends with a success of sorts for Sancia and her friends, but sometimes success is just as simple as “Not Dying.” The third book in particular opens with a really scary existential threat that is a direct consequence of past successes, and that only gets more existential when you find out what the Big Bad’s true plan is.
At the same time, the protagonists maintain a flicker of hope, and a sense of boundless creativity taking them in directions that the villians simply can’t comprehend. Which allows to book to, as I predicted, end in a good place that feels wholly earned. Maybe I’m just feverish, but the epilogue genuinely did feel uplifting to me, which is quite the accomplishment.
The magic system is complicated enough that the first book might take a while to get into, but the world is richly detailed, and the characters have real depth. The big set-pieces of the books— heists and battles and heists during battles— also really pop off the page in a fun way so it’s well worth the effort. The third book in particular start off with a bang and never really slows down.
Given the nature of the Big Bad here, it would be depressingly easy to cast the whole thing as a tedious allegory for modern world politics, but I think that’s a little too glib. Bennett feels like he’s reaching for something deeper about the nature of humanity and our relationship to the world, and I think he mostly gets there. I am definitely too feverish to coherently explain what I think it is, though— this may be an “a smell of petroleum pervades throughout” situation— so you’ll just have to read it for yourself.
Highly recommended.
If you want to see whether I lapse into truly deranged ravings over the next few days, here’s a button you can click:
If you’ve read these and would like to comment on them, the comments will be open, and should be considered a free-fire zone for SPOILERS.