Book Review: The Founders Series

The last book in the Founders series by Robert Jackson Bennet is finally out in paperback! The first book, Foundryside, is a fantastic, exciting read with sympathetic characters involved in heists, fights, and spying all in a techno-magic cyberpunk world. Sancia, the central character, is an excellent thief in a dystopian city ruled by merchant class clans. You either work for a clan or you live in the slums. The clans control all the magic which is based on “scrivings” or writing that can convince inanimate objects that a different reality exists. For example carriage wheels are scrived to think they are always going down hill, thus they roll until given the order to stop. The book has Sancia on a mission to steal a box from one merchant house for another. Instead she opens the box which contains an object that changes everything for this world. The rest of the book involves Sancia trying to survive. Although the first book can stand alone, I welcomed the second book, Shorefall, as a chance to revisit the snarky Sancia, the handsome Captain Danolo, and the object in the box. In the second book, it is not just Sancia’s survival at stake, it is the entire world. In the past, techno-magic was so advanced that anyone controlling it controlled the nature of reality itself. With the proper scriving you could convince any inanimate object that up was down and thus could fly, that stone was wood and thus could burn. Now the ancient inventor of that magic, Crasedes Magnus, might return and destroy the world as he did before.

Robert Bennett’s books, like the best of the fantasy/sci fi genre can be seen as an interpretation of our world. The two books I have read in this series ask questions about the nature of humanity, the place of technology, artificial intelligence and the nature of freedom. That takes them beyond the exciting, fun romp into another world. I am looking forward to reading the third book. In fact I’m off to buy it right now!

If you’d like to pick up a copy locally, you can stop in at our own cyberpunk dystopia that is Artefaktual Comics in Philippi, WV!