Locklands by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by ‎ Del Rey on June 28, 2022

Locklands is the concluding novel of the Founders trilogy, following Foundryside and Shorefall. The central characters have established a new settlement called Giva that they enshroud in fog as they advance their war with Tevanne, trying to save as many people from conquest and slavery as they can. None of this will make much sense to readers who jump into Locklands without reading the first two novels.

Using the magic/technology of scriving, key characters are “twinned” with each other, sharing their thoughts as if they were inhabiting the same body. The same scriving allows multiple characters to join in something like a group chat. This might be the only way that people can truly understand each other and thus the only way to overcome mindless hate. Unfortunately, scriving only exists in fantasy.

We learn more in Locklands about the relationship between Clef and his son Crasedes, a father-son tragedy that departs from literary tradition by basin gtheir conflict on the desire to alter reality (although, in a less literal sense, that might be something that underlies most parental-child conflicts). Building on that foundation, Tevanne now wants to open a door into the substructure of reality, the boiler room holding the machinery that defines the reality we perceive. Tevanne’s plan is to force a reboot with the expectation that God will do it right the second time. Wiping out reality as a solution to humanity’s problems seems extreme, but Tevanne is one of the hierophants who shaped the current reality with scriving so he has a bit of a god complex.

The plot is an action/quest story that has central characters (led by Sancia, the first significant character we meet in the trilogy) venturing into battle to thwart Tevanne’s plan. The novel ends with an epic battle between Clef, Crasedes, and Tevanne. Other characters step into the battle as needed to secure a victory. Despite bogging down from time to time, the story reaches a satisfying conclusion.

Most central characters undergo a transformation over the course of the trilogy. Crasedes, who starts as more of a legend than an actual character, is given a meaningful role in Locklands, a role that has him seeking atonement. Clef starts the trilogy as a sentient but sleeping key, turns into a more substantial character who can’t remember much of his past, and regains those memories (for better or worse) in Locklands. Clef’s story is also one of atonement.

The need to sacrifice for the greater good is a constant theme in the trilogy. Several characters make sacrifices in Locklands: Beatrice, Sancia’s lover and partner, sacrifices the architecture of her relationship with Sancia; Sancia, who sacrificed some years from her life in the last novel, joins Clef in making a life-altering sacrifice that seems to have been destined since the first novel.

The grand lesson of this trilogy is that love conquers all — or more specifically, that we can’t fix the world by meddling with reality because “a better world can only be brought by what we give to one another, and nothing more.” A debatable proposition, but it’s fair to say that destroying reality and hoping God will build a better one isn’t a smart solution to humanity’s problems.

Characters have an annoying tendency to say “Oh no. Oh, no, no, no” every time they face adversity. The novel has too many hokey moments as characters embrace and profess their love before stepping into danger. The book is needlessly wordy, perhaps a hundred pages longer than it needs to be, but it does bring the trilogy to an exciting conclusion.

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In the Shadows of Men by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by Subterranean on August 31, 2020

Science fiction, fantasy, and horror all tend to be shelved together in bookstores, although they are distinct genres. Robert Bennett Jackson is one of the best at blending the genres together. His recent novels have been fantasies with elements of science fiction, but In the Shadows of Men is best categorized as a horror novella.

The story is of two brothers, one of whom becomes obsessed and perhaps possessed by evil. Narrating the tale is the younger Pugh brother. He calls his older brother Bear. If the narrator’s first name is revealed, I missed it.

Bear and his brother had an abusive father. Bear took the larger share of the abuse. The narrator was living in Houston when Bear asked him to come to Coahora, a dried-up Texas town that is seeing a new life due to fracking. The narrator’s wife left him, he feels trapped, so Coahora seems as good as any other place in which to disappear.

Bear bought a motel from a cousin who inherited it from Corbin Pugh, an uncle of Bear’s father. Bear thinks he can fix up the motel and cash in on transient workers until the fracking moves elsewhere. The narrator agrees to help because he has nothing else to do. Before much time passes, the sheriff pays a visit and tells them that Corbin operated the motel as a house of ill repute, importing Mexican girls to serve the local men.

In the tradition of horror novels, spooky things begin to happen. They find a hatch in one of the motel rooms but they can’t unlock it. They hear voices and an old Merle Haggard song. The narrator sees apparitions and hears girls crying. Bear begins to behave irresponsibly and then gets a bit whacky. The narrator is eventually drawn into the good-versus-evil conflict that is so often central to Bennett’s work. The story’s suspense comes from the fear that evil will overtake the narrator before he can save an innocent victim and — perhaps — save his brother.

Since these are all standard horror elements, I can’t say that there is anything surprising about the story, although it delivers some chilling moments. Bennett’s strength is his characterization. While there aren’t many characters, he does a sufficiently deep dive into the narrator’s psyche that it’s easy to feel sympathetic when the brother-against-brother theme reaches its denouement.

At this point, Subterranean has made In the Shadows of Men available as a fairly pricey deluxe edition hardcover. I don’t take price into account when I make recommendations, but buyers might want to take it into account when deciding how much they want to pay for a novella. The price point is appropriate for collectors and affluent Bennett fans. Other readers might hope that it eventually becomes available in a more affordable format. In any event, the story is one that horror fans and Bennett fans will likely appreciate, even if it lacks the substance of Bennett’s longer work.

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Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by Del Rey on April 21, 2020

My objection to most fantasy novels is that writers too easily resort to magic (or godlike powers) to make things happen for the convenient purpose of advancing the plot. Robert Jackson Bennett, on the other hand, is scrupulous about creating rules that govern the universes he creates. Bennett's rules are the analog of the laws of physics in our universe.

In the Founders trilogy (of which Shorefall is the second installment), reality is affected by scrivings that trick objects into believing that the rules are something other than they would otherwise be. Objects float because they are told that gravity makes them rise rather than fall. Wheels turn without propulsion because scrivings convince them that turning is what wheels do. The instructions that give definitions to scrivings are stored in large devices known as lexicons. How mere humans came to learn about scriving is not entirely clear at this point, but the explanation appears to be unfolding.

Foundryside ended with its protagonist, Sansia Grado, facing a perilous future. The peril heightens in Shorefall as Crasedes Magnus — perhaps the first of the long-vanished hierophants and known to some as the Maker — travels to Tevanne, the city-state in which the Foundries operate. Crasedes plans to take control of the lexicons to restore his ability to remake reality to suit his purposes. To do that, he must overcome another godlike being, a powerful “construct” known as Valeria whose scrived permissions restrain her from confronting Crasedes directly. Crasedes gets an initial assist from Ofelia Dondalo, Gregor's conflicted mother.

Gregor's heroism in Foundryside finds new expression in Shorefall. Gregor’s mommy issues are reflected in other characters who have difficult parents, although the novel’s biggest surprise involves a key character from Foundryside who is dismayed to discover that he has a troublesome child. (You need to read Foundryside to catch the pun in the last sentence.)

Sansia, Berenice Grimaldi, Orso Ignacio, and Gregor Dandalo are the primary returning characters from Foundryside. Each grows in his or her own way. Each confronts adversity, gains strength, and finds a way to cope. The heroes in Bennett’s novels always remind readers of the need to place the common good ahead of their own desires — a message that resonates in these troubled times. While all the heroes in Shorefall risk their lives repeatedly for the welfare of the world they know, a couple of characters engage in acts of self-sacrifice that will change them, or end them, because they see no other choice. One reason I keep coming back to Bennett is that he makes me feel good about the human race, even if his humans live in a different universe.

There is usually a moral conflict in a Jackson novel. Shorefall presents two views of how power might be used. One powerful character wants to make the world a better place by taking control of humans and directing them toward pursuits that do not involve violence or corruption, a sort of benevolent enslavement. A competing powerful character wants to make the world a better place by taking away scriving, which would prevent the owners of lexicons from exploiting everyone else, although a few million people would die when everything collapses. Both powerful beings believe they have good intentions, but their laudable ends may not justify such destructive means.

Despite its philosophical underpinnings, Shorefall offers abundant action. I admire Jackson’s ability to create imaginative problems that can only be overcome by devising clever but dangerous solutions. Shorefall doesn’t exactly end on a cliffhanger, but the resolution creates a temporary lull in a larger story that will continue in the final novel. Jackson and his publisher made me wait twenty agonizing months for the second novel after the first one was published. I hope we don’t have to wait as long for the last one.

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Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by Crown on August 21, 2018

I read a fair amount of science fiction but not much fantasy. At the first whiff of dragons or magic, I usually find something else to read, but some writers (J.K. Rowling, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J.R.R. Tolkien) wield their own kind of magic by turning fantasy into a reality that the reader readily accepts. Robert Jackson Bennett is one of those writers. Bennett is a master of building worlds that defy our current understanding of physics, while operating in a realm of perfectly ordered rules that seem entirely plausible, even if they aren’t the rules that govern our own universe. His careful world-building makes Bennett one of the best of the current fantasists — that, and his ability to create sympathetic and principled characters who wage epic battles against the kinds of evil that are recognizable in our own universe.

Foundryside shares some similarities with Bennett’s excellent Divine Cities trilogy — primarily in a setting that seems to be drawn from the Middle Ages — but the element of magic in Divine Cities was based on divinities (entities with godlike powers), while Foundryside (the first installment of the Founders trilogy) makes use of industrial magic, or magic that has been harnessed for industrial purposes, to the profit of the four merchant houses that control it.

Bennett sets Foundryside on an Earth-like world in which sigils do the work of technology. The scriving (drawing or inscribing) of sigils onto an object convinces the object to accept a different reality: wood believes it is stone, wheels turn because they believe they are on a downhill slope. Sigils were apparently created by hierophants of the Occidentals, a long-dead civilization thought by some to be equivalent of angels. The merchant houses manufacture the scrived devices, which pretty much belong to the affluent and powerful. The Tevanni empire is based on the power of scriving, which might be the equivalent of machine code in the world of technology.

It is against that background that we meet Sancio Grado, a thief whose particular talent is the ability to touch inanimate objects and to know them — where they’ve been, how they are structured. She can pick a lock or open a safe because locks speak to her. She can touch a hand to the floor and picture the entire building. The power comes with a heavy price, and her goal is to gain enough money to rid herself of the talent, which comes from sigils on a plate that is implanted in her skull.

The story begins with Sancio stealing a small box for a client. Succumbing to her curiosity, she opens the box and finds a key. They key has a consciousness, a snarky personality that it reveals by speaking to her telepathically. The key’s name is Clef.

The man in charge of security, who should have been protecting the stolen key, is Gregor Dandolo. Sancio is the novel’s protagonist, but Gregor is the novel’s selfless hero. Other important character are Gregor’s power-driver mother, a scriving genius for the Dandolo house named Orso Ignacio, his less self-centered assistant Berenice, a few freelance scrivers, and a true force of evil (whose identity the reader must discover). The plot is too complex to summarize, but it essentially involves the reader in Sancio’s perilous adventures as she tries to prevent something really bad from happening while coming to terms with her true nature.

Foundryside might be seen as a cautionary tale of the risks associated with artificial intelligence and transhuman existence. When people build a god (in the sense of a self-aware superior being), and then look for ways to make themselves in their god’s image, they might become as capricious as gods are reputed to be.

Or Foundryside might be seen as taking on the enduring themes that are common in Bennett’s work: the misuse of wealth and power; the importance of freedom and of freeing the subjugated; the internal battles that people wage to find and maintain their better selves. His main theme in Foundryside is: “Any given innovation that empowers the individual will inevitably come to empower the powerful much, much more.” Bennett always stuffs a good mixture of action and contemplation into his novels, and the good news is that there are two more to come. I didn’t love Foundryside quite as much as the Divine Cities trilogy, but I enjoyed every page.

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City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by Broadway Books on May 2, 2017

Epic fantasy almost always follows a well-established path. A heroic figure embarks on a quest to overcome a force of evil. I don’t read much modern epic fantasy because so much of it is predictable and boring. But whatever genre Robert Jackson Bennett chooses (he often straddles fantasy and science fiction), I read his work with great anticipation because he is never predictable.

City of Miracles is the third novel in an excellent trilogy. It seemed to me that the first novel was so good, there was no need for a second. I enjoyed it but I felt a bit let down because the characters and setting were no longer fresh and startling. Still, as soon as I started reading City of Miracles, I was swept up in the sense of wonder that enveloped me as I read City of Stairs. Part of that stems from the novel’s focus on Sigrud, one of Robert Bennett Jackson’s most complex characters and by far my favorite in the trilogy.

Shara Komayd has not been prime minister for ten years, but she still has enemies. City of Miracles opens with her assassination — the first of many surprising elements in story — the news of which deeply disturbs Sigrud. Naturally, he vows to find the killer. That leads him back into the quest established in the first novel and advanced in the second: to overcome the divine entities that pose a threat to humanity’s future.

There shouldn’t be many divine entities left after the first two novels, but it turns out that the divinities had children, and there are any number of those, although the most powerful of them wants to wipe out the rest and absorb their power, strengthening his ability to expand his realm (nighttime itself) until nothing is left that is warm and light and, well, alive.

Along the way, Sigrud fights the requisite battles that an epic hero must face, but the interesting thing about Sigrud is how he changes over the course of the trilogy. In part, the change is physical — something happened earlier in his life that (as the reader will have noticed in the last book) gives Sigrud an improbable ability to overcome divine obstacles — but he also changes emotionally as he struggles with his past, his pain, his dark nature, the death of his daughter, the death of Shara, his sense that he has never been free to define his own identity, and his uncertainty about the identity he would want to define if given a choice. Sigrud describes himself as “a man whose moments are little more than slit throats, and sorrow, and skulking in the dark.” He is an unlikely epic hero, but he is also selfless and duty-bound, a man whose means are at war with his ends. Bennett always creates strong characters, but the conflicted Sigrud is one of his best.

City of Miracles is an excellent action/adventure novel. On another level, it can be read as an allegory about the isolation of abandoned or abused or orphaned children, about the consequences of failing to provide them with stability and guidance. And it is a novel of epic themes:  the need to let go of grievances before they become all-consuming; the difference between justice and vengeance; the eternal struggle of the privileged few to control the masses; the desire to defeat time; the meaning of freedom and happiness; the remarkable ability of humans (and deities) to destroy just about anything that’s good.

By removing the story from the political quarrels that impair clarity of thought, science fiction and fantasy can use a world (or time) that is not our own to shed light on the failings and virtues of the world (or time) that is our own.  Bennett uses that opportunity to say something important about our world and our lives by directing our attention to a fictional world that is very different from, but significantly similar to, the world that humans are always trying so hard to destroy.

The first book in the trilogy was so good that I was almost sorry to see it continue. Having read the third book, I’m sorry to see it end.

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