Readers of the final volume of Robert J. Bennett’s Founders Trilogy, Locklands, might expect a return to Tevanne, the dockside metropolis of warring merchant houses that Bennett crafted in meticulous economic, technological, and logistical detail during the first two volumes, Foundryside (2018) and Shorefall (2020). Tevanne’s four scheming dynasties have monopolised the magic known as “scriving,” which powers every advanced device in the city and gives the chosen few inside the ruling houses’ secure “campos” a standard of luxury about which commoners like the trilogy’s protagonist Sancia Grado can only dream. The themes that emerge as Sancia and her tight-knit crew of thieves and radical scrivers steal and democratise this arcane knowledge, coupled with Tevanne’s Venetian-style setting, create an atmosphere that Ry Herman aptly describes in one of Shorefall’s many endorsements as “magical Renaissance cyberpunk.”
Yet by the time Locklands begins, Tevanne and all the worldbuilding invested in it are no more. Or, more precisely, the material city of Tevanne is in ruins, but the consciousness once called “Valeria,” which fused the currents of magical power in Tevanne into a single self-aware intelligence at the end of Shorefall, has become a terrifyingly networked army on the point of destroying the known world.
Eight years on from those events, where Locklands drops the reader into the middle of the action, not just the city but also its surrounding nations have collapsed and had their people and lands absorbed into the consciousness that now calls itself Tevanne. Conventional warfare can do nothing to resist it; only the territories known as the Black Kingdoms, themselves conquered by the resurrected hierophant Crasedes Magnus, appear to be holding out. Sancia and her band, who fled at the end of Shorefall, have regrouped in the islands of Giva—one of the many plantation sites where the merchant houses used to enslave captives like the young Sancia. There, they have gathered whatever refugees come their way into an underdog navy which may nevertheless be the only force capable of defeating Tevanne.
Sancia’s unique talent of perceiving what the scrivings on any object can do, and the metaphysical knowledge of her sidekick Clef, a mysterious talking key, must now be turned towards battling against overpowering odds. Through Clef, Sancia can essentially “hack” any scrived object by persuading it that reality is somehow other than it is. Consequently, Clef’s arguments with locks and other devices, a delight of Foundryside, return in Locklands, even though by the end of the novel the consciousness inside the key matters much more to the story. Sancia’s lover Berenice and their comrade Claudia, whom readers met as renegade scrivers and artificers in Tevanne, are now seasoned military commanders, grimly visiting another embattled fortress in another collapsing state when the ambush that incites the story begins.
Quickly established in this first part of Locklands are the enemy’s abilities to fight and spy through millions of perfectly assimilated human “hosts,” and to project annihilatory power through its numerous flying “deadlamps,” which are powered by the sacrifice of human life force. We also learn about the workings of many new Givan devices, and the power of silent communication and empathy through “twinning” that makes Givan society unique.
Twinning is Giva’s greatest advantage but also its greatest weakness, should any Givan be captured. To protect their secrets, each Givan carries a “purge stick” that can irreversibly sever a person from the consciousnesses they are twinned with, at the cost of isolating them from these connections for the rest of their lives. The risk that Berenice or Sancia will be forced to take this last-ditch step, then, instantly imperils their bond, as does a threat which has been building ever since Foundryside: the unnatural pace of ageing that Sancia but not Berenice is undergoing.
As the trilogy’s finale, Locklands further escalates a scale of action that began with Sancia magically picking warehouse locks on a dockside in Foundryside; expanded in Shorefall to confronting the immortal tyrant Crasedes and the city-size artificial consciousness which now animates Tevanne; and by the middle of Locklands involves destroying entire floating magical cities in the sky, vying for control of a door which can unlock the very power to alter reality or end the world for good.
This gradient is satisfyingly smooth across the three books, although moving the action outside Tevanne itself means that much of the care with which Bennett designed the city’s economy, technology, and criminology has now been spent. Foundryside and Shorefall showed very little of any nations and territories beyond Tevanne, and in this volume locations can feel as if they have been designed to serve the action rather than springing organically from a setting that allows the story’s themes to take shape. Locklands’ action is more episodic and its pace perhaps less satisfying, not least because characters now have to travel long distances to meet each new threat, though this does create opportunities to showcase characters creating yet more on-the-fly inventions, including robotics, avionics and beyond.
Scriving, the trilogy’s foundational innovation, is by contrast as fresh in Locklands as when created in Foundryside, with every new advance propelling the plot forward and causing further technological adaptation, reaction and change. In conventional scriving as the city used to know it, objects were enchanted to believe that physical reality was different than what it truly is and act accordingly: a simple example, given early in Foundryside, is scriving carriage wheels to persuade them they are on an incline so that they will always roll “downhill,” the basis of powered transport once gears, brakes, and a driver are attached. Scrivings are inscribed through sigils, painstakingly created by scrivers like Berenice to redefine each object’s reality according to definitions stored in “lexicons.” These boxes of magical discs were, until Shorefall, held only by the merchant houses of Tevanne; with this monopoly came their material power.
Scriving itself relies on principles of sympathetic magic, and on artefacts which gradually reveal themselves as analogues for computer memory and digital technology. Every scriving’s sigils are stamped onto tiny plates fixed to or inside objects, which persuade the target object to follow a certain redefinition of reality by interacting with the target’s identity and desires. Each “persuasion plate” is paired with a “definition plate” stored in a nearby lexicon, where the redefinition has been proven coherent through an argument expounded in millions of handwritten sigil strings.
Traditionally, scrived devices have only functioned within a mile or two of their lexicon. Earlier in the trilogy, however, Berenice and her mentor Orso were able to invent a workaround that persuades objects they are the same and thus allows any box to impersonate a lexicon. This pairing eliminated range as a limitation of scrived objects, and also secretly allowed the Foundrysiders to set the contents of the house lexicons free. Before Crasedes and Valeria manifested in Shorefall and brought Tevanne to ruin, this audacious move was promising to revolutionise the political economy of scriving in clear resonance with the ideals of the open-source movement in our world; “the Commons” is even the name for the urban underworld outside the campos’ walls.
Conversely, criving the human body has, as the story begins, only ever been the preserve of amoral cultists within the merchant houses. Between Shorefall and Locklands, however, the Tevanne consciousness has scaled up human scriving en masse by using plates linked to its own lexicon to control its human hosts, making the plates legible as analogues to computer chips if they have not been before.
All these forms of scriving are by the time of Locklands, examples of everyday magic, as unimaginable as the cumulative advances might have been to Tevanne’s citizens before the trilogy began. Another mode of scriving, known as the “deep commands,” permanently alters reality across the whole world by harnessing the life force that separates from human bodies when they die. This magic was the preserve of Crasedes Magnus and the ancient hierophants, who ruled in a past age. Crasedes has become immortal through the deep commands, while the Tevanne consciousness can drain the life force of captives in its deadlamps to edit people, things, and terrain out of reality for good. By Locklands, the Foundrysiders’ worldly concerns have been swept aside by each of their positions on this deeper magic, and their focus directed instead towards the door leading to the metaphysical realm where the sigils take their true form.
Bennett’s system of scriving has resonances with postmodern esotericism and chaos magick, itself a phenomenon of the early digital age, which seeks to employ sigils as devices for hacking reality—essentially how both forms of scriving operate, at micro- or world-altering scale. Like the “silverwork” of another recent triumph of critically-engaged speculative fiction, R. F. Kuang’s Babel (2022), it makes sympathetic magic the driving force of a magic system that sets up serious explorations of technology, power, and resistance, albeit with coloniality less in the foreground.
Within the narrative, Bennett’s own near-limitless talent for invention allows the reader to enjoy continued pleasures of discovery as the characters employ each new device and its engineering is described. Unerringly original, these descriptions put Bennett in the position of his own master scrivers, fusing his invented principles of magic with the physics of how objects would have to behave in a universe sharing laws with ours.
This is accentuated by the way in which each book begins either with, or very shortly after, a technological step change that facilitates the rest of its plot. In Locklands, that step change is twinning, a technology invented in Shorefall using ancient knowledge tested by Sancia and Berenice at the risk of both their lives. After only eight years, twinning is now as ubiquitous in Giva as digital communications have become to us, and raises questions about the politics and ethics of living in such a networked society that are equally the stuff of cyberpunk. Whatever utopia could have been made from this technology if not for the fall of Tevanne, necessity has forced the Foundrysiders to make it the foundation of a way of war that can defeat what is essentially a rogue, world-threatening AI.
With twinning so deeply embedded in Givan society that each person can hear the thoughts of every other person at once, Givans have refined the technology in both deliberate and emergent ways. “Pathing” enables twinned people who know each other intimately to perceive the other’s choices even when far apart. “Conversation keys,” allowing individuals to tune out the thoughts of everyone but those to whom they are talking, are essential for managing the barrage of information that flows through every Givan’s mind. Through working on common tasks, certain groups have even become “cadences,” collectives who have chosen such close alignment with each other that they constitute many bodies with one shared mind. The emphasis on trust, consent, and reciprocity in all these techniques separates Giva’s twinning from the tyrannical assimilation and consumption of hosts by Tevanne.
Twinning’s societal implications, left somewhat for later during Locklands’ fast-paced first part, are explored more once the story moves to the characters’ home base. These include questions of sexual intimacy and gendered embodiment, at least to an extent. It is easier to show how twinning affects Berenice and Sancia’s intimacy as a settled couple once these two highly-driven characters are (briefly) at rest, and the exchange of bodily sensation through twinning even compensates—temporarily—for the strain on their relationship that has developed now that Sancia has aged into her sixties and Berenice has not. (It may or may not reflect the much more intense knowledge of each other they have developed by Locklands that flashbacks to their relationship in previous volumes are more richly drawn than those years were in the books themselves.)
Now that so many individuals of different genders are linked through twinning, the potential for trans sensations, or sensations that readers might understand through lenses formed using trans knowledge, is also latent in Locklands. This occurs in a way that did not immediately raise itself in Shorefall when only Sancia and Berenice were twinned, and cis readers at least are likely to have presumed that their bodies were sexually the same (the text has never unsettled this assumption). Pathed individuals do share each other’s senses deeply enough to feel sexual sensations: when Berenice paths into the mind of her squadmate Vittorio, for instance, she feels all his sensory input and subconscious thoughts alongside her own, including “the sweat on his cheek, the ache in his elbow from a wound he’d sustained long ago, and the discomfit of his genitals, shrunken with anxiety and pressed against his trousers.”
A lens of queer and trans exploration, which the text does not attempt, might imagine that some of the first experiments by people with access to this technology would involve investigating how it felt to experience the world, or sex itself, in a body with different hormones and sexual characteristics to one’s own. In this regard at least, the embodied implications of twinning and pathing are not imagined with quite the same boundlessness the trilogy has brought to creating numerous magical artefacts and explaining how sigils scrived onto objects could remake reality like computer code.
That said, apart from the divide between campo-dwellers and commoners in Tevanne, other forms of social differentiation are not particularly visible either. Sancia and Berenice are depicted as lovers without any sense of how normalised or otherwise same-gender desire is in this world, or what implications the answer to that question would have for the dynastic power structure of the merchant houses (compare how queer relationships and kinship are integrally incorporated into the society of another recent fantastical Venice, M. A. Carrick’s Rook and Rose trilogy [2021-]).
Whatever dynamics of ethnic and national belonging operate between Tevanne and its surrounding nations are not explained other than the fact that there have been major wars, and patterns of natural human variation do not appear to have become the basis for any systems of racialisation. Darker phenotypes are, however, quietly normalised: Sancia remarks at one point, after a vision of the ancient city where Crasedes and the being that became Clef learned the secret of the deep commands, that she found it “weird as hell” to see a person in the vision who had yellow hair.
During the final showdown with Tevanne, nevertheless, Locklands fully realises its metanarrative of technology and power. The Foundrysiders’ utopian, reciprocal form of collective consciousness permits the Givans to make a move which is beyond the conception of either the rogue city or the hierophant, since neither can imagine a society of autonomous individuals responding as they do. In an almost Stapledonian coda, Locklands looks into the future posthuman potential of twinning through the eyes of a character who can never join this next stage of evolution. This narrative could not be further from the grubby city alleys where Foundryside began, but fittingly concludes on the scale of story that Locklands has accessed by abandoning Tevanne.
Throughout the trilogy, in fact, Bennett has interrogated ideas about technology and innovation as trenchantly as critical cyberpunk once did. The tension between techno-optimism and techno-pessimism had already become a central theme in Shorefall, in which the idealistic Foundrysiders confronted antagonists who each believed that autonomous humans could not be trusted with scriving or the power to alter the world. Whereas in Shorefall the next impending turn seemed to be towards exploring what could happen if scriving and its lexicons were liberated from the merchant houses entirely, by Locklands something that was almost a byproduct of the efforts in Shorefall—twinning—has emerged as the world-changing innovation instead.
This unexpected turn itself may illuminate how the trilogy regards technological change, and Berenice’s remark during one homecoming in Locklands that “when you invent a new technology, I suppose you can never quite comprehend all the uses people will find for it” could easily represent the whole trilogy’s theme. By the end of Locklands, the Foundrysiders have had to accept that technology will not save the world on its own after all, and that power will always try to appropriate every innovation that might once have seemed emancipatory; and yet their radically organised and distributed society has been able to invent more utopian uses for that contested technology than their adversaries could imagine.
Contending with questions about when the augmented body is still human, and how to retain autonomy in a totally networked society, the Founders Trilogy tackles all the signature tensions of cyberpunk. Indeed, it arguably does so more effectively for a present-day reader by translating these into a magical secondary-world Renaissance, forcing readers to think through the dynamics of each innovation without the familiarity of cyberpunk aesthetics as they are usually known.
Indeed, part of Locklands’ millennia-old backstory—the heartbreak of a father striving to do the best for his young son while a pandemic gripped their failing civilisation—now seems of the author’s own moment much more than it would have done in 2019 when Foundryside appeared. Bennett’s acknowledgements are almost a second coda, conveying the dissonance of his trying to put characters through agony and closure to conclude a trilogy while he and his family were living through the COVID-19 pandemic, with no such closure in view. Bennett reflects:
If the Founders Trilogy is about anything, it is that the innovations of our species do not yield dividends on their own [but only] when they are paired with a society, a culture, or a people who can use them to their utmost […] A road cannot bring travelers if people refuse to let it be built. A printing house cannot bring wisdom if its readers decide they mostly prefer lies. And there is no balm or medicine that can bring health and happiness if the sick refuse to take it.
Does today’s culture empower readers to avert themselves from preferring lies so that their printing houses can bring wisdom? Does it provide the sick with the knowledge and wherewithal to choose to take the health-bringing balm? Bennett is not sure—and we, like him, must wonder about the answers long after the Foundrysiders have found theirs.