Be gay and do crimes, kid

The latest BSpec reading club book, which we will be discussing later this weekend, was Robert Jackson Bennett's new-ish release Foundryside, the first book in what it appears will be called the Founders series (I'm not sure how long the series is supposed to be but I am getting trilogy vibes). 

 

Foundryside is a crime action-adventure fantasy in the "urchins of the dangerous underworld of corrupt city gets involved in things that piss off the power structure" sort of book, so if you liked the general vibes of books like Six of Crows or the Gentlemen Bastards series, you might dig this, too. The main character is a teenager, but it's definitely not a YA book; I'd say it's also comparable to the Gentlemen Bastards series in terms of stuff like swearing (not quite so creatively, though), graphic violence and gore, sexual content, complex political corruption that runs deeper than anyone even knows about, and being based in an Italian Renaissance-flavored port city haunted by the ruins of an ancient civilization more powerful than anyone can imagine but that nobody really knows jack shit about. 

 

Our main character, Sancia Grado, is a thief, and she's very good at what she does, because she has magical gifts that make her good at thieving but also make her entire life an unbroken hell of sensory overload. She ekes out a sparse and dangerous living in a Dickensian tenement room in the filthy no-mans-land slummy bits of the industrial city-state of Tevanne that aren't claimed by any of the four big merchant houses that actually run everything, each of which hides behind big walls in their clean, pristine "campos" that eat up most of the city, kind of like Harvard if there were four of them and the rest of us weren't even allowed to take shortcuts through them. 

 

Tevanne's early-modern economy is mostly based on scriving. Technically I think it is mostly based on merchant shipping, with a basic mercantilist relationship between the squalid urban core and an out-of-sight, out-of-mind set of far-off plantation lands that send in goods like coffee and paper. But the four big ruling trade dynasties in Tevanne got that way because they can do scriving, a type of sigil magic with more than a few superficial parallels to coding, except that it gets used for different stuff (using scriving to invent the equivalent of cars was apparently pretty easy; using it to invent the equivalent of a phonograph is apparently mind-blowingly advanced and happens several decades later). 

 

The ancient ruined civilization from the ancient past is known as the heirophants, and it is rumored that they could do what is basically Scriving Plus, except that there are a lot of obviously silly legends about the heirophants and nobody knows what's real and what's not. And anyway, whatever they did eventually caused them to completely self-destruct so apparently it wasn't a good idea anyway. This does not, of course, stop the current generation of rich people from having a bunch of people in it who are obsessed with this stuff and willing to go Meddle In The Affairs Of Heirophants in the hopes of gaining some next-level powers.

At the beginning of the book, our gruff and damaged criminal street urchin of a protagonist gets offered an absolutely stupid amount of money to steal a very secret thing that's so secret that she doesn't even know what she's stealing. You can probably see where we're going with this: She does not quietly steal the thing, collect her payday, and live happily ever after. That would give us a very short book. Instead, she winds up almost getting murdered several times and setting some stuff on fire, then having to assemble an intrepid team of people who are all highly skilled at different things and have their own mysterious and tragic backstories in order to defeat the folks who hired her who are now dead set on murdering anyone who had anything to do with the heist, and to embark upon another, much more advanced heist to prevent the most batshit of the corrupt scriving dynasties from amassing otherwordly power using heirophant artifacts. 

One of the valued members of this misfit team is Clef, who is a magic talking key. Clef is undoubtedly my favorite character. He is himself a heirophant artifact, and while that makes him several millennia older than anyone else in the book, his speech style reads a lot more modern to me, to hilarious effect. Everyone else is talking in that sort of passably-medieval-compliant-but-not-overdoing-it register where they talk like normal people but a little on the formal end; Clef talks like a 1930s private eye as written by someone writing today who is only middlingly familiar with 1930s private eye dramas (he usually addresses Sancia as "Hey, kid"). Clef talks the way you'd expect him to talk if he were a human named "Clef." 

Other members of the team include Gregor Dandolo, a wannabe cop whomst is very idealistic and generally unaware that All Cops Are Bastards; Orso Ignacio, a splenetic master scriver; Berenice, his prodigy apprentice; and Claudia and Giovanni, a couple freelance scrivers who are more talented than their circumstances allow them to express. Berenice thinks Sancia is cute and exciting; everyone else thinks Sancia is grouchy and oh my god she's covered in blood again

Sancia and everyone else do get covered in blood a lot, because this book goes into some hella dark places regarding the economics of slavery, human experimentation, what rich assholes will do for power, and other important political themes regarding industrialization and primitive accumulation, but because of the magic element it has more "exploding people in midair by fucking with their personal gravity" than real-life early modern politics did.

It is, in short, extremely my kind of book.