Scriving and loricas and espringals, oh my
Sep. 1st, 2022 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI got Locklands, the third book in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founders trilogy, out from the library nearly as soon as it was released. I read about two-thirds of it before I had to return it, then put it right back on hold. Now, after an interruption of a few weeks, I have finished it.
Due to the interruption I am having a little trouble in my head sorting out the degree to which it was a satisfying ending versus the degree to which I am merely satisfied to have finally finished it–I enjoyed the series but I am also enjoying having a nice actual-trilogy-just-as-was-promised wrapped up and done with. I have gotten to the end of the story and no longer have to wait for any further updates.
I am a little tired of the general mode of endless content generation and the franchising of everything these days. I am in particular still feeling a little bit burned about the fact that A Song of Ice and Fire will simply never be completed, and am retreating into a little hobbit hole of feelings where I don’t want to pick up any new series that aren’t finished. I am waiting on the next installments of the series I am already invested in–some of which have seen multiple publishing delays, often but not always due to the pandemic–and while I do not want to turn into a cranky entitled fan whomst thinks various authors are my bitch, neither do I want to start up reading another beginning of a story without knowing if the end will ever exist. So it’s very satisfying to me right now simply to wrap up the Founders trilogy and put it down.
That said, I did also enjoy reading it. I do think wrapping it up at three was the correct call, since the rules of narrative escalation here were already pushing at the beginnings of becoming overextended. It’s a series about big, world-changing magics and immensely powerful beings with big ideas about rewriting reality; things that were Thought Impossible in one book are old hat a few hundred pages later, so the complexity of the magic system and of the plot–and the accompanying technobabble–grow considerably over the course of the series.
Despite all the increasingly hyperpowered and complex scriving stuff–its aesthetic is Renaissance-Italian-flavored but the way it functions is basically “what if you lived in a simulation, and you learned to code; then you’d be a magician”–the basic message of the series (to the degree that it is message fiction, which it mostly isn’t except right at the end) is anti-technocracy: all the bad guys keep trying to single-handedly “fix” the world with horrifyingly powerful magics and end up just murdering shit-tons of people because they’re so up their own asses with incredible power and tunnel vision about imposing their idea of “fixed” on the world by editing reality with ever more elaborate feats of magic. Ultimately it turns out that advanced technology can help people build stuff that makes the world better, just not if it’s all in the hands of one megalomaniacal douchebag with a savior complex. However the series doesn’t read like a thinly veiled critique of Silicon Valley self-importance–if it is one, it is very thickly veiled in a bunch of heist drama and pseudo-Italian merchant houses and a lot of old-fashioned bloody warfare. My brain just goes in odd nerd-bashing directions when presented with something like “unlocking a locked door by arguing with it until you convince it its unlocked” (similar to my brain’s reaction to the way speaking works in Dune–it’s a perfectly fine spec fic reading experience but a little voice in my head still wants to ruin the moment by crowing “LOL, you wish, nerdboy”).
Anyway, Locklands takes place several years after the events of Shorefall, and our intrepid heroes are in a long, grinding war against the entity now known as Tevanne, which is basically a hyperpowered heirophantic consciousness that has been absorbing hosts and cities and weapons and stuff like a big grim Katamari Damacy of murder. The forces opposing Tevanne have coalesced into a weird little floating nation that functions cooperatively, due largely to a complicated system of scrivings that allow them to basically all be mentally networked. Within this magically networked nation are a bunch of even more tight-knit magical networks called cadences, which is basically a committee that’s mind-melded into a hivemind. It’s convincing in the book but also I am trying to imagine being psychically networked with everyone else in my committees in DSA and frankly the idea makes me wish to instantly die.
All these big juiced-up consciousnesses being singlehandedly dedicated to war means that this book has lots of fighting–and not just normal fighting, big earth-shattering fighting where entire mountains and cities and oceans get tossed around like footballs! Weird stuff happens to the sky! Ancient ruins are explored! We rummage around in the deepest darkest oldest corners of the world uncovering long-buried secrets until stuff makes sense! Clef makes jokes! Actually, in some spots, things get so dire that Clef stops making jokes, which is how you know things have gotten very serious, and there’s no more serious you could go, which is why I think a fourth book would have broken this series. As it is, I found it to be a pretty solid Big Magic Heist series, and big magic heists are a subset of fantasy that I enjoy quite a lot, so it was nice to read these instead of fretting about the release date for The Thorn of Emberlain.
Due to the interruption I am having a little trouble in my head sorting out the degree to which it was a satisfying ending versus the degree to which I am merely satisfied to have finally finished it–I enjoyed the series but I am also enjoying having a nice actual-trilogy-just-as-was-promised wrapped up and done with. I have gotten to the end of the story and no longer have to wait for any further updates.
I am a little tired of the general mode of endless content generation and the franchising of everything these days. I am in particular still feeling a little bit burned about the fact that A Song of Ice and Fire will simply never be completed, and am retreating into a little hobbit hole of feelings where I don’t want to pick up any new series that aren’t finished. I am waiting on the next installments of the series I am already invested in–some of which have seen multiple publishing delays, often but not always due to the pandemic–and while I do not want to turn into a cranky entitled fan whomst thinks various authors are my bitch, neither do I want to start up reading another beginning of a story without knowing if the end will ever exist. So it’s very satisfying to me right now simply to wrap up the Founders trilogy and put it down.
That said, I did also enjoy reading it. I do think wrapping it up at three was the correct call, since the rules of narrative escalation here were already pushing at the beginnings of becoming overextended. It’s a series about big, world-changing magics and immensely powerful beings with big ideas about rewriting reality; things that were Thought Impossible in one book are old hat a few hundred pages later, so the complexity of the magic system and of the plot–and the accompanying technobabble–grow considerably over the course of the series.
Despite all the increasingly hyperpowered and complex scriving stuff–its aesthetic is Renaissance-Italian-flavored but the way it functions is basically “what if you lived in a simulation, and you learned to code; then you’d be a magician”–the basic message of the series (to the degree that it is message fiction, which it mostly isn’t except right at the end) is anti-technocracy: all the bad guys keep trying to single-handedly “fix” the world with horrifyingly powerful magics and end up just murdering shit-tons of people because they’re so up their own asses with incredible power and tunnel vision about imposing their idea of “fixed” on the world by editing reality with ever more elaborate feats of magic. Ultimately it turns out that advanced technology can help people build stuff that makes the world better, just not if it’s all in the hands of one megalomaniacal douchebag with a savior complex. However the series doesn’t read like a thinly veiled critique of Silicon Valley self-importance–if it is one, it is very thickly veiled in a bunch of heist drama and pseudo-Italian merchant houses and a lot of old-fashioned bloody warfare. My brain just goes in odd nerd-bashing directions when presented with something like “unlocking a locked door by arguing with it until you convince it its unlocked” (similar to my brain’s reaction to the way speaking works in Dune–it’s a perfectly fine spec fic reading experience but a little voice in my head still wants to ruin the moment by crowing “LOL, you wish, nerdboy”).
Anyway, Locklands takes place several years after the events of Shorefall, and our intrepid heroes are in a long, grinding war against the entity now known as Tevanne, which is basically a hyperpowered heirophantic consciousness that has been absorbing hosts and cities and weapons and stuff like a big grim Katamari Damacy of murder. The forces opposing Tevanne have coalesced into a weird little floating nation that functions cooperatively, due largely to a complicated system of scrivings that allow them to basically all be mentally networked. Within this magically networked nation are a bunch of even more tight-knit magical networks called cadences, which is basically a committee that’s mind-melded into a hivemind. It’s convincing in the book but also I am trying to imagine being psychically networked with everyone else in my committees in DSA and frankly the idea makes me wish to instantly die.
All these big juiced-up consciousnesses being singlehandedly dedicated to war means that this book has lots of fighting–and not just normal fighting, big earth-shattering fighting where entire mountains and cities and oceans get tossed around like footballs! Weird stuff happens to the sky! Ancient ruins are explored! We rummage around in the deepest darkest oldest corners of the world uncovering long-buried secrets until stuff makes sense! Clef makes jokes! Actually, in some spots, things get so dire that Clef stops making jokes, which is how you know things have gotten very serious, and there’s no more serious you could go, which is why I think a fourth book would have broken this series. As it is, I found it to be a pretty solid Big Magic Heist series, and big magic heists are a subset of fantasy that I enjoy quite a lot, so it was nice to read these instead of fretting about the release date for The Thorn of Emberlain.