Foundryside

Robert Jackson Bennett is a weird author to place. He gets lumped in a lot with Brian McClellan and James Islington as sort of the successors to the hypermodern Sanderson school of fantasy. This is the type of fantasy that dispenses with elves and dwarves and dragons and instead reinvents worlds with crazy laws of physics that must be followed exactly to a T, and flawlessly executes intricate bulletproof plots in said worlds.

The thing is, this is not a really good description of Bennett, from the two novels I have now read from him. He's not interested in bloat, side quests, or epic/cosmic plot shenanigans. He basically writes thrillers and mysteries in modern fantasy worlds, very much like a Genevieve Cogman or Rachel Aaron, but since he's a man and writes hard sci-fi descriptions of his magic systems instead of pointless romance subplots, he gets taken more seriously.

I'm more bashing the public's advertising of Bennett than the man himself, because I liked this book. It's a fun and well-executed fantasy novel set in a world that's loosely based on Renaissance era Milan but which ends up feeling very weird and inhuman (and downright Islingtonian). The well-leashed cast of six main characters are all developed well, the pacing is good, the dialogue is snappy, etc. The writing and character interactions, and the sort of “art-style” of the characters, reminded me a lot of Foucault's Pendulum and Umberto Eco in general. It's a novel with impressive construction and execution.

I return to my half-joking “manliness” argument here because I think Bennett in general pays too little attention to any sort of emotional payoffs and instead wants a reader to find catharsis from solving increasingly important problems. If you're an engineering type and you enjoy when a problem is solved from a patient and distant perspective, you'll love this book. If you can't stand the people who methodically sit down, pull out a pencil and a neat sheaf of white paper, and start carefully drafting solutions when something is desperately and urgently wrong, you will be irritated like I was. There's really not enough “human interest” in this book, which is something I rarely find myself saying.

It is fun to figure out how everything works and follow the characters as things are slowly unveiled and they each find their successes. Bennett won't be making it on my all star author list anytime soon, but he's solid enough and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series for sure.

Rating: 7.5/10

Closest comparison: The Sunlit Man, for all the problem solving and engineering jargon.