★★★★★ Fantasy novel about software development

Foundryside

Robert Jackson Bennett

Here are the finalists for the 2023 Best Series Hugo Award:

⬤ Children of Time Series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Pan Macmillan/Orbit)
⬤ The Founders Trilogy, by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey)
⬤ The Locked Tomb, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com)
⬤ October Daye, by Seanan McGuire (DAW)
⬤ Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovich (Orion)
⬤ The Scholomance, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)

I was surprised to find, on seeing this list, that I had read five of the six series -- completely, except in the cases of The Locked Tomb, October Daye, and Rivers of London, which have not yet reached their ends. Even in those three cases I have read all extant published novels.

The exception was The Founders Trilogy, which I was previously unaware of. Obviously, the first book, Foundryside, went on my reading list immediately. I finished it yesterday and added the next two books to my reading list. If that's not a vote of confidence, what is?

So what is it about? Foundryside is a novel about software development. Oddly enough, the 2023 Hugo finalists include another novel about a nontraditional fantasy topic: the fabulously popular Legends & Lattes, which turns out to be a novel about starting a business. I personally liked Foundryside much more than L&L, however, perhaps because programming is nearer and dearer to my heart than entrepreneurship. (By the way, that The Founders Trilogy is about software is not just my imagination, Bennett, in a blog post, has said so.)

Foundryside takes place in and around the city of Tevanne. Tevanne is dominated by four wealthy founding families, which you should think of as competing software companies. The special thing about the world of the The Founders Trilogy is that reality is programmable -- this is the magic system. For instance an arrow can be programmed -- scrived (real-world programmers call this scripting) -- to believe that down is the direction it is pointing, and that it is far heavier than it is by nature. This arrow will then fire straight at very high velocity. The scriving done by the four families is mostly restricted to physics -- because of bad experiences, scriving humans is not allowed.

Within the compounds life is good. But the Founders are the only law in Tevanne. Outside the Founders compounds there is a lawless marginal underclass. Our hero, Sancia Grado, is a thief who manages to get by in this marginal dystopia. Sancia has special abilities that make her an especially effective thief. We eventually learn that Sancia was illicitly scrived, and that there is a bug in her code that gives her her special powers. She gets herself into trouble with one (and eventually all) of the Founder families and other older powers.

It's a great story, exciting, full of great characters, both heroes and villains. The last third or so of the book is a deliciously exciting action-packed puzzle box, full of revelations about the magic system, setting up the sequels.

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