Foundryside

Foundryside is a great urban fantasy novel set in a world where people can change the properties of matter – an ability held by powerful merchant houses that monopolize knowledge to maximize profit and control the city of Tevanne with an iron fist.

The protagonist is Sancia, a young thief with a very special ability: she can “communicate” with any object she touches with her bare skin, feeling what it feels, seeing its strengths and weakness, and also its history – where it has been, what hands have touched it. Although using it hurts her, it’s still a very useful talent for a thief to possess, as she can sense what any vault contains without opening it, among other things: “Sancia was phenomenally talented at scaling walls, navigating dark passageways, and picking locks – because picking locks is easy if the lock is actually telling you how to pick it.”

The city Sancia lives in is marked by inequality. Only four families hold all the money and power in Tevanne, they are the merchant houses with access to the technology – here, it’s indistinguishable from magic – that allows them to alter objects in many ways: with the art of scriving, they can build self-propelling chariots, make wood be as resistant as iron, or a flame that doesn’t extinguish with time. They are businessmen, however, which means that instead of this technology bringing prosperity to the people of Tevanne, it’s used to make them, and only them, filthy rich and powerful. The merchant families live in enclosed campos with all the luxury and protection their inventions can provide, while everyone else fights to survive in the dangerous streets outside. Consequently, Tevanne became a city “smeared with starlit smoke and steam, a ghostly cityscape sinking into the fog,” a steampunk setting drowned in poverty.

Sancia’s home is a place called Foundryside, an especially poor part of the town that lies between two merchant campos: “Clinging to the bases of the walls was a tall, rambling stretch of ramshackle wooden tenements and rookery buildings and crooked chimneys, an improvised, makeshift, smoky tangle of soaking warrens stuffed between the two campo walls like a raft trapped between two converging ships.” The description emphasizes how impoverished the actual Tevanne is, a place flooded by adjectives such as rambling, rookery, crooked, makeshift, and smoky. Foundryside is a polluted slum with buildings that barely hang together, and it’s stuck between the huge walls of two rich merchant houses, Michiel and Dandolo, who stand “white, towering and indifferent,” the clear image of the privileged crushing the common people.

The story starts with Sancia getting a new job, a highly unusual job with an unusually high payout – something that never bodes well. She acquires the box the client wished her to steal, but decides her safety depends on discovering what lies inside – she must know if her employer will kill or pay her for it. When she opens the box, however, she finds a key. A key that, to her astonishment, talks to her not with the usual images and sensations of other scrived objects, but with actual words, just like a conscious, articulate being. The key’s name is Cleff.

In Foundryside’s world, magic and tech are intertwined. Scrivers are people capable of writing certain glyphs and sigils on objects that “convince” them to function and behave in specific ways. A person can scrive a piece of wood to “trick” it into being as hard as iron – the wood “believes” it is iron and works as if it were – making a building made of wood much more resistant. Of course, the applications of this system in warfare are numerous: scrived arrows can auto-aim at their target’s weakest point or be made to inflict more damage to their victim. In other words, the language of the glyphs can alter the reality of objects.

The words used to describe how this system works, such as “convince,” “trick,” and “believe” imply that the glyphs confer to every object a certain degree of consciousness and a notion of identity: for a piece of wood to be tricked into believing it is iron, it had to be aware it was made of wood in the first place. “These rigs are made by people. And people make things that work kind of like people – if you want a device to do something, you build the desire into the device,” Cleff explains to Sancia. This means that his ability to speak and act like a person, despite being a key, doesn’t seem too far-fetched or out of place in this world, but instead functions as the ultimate natural consequence of the logic that moves it.

Cleff has that easygoing, sarcastic attitude that would make movie producers tempted to cast Ryan Reynolds to do his voice. He’s always making clever remarks about the dangers Sancia must face and is the main source of humor in the book. His discussions with objects are a highlight: to change their nature, he must argue with them, finding loopholes in the commands given by the glyphs scrived on them – such as convincing a door that opening it in the wrong direction would not really count as opening it, so it could let them pass while still obeying the command to remain sealed.

Sancia, on the other hand, is a much more troubled and dense character.  The reason she lives in Foundryside is that she’s as poor as the region is: “Her dark skin was weather-beaten and hard, the face of someone for whom starvation was a frequent occurrence,” the narrator remarks. Her social status made her develop a practical mind. She believes that grudges and personal vendettas are a luxury that people like her can’t afford, as she’s too busy just trying to survive. When a friend tells her the size of the mess she got herself in, she doesn’t react in a shocked way like they expected, and explains, “I don’t have time for nervous breakdowns.”

And this is the result of trauma and a life of poverty. She’s paranoid and for a good reason. Besides her life of crime and her lawless neighborhood, there’s also the fact that her ability to “communicate” with objects is not a common one. Sancia knows it makes her a freak in the eyes of everyone in Tevanne and that she must hide her ability, lest she be hunted and dissected by the merchant houses.

Scriving is a recent science in Sancia’s world. Some people discovered it in the old ruins of an ancient civilization and everyone is still trying to get their heads around it. It’s a field rife with mystery: no one knows exactly how and why the strange language of the glyphs works and scrivers are learning new things every day. This imbues the worldbuilding with some mystery and allows for some surprises in the narrative, as things that the characters didn’t think were possible can suddenly happen because someone else has just cracked how to do it.

“If you can change something’s mind enough, it’ll believe whatever reality you choose,” a scriver explains his work at some point. This resonates in a different manner with Sancia due to her past – the time she spent working on a plantation. The narrative links slavery to scriving as both accomplish a similar thing, but the former with sheer violence and torture instead of magic: it tries to turn people into objects, erasing their identity and their humanity, and all for profit.

This is why Sancia connects with Cleff right away, treating him as a person trapped inside a key and not as an object with a quirky personality that emulates a person. She carries the scars that prove that humanity will do anything for money, and that profit is the reward of the wicked. Her society is ruled by merchants who are just ridiculously powerful CEOs. They look for cheap labor to increase profits and know that there’s nothing cheaper than free: slavery is the best economically viable option. Without a State to regulate and police their work, they have absolute freedom to do whatever they please. And this is the thing about absolute freedom: it means that the few are free to exploit and oppress the many. “I’m a businessman,” a villain highlights, “If I’m making an investment, the only thing I care about is the highest possible yield.”

But one of the people after Sancia doesn’t care about money at all. He’s a soldier named Gregor Dandolo, who’s said to be the only honest policeman in Tevanne and who is the heir to one of the most powerful merchant houses. He has great ambition, planning to bring law and order to the streets – and not just by stopping the common thefts and the murders, but also any abuse perpetrated by the merchant houses – and he’s willing to sacrifice anything for it: “The chance for reform… for real, genuine reform for this city… I would shed every drop of blood in my body for such a thing,” Gregor says. The truth he refuses to acknowledge, however, is that his wants and wishes matter little, for he’s a soldier, and so is intended to be just another person turned into a tool to be used to make the rich richer.

Finally, we have the relationship between Sancia and another girl, which unfortunately is the most underdeveloped element in the book. There was a lot of material here to give a tragic tone to the romance – Sancia feels pain touching things with her bare skin, after all, – but this is not developed too much. There are a couple of good moments, such as when Sancia reprehends herself for getting distracted by looking at this other girl – her pragmatic mindset tells her she should be focused on the job – but in the end, there should have been more bits in the book about the relationship.

In the end, Foundryside is a great start to The Founders trilogy, offering an exciting story set in a memorable, inventive, and thought-provoking world.

January 27, 2022.