Shorefall

Shorefall offers a natural thematic progression from the great Foundryside, further expanding the link between technology and oppression while presenting a memorable antagonist that challenges the protagonist’s worldview, daring her to find a better solution for society than his tyrannical nihilism.

When she was a slave in a plantation, doctors experimented on Sancia. Scriving is the skill that alters the properties of an object through a series of written commands, but instead of an object, the doctors were attempting to create a scrived person: a slave with special attributes, extremely powerful but also incapable of disobedience. Sancia, however, was granted the ability to sense and communicate with scrived objects and used it to escape. Now, many years later, she’s one of the founders of a private company that intends to upend society in the city of Tevanne. But their plan to bring down the big merchant houses that rule the city revolves not around violence – the house’s campos are heavily guarded and nearly impregnatable, after all – but the ownership of patents.

Sancia believes that the only way to help the city, to free its people, is to socialize the tools that give the merchant houses their power. Their scriving designs shape Sancia’s world, modifying weapons, vehicles, and buildings, and so they concentrate all the wealth in the hands of a select few: the “CEOs” of each merchant house, despite not even necessarily having great scriving skills, live like feudal lords in their campos, untouched and all-powerful.

Sancia’s goal is to start a revolution. The plan is to steal those designs, making it so that any scriving firm (a concept also introduced by Sancia, since the merchant houses work like a cartel) is able to make use of them:

“It was a terrifying concept for most scrivers, who came from the campos, where the question of intellectual property was something that regularly got people imprisoned or murdered every month. Sharing scriving designs? Building some kind of library that could be browsed by almost anyone? It seemed mad.”

The book begins with a heist, with her group infiltrating the Michiel campo under false pretenses, with Orso selling a new scriving technique to the Michiels while Sancia works in the shadows to steal their patents. It sets the tone for the story: it’s an engaging and funny set piece – when things go wrong around them, the characters often respond with snarky humor – despite the serious nature of the situation.

However, the liberation of Tevanne gets more complicated when someone visits Sancia in her dreams to warn her of the imminent arrival of a powerful enemy: the mythic Crasedes, who is said to have been the first to master the art of scriving, conquering time and death centuries ago, is set to arrive in Tevanne in a few days. He’s a figure of legend, engulfed in mystery, and who Sancia despises in principle, knowing that genocide was behind his many feats: powerful scriving requires sacrifice, for to command without disobedience one must oppress.

The introduction of Crasedes in Shorefall is excellent. The chapter in question, where Sancia and her friend Gregor attempt to break into a naval vessel at sea, is much longer than the others, which calls attention to itself, lets room for the suspense to build, and delays the relief of an ending, making us just like the characters: unable to escape those events. First, they both notice there’s something off with the ship, and their uneasiness increases as they fail to find any signs of life onboard. The ominous tone quickly escalates into pure horror when they finally find people on the ship, but these men seem desperate and mad, tearing out their eyes in despair. We are led, then, to expect Crasedes to be something akin to an “Old One”, a terrifying monster out of a cosmic horror story, especially after Sancia stumbles upon the damage he has done to the ship, taking parts of it out of existence, leaving black holes of nothingness in their place. But when Crasedes finally shows himself to Sancia, his form subverts expectations, being that of a man dressed in black with the face hidden beneath a carnival mask. This actually makes him a lot scarier than a tentacled beast, for he has the same destructive power of a monster but now also displays the cunning and shrewdness of a man. Instead of destroying Sancia, Crasedes tries to reason with her, using a soft, calm tone of voice, trying to convince her of nothing less than… his good intentions.

This ambiguity in Crasedes’ characterization is precisely the key that makes him work. After the terrible events on the ship, Crasedes is often shown punishing bad men in Tevanne, crippling the merchant houses, and fighting Sancia’s own enemies, so when he claims to be one of the good guys, we may be tempted to believe him. But the rub is that he relishes so much the pain that he causes on Tevanne’s many villains that he makes sure to have someone witnessing it: since righteousness can be a tonic for the ego, Crasedes wants to make a spectacle of the justice he perpetrates.

Nevertheless, we start to suspect that he truly believes in the image he wants to project to others, the image of a “good ruler”. Crasedes is so full of himself that there’s no room left for self-reflection: his ego prevents him from seeing himself as anything other than a benevolent force. This is why he’s always telling stories about the corrupt kings and emperors he’s annihilated in the past: he’s not only pissed that no one remembers them (and is so unable to acknowledge his deeds) but he’s also making sure that he’s extricating himself from these tyrants, as if saying he can’t be one if he has murdered hundreds of them.

The first book was about pinpointing the problem in Sancia’s society, with the characters discovering how one can’t amass wealth and power without causing suffering in the process, and how the greater the power and wealth the greater the suffering. Here, we see these characters struggling to find a solution. Sancia, her girlfriend Berenice, and their friends Orso and Gregor, they all want to dismantle the merchant houses, believing the answer to be the sharing of tools and knowledge with the people. Crasedes, on the other hand, argues that this is not enough. He has no faith in humanity whatsoever, arguing that people are too broken to do the right thing. The same thing goes for Valeria, a sentient tool that Crasedes created in the past and who went rogue on him, becoming his nemesis. She forms an uneasy alliance with Sancia’s group, even though she disagrees with their hope in humanity.

“And do you believe that if everyone could make spears,” she questions Sancia, “that they would all use them to fish, and there would be no more warfare?” In a sentence that would make any Bolshevik shudder, Valeria points out how an “emperor’s hunger for control will always outlast a moralist’s desire for equality and idealism.” Years of history have taught Crasedes and Valeria that the problem with humanity is that there will always be a group of people that will pervert the tools and systems at their disposal to rise in power: for us, oppression may be as certain as death itself.

Orso, Sancia’s friend, eventually begins to recognize another flaw in their plan. There’s a moment of revelation when he watches a captain preach about the merchant houses, defending his masters with unwavering loyalty and faith, under the belief that they rule because they deserve to do so. Listening to the captain makes Orso suddenly understand that the problem of trusting people to do what is right by them is that they can be taught to go against their own interests and embrace their own submission. Sometimes, there’s not even need of indoctrination, for they end up defending the status quo just because they have rationalized their own lives that it is the way of the world, so to acknowledge an alternative is to acknowledge a whole lifetime of wasted potential. And so, Orso hesitates:

“He doubted for the very first time whether the merchant houses could really be overthrown – it Tevanne really could be restored, or remade, or at least changed just a little. What change could possibly be accomplished in the face of such thoughtless, ignorant conviction?”

Crasedes’ solution doesn’t seem out of place, then. If we can’t trust the people to govern themselves, the only solution left is to have a benevolent tyrant with unlimited power, someone able to enforce peace and cooperation, capable of preventing violence and injustice with extreme force. The irony of fighting oppression with more oppression doesn’t escape anyone, especially Valeria, but Crasedes defends that there’s no other way. The strength of Shorefall’s narrative lies in these discussions, especially since Crasedes is an antagonist who cares more about convincing the protagonist than killing her: his arsenal is often made more of arguments than guns.

Now the weakness of the novel comes in the lack of a proper conclusion, for unlike Foundryside, Shorefall doesn’t resolve all its narrative conflicts, leaving the final physical and philosophical confrontation between the characters to the last book of the trilogy, Locklands.

However, the relationship between Sancia and Berenice may foreshadow a possible key to solving their problems, since an entire world of sensations and self-awareness opens to them when they magically link themselves with each other, seeing everything with the other’s eyes: empathy opens doors and creates understanding – even though, due to the strong magical nature of their bond, it’s a key that veers dangerously close to another form of oppression, a hive mind that suppresses individualism.

Shorefall, then, is a fascinating sequel that successfully expands on the themes of the first book, refusing to present easy answers to the characters’ many struggles while offering an exciting take on urban fantasy.

April 14, 2024.