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Our Discussion of Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

Foundryside (Founders #1) by Robert Jackson Bennett

Sancia Grado is a thief, and a damn good one. And her latest target, a heavily guarded warehouse on Tevanne’s docks, is nothing her unique abilities can’t handle.

But unbeknownst to her, Sancia’s been sent to steal an artifact of unimaginable power, an object that could revolutionize the magical technology known as scriving. The Merchant Houses who control this magic--the art of using coded commands to imbue everyday objects with sentience--have already used it to transform Tevanne into a vast, remorseless capitalist machine. But if they can unlock the artifact’s secrets, they will rewrite the world itself to suit their aims.

Now someone in those Houses wants Sancia dead, and the artifact for themselves. And in the city of Tevanne, there’s nobody with the power to stop them.

To have a chance at surviving—and at stopping the deadly transformation that’s under way—Sancia will have to marshal unlikely allies, learn to harness the artifact’s power for herself, and undergo her own transformation, one that will turn her into something she could never have imagined. Goodreads

Below are a sampling of our comments:

  • I like it – all the characters were interesting
  • I loved Clef. He was like a trickster god
  • I loved it when the scrived objects talked – they were so devoted to their function
  • It started out as another young woman thief on the edge of society, but it was an original book with an entirely new concept of magic
  • The characters had a modern sensibility – it could have been a Star Trek episode
  • The author wasn’t afraid to have women as villains
  • There was no mention of the author being a programmer, but so much of the magic was based on computer programming – the lexicon was a server, things lost their abilities when the WiFi went down, twinning was like cloud computing
  • I liked that gender assumptions weren’t made by the characters when faced with unknown entities
  • The book passed the Bechdel–Wallace test on page 58
  • It was the nerdification of magic
  • The book was very similar to The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
  • Good won over evil … through paperwork

Please add any additional thoughts or comments you have about Foundryside. We gave this title the codes MAG, AGE, STP, & FEM with an average rating of 4.7.

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