Foundryside

Robert Jackson Bennett has quietly built up a reputation as one of the best genre authors currently working. The City Of Stairs books were excellent and imaginative takes on the fantasy genre, while previous works like The Troupe and American Elsewhere were some of the strongest dark fantasy of recent years. This new novel is the opening in a new series, and at first glance appears to be set in his most traditional milieu yet, analgous to post-Renaissance Western Europe society creeping towards industrialisation. It's the cause of that industrialisation that is at the core of the novel, and I'm happy to report that it's a cracking idea, one of the best magic systems I've seen in a long time. I say magic, but it's closer to science, taking ideas from coding and quantum entanglement and refracting them through the prism of a pre-scientific society. The story around them is perhaps Bennett's most straightforward, and veers close to YA at times, with the lead character being a young girl who discovers her own amazing powers. It doesn't have the complexity of the Bulikov books, but there is enough charm and power to the writing, let alone originality of approach, to overcome this potentially hackneyed material, and we end up with probably one of the fantasy novels of the year. Can't wait for the next one.