3 minute read
LOCKLANDS by Robert Jackson Bennett
science fiction & fantasy
LOCKLANDS
Bennett, Robert Jackson Del Rey (560 pp.) $28.99 | June 28, 2022 978-1-9848-2067-9
A thrills-and-spills conclusion to the adventures of Sancia Grado. Bennett concludes his Founders trilogy, preceded by Foundryside (2018) and Shorefall (2020), with characteristically high-spirited mayhem. The magic of scriving, which is to say, melding two objects together to form weapons, tools, and the like, has been extended to humans and even whole cities, so that the medieval-tinged metropolis of Tevanne now roams the land, searching for transubstantiation: “Tevanne did not wish to have a body anymore. It had calculated many times that, should it shed this corporeal form, its intelligence should still persist in all the various lexicons and rigs throughout its empire.” Against the bad-tempered and illintentioned Tevanne stand characters we’ve met in Bennett’s previous volumes, but with considerable attention given here to their backstories: We learn, for example, that the keylike creature called Clef (naturally) once took quite different form, that Berenice and Sancia are more than comrades in battle, and that Gregor Dandolo has more resources than hitherto hinted at. And then there’s Crasedes Magnus, who has strong skills as a shape-shifter and, mercurially, is good one minute and bad the next; it’s for good reason that Clef in particular harbors deep hatred for him. Some of Bennett’s yarn concerns the origins of scriving, a bit of technological sorcery that, often put to bad uses itself, reveals some good sides as well and produces a happy ending—at least for the survivors. Bennett’s language sometimes runs blue, sometimes knotty (“The Keyship’s espringal batteries wheeled about and sprayed the night skies as the shrieker bolts descended”), and readers will be lost in its idiosyncrasies and the story’s plot turns if they haven’t read the first two books. The effort to do so is well worth it, though, for Bennett is a master of worldbuilding, and for all the novel’s far-fetched moments, everything seems perfectly logical on its own terms.
Great fun, with nonstop action and with an escape hatch that would allow—dare we hope?—a sequel.
THE INVISIBLE THINGS
Johnson, Mat One World/Random House (288 pp.) $27.00 | June 28, 2022 978-0-593-22925-5
Kidnapped astronauts find themselves in a mysterious city on one of Jupiter’s moons. Sociologist Nalini Jackson landed a gig that many of her colleagues would envy: She’s undertaking “an intensive field study of social dynamics” on a NASA cryoship orbiting Jupiter. The problem, she soon realizes, is that she doesn’t like people all that much, especially most of the overgrown frat-boy types who are her shipmates. Things get worse when their ship is suddenly taken by mysterious forces to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, and they find themselves in New Roanoke, “an American city of at least a million. On a freaking moon, 444 million miles away, for chrissakes. In a bubble. City streets. Expressways. Parks.” They’re made to attend an orientation, where a supervisor tells them, “You can either let it drive you crazy for the rest of your life—and it can—or you can just go with the flow and make the most of this. Do like the locals do: Accept it and live your life. You got no choice; this is your home now.” The ship’s mission leader, Bob Seaford, takes this advice and gets involved in the community’s ruling party, while Nalini’s friend Dwayne Causwell goes the other way, plotting to escape the city with a ragtag group of dissidents. Meanwhile, a crew consisting of a NASA admiral, a businessman, and his dopey assistant embark on a voyage to rescue the kidnapped astronauts, who find themselves dealing with “invisible things,” mysterious gravitational forces that the people of New Roanoke refuse to discuss. There’s a lot going on in this book, and the results are mixed. As a satire of American politics and class issues, it’s a little too obvious and clumsy. But as a science-fiction novel, it’s saved by Johnson’s charismatic writing and sense of humor. (“So we missed sentient life—so what?” Nalini tells Dwayne early in the book. “Have you ever met sentient life? A lot of them are assholes.”) The book doesn’t quite live up to its high ambitions, and it’s far from Johnson’s best work, but it’s still unquestionably entertaining.
