Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1)

I can’t believe this came from the writer of the excellent Divine cities books. The only explanation I can come up with is he wrote this in highschool or something as his first ever big writing project, which probably got an A but of course no one would publish it. Then, later he writes some great books and his publisher said “Write more! Got anything else? We’ll publish anything you give us!”, so he dusted off an old 3.5 inch floppy disk and converted this from its old Word 95 file and here it is.

Everything is stilted, the text is repetitive and awful. This is paraphrasing, but there was a page which went something like “She rubbed the large magical scar on her head and reflected about the large magical accident which had scared her head . She wished a magical accident hadn’t scared her head so largely, it left her with a largely magical scar. On her head. She itched the scar on her large magical head and thought back to the days when she didn’t have a magical scar on her head. Back then it was largely magical, the accident had scarred her (physically, on her head). Her scar itched.”

About10% in she met a magical item which talks like a modern sarcastic internet person and I stopped reading. Perhaps the rest of the book gets better, but it was causing me pain to read it so I’ll never know.

The worst part is I bought this 8 days ago and the refund window is a week.

This is a good book.

Think of magic like a computer program. You add instructions and arguments and with those you reform reality. The tighter your arguments the stronger and more varied changes you can make to reality. However, imagine being limited by not knowing all the different programming languages and only being able to use certain commands from those languages you do know. The old ones had the language of the gods but they went to war and destroyed themselves. Now people are trying to relearn the words and commands using artifacts and ruins.

This book is about a thief. She was a former slave and has abilities not generally found amongst the general populace. All the better to help her thieving. She’s hired to steal a small box from security at the dock. A small box and not to look in it at all. Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy and it all goes pear shaped rather fast. As with any story where you’re not supposed to look, she does, and from there our story explodes.

This is a good book.

The dialog is laughable. Characters start out with voices but within a few pages everyone speaks in the same internet snark. The author valiantly avoids the f-word, but flippantly tosses in murder, sexual assault, domestic abuse, torture, slavery, casual sadism, and worse.

As a single example (of dozens): A main character who has already been enslaved, lashed, beaten, and medically experimented on, reflects back on a woman she considered a mother figure years before, who eventually was dismembered then lynched. The character is never mentioned again. Just a little toss-off brutality inflicted on a woman to keep our main character motivated. It would be deeply offensive if it weren’t so comically over the top and ham-fisted.

The plot barely hangs together; almost everything the characters do falls apart under scrutiny. Twists are forecast so blatantly that it became self parody. Simple ideas are explained over and over again, as if the reader were drunk, or six. A romantic subplot is the subject of perhaps four paragraphs.

One star for the writing, plotting, and characters, all abysmal. Plus one star for the innovative magic system, based (clumsily but intriguingly) on computer programming, up to and including a rogue AI and speculation about living in a simulation. Borrows from the Matrix but this is forgivable.

Not recommended, overall. The disposable violence and cruelty aren’t worth the good bits. The author broaches serious, traumatic topics but is nowhere near up to the task of dealing with them.

I got to meet Jackson at a library event in March before Foundryside was fully revealed. When he described the series, I was figuratively bouncing off the walls in excitement. Pre-ordered it the next day. Then I received an ARC.

Holy crap is this story a ride! It’s a lot lighter in tone than Divine Cities so it definitely has a different feel despite the main character living in squalor. The setting is like Locke Lamora meets industrial revolution with some Full Metal Alchemist thrown in. Also the dialogue between some of the characters reminds me of Atticus and Oberon in the Iron Druid series. Which kind of ticks all the boxes for me!

The characters are fleshed out and they grow. Each character overcomes a lot and realize they have more to go. The plot takes many a twist and turn and at one point towards the end, I had to take a break from reading, things were so intense.

Overall, Foundryside is light-hearted and fun yet intense. I cannot wait for book 2!

Thank you, good sir, for an excellent read!

It’s frustrating that so many people think sci-fi and fantasy books are badly written, infantile rubbish consumed by undiscriminating shut-ins … but then you read something like Foundryside and understand why.
I was sucked in by all the gushing positive reviews, in and out of amazon, and the idea that it’s a clever cyberpunk fantasy mash-up.
It isn’t any of those, at any level.
It turns out that it’s the second mainstream publishing fantasy of 2018 I’ve just read that basically files the serial numbers off The Matrix – which is good news for the original IP holders, since there’s clearly an appetite, but not so much for anyone who bought either Jade City or Foundryside, which are both pretty shabby
It’s not just that Foundryside is badly written, although it is, pretty much all the way through. And that’s not just because the writer often uses words that don’t mean what he seems to think they do. Or that he uses technical concepts he doesn’t understand and confuses. Like gravity – a LOT – and momentum. And lots of really poor stuff about coding.
The problems aren’t even consistent. There’s a lot of hold-the-plot infodumping to mansplain the terrible cod-techie magic system … and then, once he’s painted himself into a corner, there’s just a hand-wave.
Usually, “because gravity”.
There’s even one hysterical sequence when the main Point of View character nods in and out of sleep to escape a numbing sequence of “as you probably already know …” between the rest of the cast.
There’s also a terrible cowardice over rude words, which I can’t forgive. It can only be to jump a perceived explicit content issue for the unspoken target YA audience, because by no stretch of the most elastic imagination is this a book for adults. The writer obviously wants his young readers to relate to cool-cat characters who constantly eff and blind, and fair enough because I’m an incredibly sweary old soul myself, but either be honest about it or just don’t do it.
I’m being made circumspect by amazon’s definite issues with the language in reviews. An invented word “scrum” is a cut and paste substitute for the f-word, which is used almost constantly in dialogue, but even more irritatingly also by the “author voice”, which should know better. Other literal four letter words that obviously don’t trip the wary school librarian alarm, like the sh-word and the English a-word slang for “bottom”, are crow-bared into dialogue like there was a sale on.
All of which you might be able to overlook if the characters weren’t one dimensional and off the rack. But they really, really are. The protagonist is an odd looking racially marginalised teenage outsider exploring non-binary gender relationships. Most adults are barely one-dimensional, and beyond the outsider cohort not to be trusted. The male antagonist is a joyless, predatory deviant.
The protagonist’s best friend is a talking amulet, and it would be interesting is they started out talking in the exact same voice because somehow it turned out they were parts of the same personality. But it isn’t because they aren’t. Dialogue obviously just isn’t a strength.
I stuck with it to make sure I wasn’t rushing to judgement. I haven’t. It’s terrible.

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