Urban Fantasy/High Fantasy/Fantasy Fiction: The Political Consequences of Technology & The Power of Imagination
"In a city that runs on industrialized magic, a secret war will be fought to overwrite reality itself--the first in a dazzling new fantasy series from "City of Stairs" author Robert Jackson Bennett.
Of How Technology Shapes Our Lives
"In Robert Jackson Bennett's critically-acclaimed new novel, Foundryside, a scrappy thief-cum-spy explores a world where items can be "scrived" to think for themselves and bend natural laws. The role scriving plays in this alternate reality is powerfully analogous to how software defines so many aspects of our own lives, and the four merchant houses that dominate Bennett's fictional society map closely to the tech monopolies that are accruing more and more power every day in the real world.
In the following interview, we discuss the political consequences of technology and the power of imagination.
In the following interview, we discuss the political consequences of technology and the power of imagination.
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How does scriving extrapolate the social implications of the internet?
"The superficial comparisons to software and technology are fairly obvious in the story: magic functions as instructions, which must be carefully written by some very educated people in order to achieve amazing results — only instead of using pattern recognition to identify hidden, unrealized value in large datasets, the programmers in this world smash things together and blow stuff up. So, a bit more dramatic.
Things are a bit more interesting when you start to consider how using this technology allows people to reshape reality, both directly and indirectly.
This method grants certain kinds of people a great deal of power, which allows them to dictate how the world works — much like how the political and economic schemes of our world are increasingly viewed through the lens of the internet, in the world of Foundryside, everything is shaped by scriving. They cannot imagine living without it, and they can't imagine not using it to get what they want. It's just too easy to colonize and conquer."
This method grants certain kinds of people a great deal of power, which allows them to dictate how the world works — much like how the political and economic schemes of our world are increasingly viewed through the lens of the internet, in the world of Foundryside, everything is shaped by scriving. They cannot imagine living without it, and they can't imagine not using it to get what they want. It's just too easy to colonize and conquer."
Foundryside is a story of revolution. What are the most misunderstood aspects of real world revolutions? If we want to empower ourselves to make a difference, what should we do and what should we pay attention to?
Revolution is examined much more closely in the sequel, but I would say that it's important to realize that a revolution is not a singular event, but a violent series of tug-of-war that has actions and reactions.