Review of "Locklands" by Robert Jackson Bennett
I received an ARC of this book from Tor in exchange for an honest review. My review will contain important spoilers for the previous two books in the trilogy, Foundryside and Shorefall, but not for Locklands itself.
In Foundryside, Robert Jackson Bennett unveiled a steampunk-fantasy alt-Venice that ultimately became a story about artificial intelligence. In Shorefall, the links to cyberpunk and computer programming strengthened as Sancia, Berenice, Gregor, and Orso discover the power of cloud computing, extending the idea of magically linking objects together to connect minds. With Locklands, Bennett again takes his half-magic, half-programming to new heights, tacking the idea of reality as a simulation with re-writable laws. Craesedes Magnus had already offered a taste of this power at the end of Shorefall, but the ability to alter the world in even more profound ways than existing scrivings takes center stage, as Sancia and her allies, noworganized into the independent nation of Giva, take on the embodied city of Tevanne, which bears little trace of its former life as Gregor Dandolo. The physics of Locklands is at times strikingly close to that of the modern world, with cleverly used scrivings emulating the roles of ICBMs and hypersonic missiles in the Cold War that opens the novel. These uses of speed and gravity lend power and tension to the book's action sequences and highlight the escalating arms race that was kicked off in Foundryside. Perhaps even more (literally) mind-boggling, though, is the centrality of twinned minds. The Givans have fully embraced twinning, leading to an early-Singularity state in which telepathy is ubiquitous and selfhood is blurred. While most Givans choose to maintain at least some sense of self, others join hivemind-like Cadences, which emphasize one attribute (such as empathy, or scriving talent) and largely subsume the personalities of their members. The Cadences are voluntary, but still somewhat eerie, especially given the observation that few ever choose to leave one after having joined. Bennett tends to emphasize the positive aspects of the Givans' web of mind-to-mind connections and highlights the horror of being cut out of it in order to avoid granting Tevanne indirect access to the minds of all of its enemies at once. I would have liked to see a little more thought given to the downsides of mind-twinning; the spectrum from an un-twinned person, to a normal twinned Givan, to a member of a Cadence, to a mindless drone in Tevanne's army, seems to offer the potential of finer gradations than what the book explores. By the time one of the protagonists begins to grapple with the possibility of being left behind by this psychic arms race, in which only vast multiply-instantiated consciousnesses can truly exist in a world of tremendous technological progress, the book is almost over. Despite this misgiving, I found that the mind-to-mind conversations were well-used and contributed to several well-staged scenes, both in the heat of battle and in quieter and more emotional moments. Locklands's last few chapters and epilogue in particular showed the best that the series has offered, combining mind-bending "how did he come up with that?" technology with an acute awareness of the characters' humanity and the ways in which central tenets of human life--the drive for progress, the fear of being alone--are modified but never erased by the relentless pace of progress. It's the mark of a good series that Bennett is able to stick the landing while still leaving open several philosophical dilemmas in a world that will richly reward return visits.
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