Foundryside
core novel 2018 The Founders Trilogy
Record
| First published | 2018 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.16 (59,359 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780525573845 |
Synopsis
Foundryside is set in the industrial city of Tevanne, where rival merchant houses hold power through scriving, a form of magic that inscribes sigils onto everyday objects to convince them of false physical truths and bend them to a user's will. Sancia Grado, a skilled thief with an unusual and painful ability to sense scrived objects, is hired to steal a heavily guarded item from a warehouse on the docks. The job proves far more complicated than expected when the object turns out to be a sentient, talking key known as Clef, whose scriving appears more advanced than anything currently understood. Pursued by multiple merchant houses eager to claim Clef for themselves, Sancia is drawn, with the help of the former soldier and scholar Gregor Dandolo, into a much larger struggle over the city's magic and its balance of power.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Founders Trilogy
- Series: The Founders Trilogy core; position 1 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert Jackson Bennett
Notes
- From the series record (The Founders Trilogy): A completed trilogy, confirmed a 3rd, wholly unrelated universe from Robert Jackson Bennett, already in this canon twice over (Shadow of the Leviathan; The Divine Cities) -- no shared setting, characters, or continuity with either. A magic-as-programmable-code ('scriving') heist-fantasy setting. The trilogy itself was a 2023 Hugo Award for Best Series nominee; Foundryside individually was a 2019 Dragon Award finalist (Fantasy Novel, including paranormal), a 2019 British Fantasy Award (Robert Holdstock Award) finalist, and placed 4th in the 2019 Locus Award reader poll for Fantasy Novel.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Founders Trilogy: position 1 of 3: next Shorefall (2020)
Sources
← The Founders Trilogy dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.