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A review by mcloonejack
Locklands by Robert Jackson Bennett
5.0
“For if the Founders Trilogy is about anything, I suppose, it is that the innovations of our species do not yield dividends on their own.”
The final stanza of any trilogy is exceedingly difficult, the author juggling not just plot lines and character arcs but also reader expectations. Robert Jackson Bennett fully sticks the landing with Locklands.
One difficulty of a final book is keeping it fresh. Bennett achieves this by adding in more POVs than just Sancia’s, a change I initially chaffed at but worked not just storytelling-wise, but also fits into the larger themes of this book and the series as a whole.
This book also largely maintains the non-stop action of the first two, but also makes space for a lot more emotional lifting that hit its marks, for me (though I am largely a sap). If I hadn’t been reading the final pages in my friends’ apartment, I likely would have let loose at least a couple tears.
While I’m usually not one for assessing the themes of fiction, this one is maybe a little heavy-handed with its messaging by the end, but is also not so horribly overbearing as to be preachy. The internal conflict between brilliance and wisdom, as framed in Bennett’s quote from his acknowledgements that I started this with, runs through the whole series and particularly this book. Invention for invention’s sake is not inherently virtuous, particularly when driven by a singular voice. It is also a critique of captive and exploitative “togetherness” as opposed to truly open connection: think Zuckerberg’s Facebook and the timesuck we spend in the vortex of being #Online to, say, the open-source investigations of Bellingcat.
There’s also a parallel, to me, to the United States government’s response to the COVID pandemic (Bennett wrote this in the midst of the early days). Without getting overly spoiler, Tevanne’s building on the literal lifeforce of mindless, captive bodies—one focal point building and expanding on the lives of others will actively ignoring their plight—compared to the empathetic collectivism of the people of Giva is a vision of how things were vs. how they should’ve been (and maybe, still could be).
Anyways, that’s a lot of words and thoughts, but the center important point here is that this is a BANGER, all three are bangers, and must reads. I’ll be recommending this series for a long time.
The final stanza of any trilogy is exceedingly difficult, the author juggling not just plot lines and character arcs but also reader expectations. Robert Jackson Bennett fully sticks the landing with Locklands.
One difficulty of a final book is keeping it fresh. Bennett achieves this by adding in more POVs than just Sancia’s, a change I initially chaffed at but worked not just storytelling-wise, but also fits into the larger themes of this book and the series as a whole.
This book also largely maintains the non-stop action of the first two, but also makes space for a lot more emotional lifting that hit its marks, for me (though I am largely a sap). If I hadn’t been reading the final pages in my friends’ apartment, I likely would have let loose at least a couple tears.
While I’m usually not one for assessing the themes of fiction, this one is maybe a little heavy-handed with its messaging by the end, but is also not so horribly overbearing as to be preachy. The internal conflict between brilliance and wisdom, as framed in Bennett’s quote from his acknowledgements that I started this with, runs through the whole series and particularly this book. Invention for invention’s sake is not inherently virtuous, particularly when driven by a singular voice. It is also a critique of captive and exploitative “togetherness” as opposed to truly open connection: think Zuckerberg’s Facebook and the timesuck we spend in the vortex of being #Online to, say, the open-source investigations of Bellingcat.
There’s also a parallel, to me, to the United States government’s response to the COVID pandemic (Bennett wrote this in the midst of the early days). Without getting overly spoiler, Tevanne’s building on the literal lifeforce of mindless, captive bodies—one focal point building and expanding on the lives of others will actively ignoring their plight—compared to the empathetic collectivism of the people of Giva is a vision of how things were vs. how they should’ve been (and maybe, still could be).
Anyways, that’s a lot of words and thoughts, but the center important point here is that this is a BANGER, all three are bangers, and must reads. I’ll be recommending this series for a long time.