Talking Myself into Reading a New Fantasy Series

So Robert Jackson Bennett, who is an excellent fantasy author, put me and my favorite character through a great deal of unnecessary torment in a certain recent book (ahem: Locklands) and I have been too busy crying in a corner to try any of the books he's written since then. Fool me once, and all that.

But it seems I have accrued enough emotional stability that I am willing to be fooled twice, since I am now (cautiously, with handkerchief at the ready) reading his most recent series, which starts with The Tainted Cup. That means I am now rediscovering all the fun and cool things I missed out on while I was all hurt and offended and on strike from reading Jackson Bennett books. So, to convince myself that it is in fact a good idea to read this new series, I’ve made a list of my top three reasons that Jackson Bennett books are awesome.

1. Worldbuilding.

There's so much depth and complexity in every Robert Jackson Bennett fantasy world, but the real prize is the bizarre and quite original magic systems. In the book I’m reading, The Tainted Cup, everything is organic. Everyday objects from building materials to cloth to climate control are grown from plants and fungi with ever wilder genetic modifications. And the flip side of that technology is heightened danger of infection and disease, and even the potential for biological weapons. It's such a juicy premise - the plot possibilities are endless.

More subtle but no less impressive to my mind is the way that Jackson Bennett comes up with clever but unobtrusive names for ordinary things like money and months and measurements. Names like that are tricky. A high fantasy book can't necessarily adopt real-world terms like "dollar" and "millimeter", but because those are such high-use words, and we're so accustomed to our specific terms for them, made-up substitutes tend to look glaringly bizarre. Robert Jackson Bennett is an author who manages to work around that by taking words that are sort of half familiar and repurposing them in new contexts. For example, instead of “feet” and “inches” he uses “spans” and “smallspans”. It’s very clever because it sounds vaguely fantastical, but it isn’t distracting, because we kind of recognize those words and we intuitively understand what they mean.

2. Balanced characters. (Because superpowerful fantasy people also have to be relatable.)

The people in Jackson Bennett’s books live in fantasy worlds, obviously, so their lives involve superhuman and magical things. In The Tainted Cup, the crazy genetic modifications extend to humans, so you have people with impossible, artificially created capacities for language, math and memory, as well as people with augmented size and strength. And their powers come with the terrifying possibilities of injury and mental illness and unhappy early deaths.

It's all a little unnerving and over-the-top, but Jackson Bennett has this ear for casual irreverence that brings it all back down to earth. One of my favorite moments in the early chapters of The Tainted Cup comes right after our first full immersion in this world, with its bizarre plants and oppressive climate and starchy formality. Din, the main character, gets a moment alone, and suddenly he's just this overwhelmed young guy who's been dropped in the middle of a bloody legal/political mess. Before he goes off to tackle the problem, he tells his reflection, "Let's not fuck this up, yes?"

I mean, I can't help but like the guy. I'm on his side.

3. The high stakes!

High fantasy thrives on big conflicts, at the scale of countries and armies and religions. That's what makes a grand and sweeping narrative; that's what gives the characters scope for enormous heroism. But the clash of empires can't be the sum total of a story's conflict, because any character who fights for a country and has no other thoughts in their head seems like a bit of a government shill and is therefore not very interesting. So it’s important for individual fantasy characters to have their own personal battles going on, stuff that’s smaller but still urgent.

In The Tainted Cup the multi-pronged conflict is managed brilliantly. There are three nested layers of story going on: Firstly we have Din and his private determination to build a career by any means necessary, despite hostile witnesses, and rival officers, and unhelpful family, and those genetic modifications with their terrifying potential side effects, and teachers interested in punishing him for what might be dyslexia. On top of that we have the murder investigation Din is working on, which keeps running up against liars and secrets and politics and getting derailed when new and disruptive information is uncovered. Then finally, for a grand-scale conflict, we have the city of Talagray, which throughout all the chaos of the murder plot is trying to defend its walls against an onslaught of vast and mysterious and cosmically destructive monsters. Each of these problems makes each of the others a little bit more difficult, and having the characters try to knock them all down at once makes for a truly epic struggle.

There are lots of other cool things I could mention, of course, but some of them would be spoilers for The Tainted Cup, so I'll stop here. Anyway - if Jackson Bennett betrays me now and does something horribly sad to a character I like, well, at least I'll have this list of cool stuff to console myself with.