Robert J. Bennett’s latest novel Foundryside starts off a new series from the author of the Divine Cities trilogy, and in this post, Bennett explains why he’s decided to investigate the use (and misuse) of magic in his latest work…

One of the most memorable video game moments of my young life was when my friend threw a LAN party – a “Local Area Network” night where we all dragged our giant desktops over, hooked up, and played games until the wee hours, as opposed to going on dates or learning something useful – and showed us that he’d made his own modified levels.

I don’t recall the exact game – I think it was some off-brand version of Counter-Strike – but he had altered significant portions of the game’s gravity, and recoded certain tiles of the playing environment so that they did new, different things when you walked over them: shot you hundreds of feet in the air, or set you on fire, or made you fall into a huge network of tunnels. You had to know which tiles did what in order to survive the game.

I remember him showing us how he’d recoded all of these environmental elements: the developer’s kit the game had provided for making mods, the way each element had an ID, and the way you could dupe an element and change some of its basic code – “This is the gravity bit here, so let’s increase it by, oh, a thousand” – to produce a totally new, altered element.

It seemed complicated, intimidating, and tedious.

But it made for a really fun game.

Over fifteen years later, I was driving around thinking about magic. Magic, I’d decided, was essentially a series of instructions given to reality to change the way it worked. But the instructions had to be clear and firm. Because reality was like everything else in the world – it had momentum, it wanted to keep doing what it was doing. It was stupid, so it needed to be convinced.

Much like one programs a piece of software. You have to define everything, then begin building elements that all work together to produce a desired result when executed.

The more I thought about a magic system like this, the more I thought about that night at my friend’s house, when he showed us the developer’s kit he’d used. “That’s what magic is,” I thought to myself. “A developer’s kit that uses coded signals to change the way elements work.”

Only instead of a game, it would be reality. And instead of a tile on the ground, it would be, say, a giant boat. Or a building. Or a carriage. Or the human soul.

Foundryside is a fantasy story about technology: about a group of smart people who figured out the way the natural laws work, realized how they could manipulate them, and then – just like those who first figured out shipbuilding, or the use of coal or oil – built an empire of trade and warfare out of it. Because even in a magical world, that’s what people so often do: an advantage, inevitably, comes to be used for domination.

Who knows? Maybe I did learn something at that LAN party.

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett is published by Jo Fletcher Books in Trade Paperback on 23rd August; click here to order from Amazon.co.uk