Why The Divine Cities Trilogy Makes Faith Political

Robert Jackson Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy—City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles—uses epic fantasy to examine empire, cultural memory, religious authority, and the violence of historical revision. Its gods are real, its miracles leave physical evidence, and its cities bear the scars of conquest, making the books unusually effective at exploring how colonialism reshapes both public institutions and private belief.

The trilogy’s achievement lies in refusing to treat faith as simple superstition or colonialism as decorative worldbuilding. Bennett connects bureaucracies, military power, language, archaeology, and spiritual practice. The result is a fantasy setting where the question of who controls the past becomes inseparable from who is allowed to define reality in the present.

A World Built From Imperial Contradictions

The central historical reversal is bold. The people of Saypur were once dominated by the powerful Continent and its pantheon, whose gods controlled cities, economies, and everyday life through genuine supernatural force. After the Saypuri rebellion, the gods were killed, the Continent was occupied, and Saypur became the dominant political power.

That reversal does not erase the structures of empire. Saypur presents itself as a modernising force that brings law, rational government, and liberation from divine tyranny, yet it also extracts resources, controls institutions, and treats the conquered population as a problem to be managed. The trilogy understands that an anti-imperial revolution can reproduce imperial habits once it acquires an army, a bureaucracy, and a confident story about its own righteousness.

This is why the setting feels more complicated than a standard “fallen empire” narrative. The old regime was genuinely oppressive, while the new regime is genuinely capable of oppression. Bennett allows both facts to remain true, creating a political landscape where liberation is not a permanent moral status.

Colonialism Lives In Everyday Systems

In City of Stairs, the colonial relationship appears through civil service departments, diplomatic missions, censored scholarship, and competing approaches to archaeology. Shara Komayd, an investigator from Saypur, enters the city of Bulikov expecting to encounter a defeated culture. Instead, she finds a society whose history has been suppressed so thoroughly that even its streets and monuments have become contested evidence.

The occupation is visible in material details. Local languages and customs are treated as suspicious, while Saypuri administration claims neutrality. The city’s inhabitants are expected to accept a foreign framework for law and knowledge, even though their ancestors built the institutions now being studied. This resembles the way colonial authorities have often classified Indigenous traditions as folklore while elevating European categories as objective scholarship.

Bennett also shows how colonial power survives after formal conquest. It remains in archives, school curricula, trade routes, military appointments, and assumptions about whose testimony counts. That focus makes the trilogy particularly valuable for readers in Australia, where debates about First Nations sovereignty, museum collections, frontier history, and the teaching of colonisation remain part of public life.

Faith Is A Social Technology

The gods in these novels are neither distant metaphors nor benevolent fantasy mentors. They govern through contracts, rituals, miracles, punishments, and dependence. Their worship creates communities and explains suffering, but it also gives divine institutions enormous authority over bodies, labour, sexuality, and political loyalty.

When the gods disappear, faith does not simply vanish with them. People continue to mourn, worship, interpret relics, and search for meaning in a world that has lost its supernatural guarantees. Others embrace the certainty of secular administration. The trilogy treats both responses seriously, showing that belief can be comforting, coercive, communal, and politically useful at the same time.

This is where Bennett’s treatment of religion becomes sharper than the usual fantasy conflict between “magic” and “reason”. Saypur’s secular modernity is not free from dogma. Its officials can become just as doctrinaire about progress and rationality as priests were about divine command. The books ask whether people have abandoned faith or merely transferred faith into the state, the archive, the nation, or the promise of technological control.

The Gods Are Also Colonial Historians

The Continent’s pantheon is powerful, but the trilogy does not romanticise it. Divine rule produces spectacular architecture and elaborate cultures, yet it depends on hierarchy. The gods make entire populations legible through religious categories, deciding who belongs, who serves, and who must be sacrificed for the system to continue.

Their disappearance creates a vacuum in historical interpretation. Saypur records the gods as tyrants, while surviving Continental communities remember them through grief, devotion, and ancestral identity. Neither account is complete. The trilogy’s conflict therefore turns on more than whether the gods were good or evil; it concerns who has the authority to preserve memory and whose version of the past becomes official.

The gods also reveal the instability of colonial narratives. Conquerors often claim to rescue people from their own traditions, while the conquered may hold complicated feelings about institutions that harmed them and still formed their cultural world. Bennett gives that contradiction room to breathe. The Continental characters are not reduced to victims who need liberation, and Saypur’s revolutionaries are not reduced to villains for governing after the revolution.

Bodies, Trauma, And The Cost Of Empire

The second novel, City of Blades, moves the trilogy’s argument from diplomatic investigation to military trauma. General Turyin Mulaghesh is an ageing veteran whose body carries the consequences of state violence. Her memories are fragmented, her authority is conditional, and her relationship with duty is shaped by what war has taken from her.

The novel’s treatment of military service is especially important because imperial systems depend on ordinary people carrying out extraordinary violence. Soldiers may believe they are protecting civilisation, ending tyranny, or preventing chaos, but their work still leaves damaged communities and damaged selves. Mulaghesh’s experience refuses the clean emotional resolution often given to fantasy generals.

The trilogy also links bodily autonomy to religious and political control. The gods’ systems treat people as instruments, while modern administrations classify them as citizens, workers, soldiers, or suspects. Different vocabulary does not guarantee different ethics. Power remains visible in who is permitted to choose, who must obey, and whose pain is considered an acceptable cost.

What The Trilogy Demands From Modern Readers

The Divine Cities trilogy rewards readers who enjoy intricate secondary worlds, but its politics are never separate from its character work. Shara’s professional confidence, Mulaghesh’s exhaustion, Sigrud’s grief, and later characters’ struggles with inheritance all show how historical systems enter individual lives. The novels make institutions emotionally legible.

Its layered structure may appeal to Australian readers who move between literary fantasy, political thrillers, and speculative fiction about environmental or social collapse. For another route into fiction that connects power with damaged worlds, the discussion of climate dystopian novels offers useful neighbouring territory, even though Bennett’s trilogy focuses more directly on religion, empire, and historical memory.

The books are also unusually suited to audio because their conflicts depend on competing voices: official reports, personal testimony, military orders, sacred stories, and suppressed histories. Readers interested in how performance can deepen expansive speculative fiction may find the rise of full-cast productions especially relevant to this kind of ensemble-driven storytelling.

For readers buying in Australia, editions may be available through Booktopia, Dymocks, local independent bookshops, or library networks, while Bookshop and Waterstones can provide alternatives when stock varies. Supporting an independent shop through Bookish Valhalla also fits the trilogy’s wider concern with whose cultural work is preserved, circulated, and valued.

The series ultimately explores colonialism and faith so effectively because it treats both as lived systems rather than abstract themes. Empire shapes maps and memories; belief shapes bodies and communities; revolution changes rulers without automatically changing habits. By allowing every political order to contain both liberation and domination, Bennett creates fantasy that remains morally unsettled long after the final miracle.