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Books : Science Fiction & Fantasy : Authors, A-Z : H : Hobb, Robin
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Fool's Fate concludes Robin Hobb's fantasy trilogy "The Tawny Man"--in which Fitz, narrator-hero of the "Farseer" trio beginning with Assassin's Apprentice, plunges into new complexities of politics and magic 15 years later.The goal is formal peace between Fitz's Six Duchies and the Outislander Raiders, ending a cycle of war fought with weapons that kill the soul, whose horror dominated that first trilogy. A royal marriage is arranged, with the puzzling condition that the Duchies' heir must bring a bride-price of the head of the last male dragon--who's alive but entombed in a glacier. Why?
Fitz's old friend the Fool, a once-albino who believes himself the White Prophet of this age but has mysteriously darkened into the Tawny Man, opposes this dragon-killing. It seems necessary to deceive and betray the Fool for his own good, if only to prevent his self-prophesied death.
Another betrayal: a halfwit master of the psychic "Skill" is needed for this mad quest, and must be lured by Fitz on to ship after ship despite his horror of the sea. Old deceptions return to haunt Fitz, such as the Skilled girl who doesn't know she's his daughter, and others long kept in the dark for what seemed excellent reasons.
Grim surprises, confrontations, a hidden enemy and the old horror of soul-draining ("Forging") all await on the island of the glacier and the dragon. Fitz has more than once been traumatically hauled back from death: now the risks are worse than ever, with an impasse that surely can't be resolved.
Do Fitz and his closest friends win through? That would be telling, but whatever happens, there are high prices to be paid. It's a measure of Robin Hobb's skill with characters and relationships that the final compromises and realistic settlements are so satisfying. Smoothly readable despite great length, laden with charm and terror, Fool's Fate is a fine ending to what is a family as well as a fantasy saga. --David Langford
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The Golden Fool, the second volume of Robin Hobb's Tawny Man trilogy, is explicitly a sequel to both the Farseer and Liveship trilogies. The palace intrigues, which Fitz has found himself dragged back into, have as much to do with the politics of trade and conquest--the war between the Bingtown traders and their living ships and the theocratic bullies of Chalced--as with the oppression of the beast-speaking Witted by the majority and the terrorism of the Piebald faction among the Witted. Fitz has always been a deeply flawed hero--growing up as a royal bastard trained in assassination has not been good for his character--and his inability to understand how deeply he is loved upsets all the people around him.One of Robin Hobb's strengths is her capacity to set up an interesting dialogue between metaphor and the literal; at both levels, The Golden Fool is a novel about moving through estrangement to reconciliation, about finding out the truth and then finding a way of living with it. This thoughtfulness means that, as always with Hobb, Fitz's role as tutor of a magically gifted prince, is as exciting as the book's occasional explosions of violence. --Roz Kaveney
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In Fool's Errand, first of the "Tawny Man" trilogy, Robin Hobb brings back Fitz, hero of her emotionally powerful and intrigue-filled Assassin trilogy, from 15 years of self-imposed exile from his royal relations and from the world of power. Hobb is particularly good at the passage of time and the things it does not change; Fitz plausibly thinks of himself as older and more settled than he actually is. She is also good on the actual changes--Fitz's mentor Chade is teetering on the brink of old age and his androgynous ally the Fool has returned to court as the fop Lord Gallant; these are characters we cared about before and she makes it matter that they have aged or altered. Fitz is bonded by Wit to a wolf; the heir, Prince Dutiful, the son he never saw, is adrift with his own Wit in a world where people get lynched for it. Hobb's leisurely story-telling never lacks urgency and menace; this is a humane book which includes nightmarish touches along the way. Her sense of the world of magic and the world of political power is acute--she makes us see more than her flawed hero, even though we share his eyes.--Roz Kaveney
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High heroic fantasy has rarely paid enough attention to ships and sailors, the lifeblood, after all, of trade and survival in a non-technological world. In her Liveship Traders series, Robin Hobb more than makes up for this with a sequence in which economic survival is the principal objective of the merchant family, the Vestrits, who provide most of her viewpoint characters. The Mad Ship takes up their adventures where Ship of Magic left off, with young would-be priest Wintrow the captive of the pirate Kennit and bonded to the living figurehead of the family ship Vivacia; and his sister Malta caught up in the affairs of the changeling traders of the Rain Wild. Their aunt Althea, who feels she should have had command of Vivacia, is off having adventures as a sailor, and the mysterious Amber is trying to heal and repair the shattered mad hulk Paragon, who killed his crew and lies abandoned in the sand dunes. All this and war and conspiracy too--Hobb gives us a rich portrait of a world and a family in turmoil and raises some interesting questions about what it is to be used and make use of. --Roz Kaveney
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Robin Hobb, author of the Farseer trilogy, has returned to that world for a new series. Ship of Magic is a sea tale, reminiscent of Moby Dick and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series in its details of shipboard life. It is also a fantasy adventure with sea serpents, pirates and all sorts of magic. The "liveships" have distinct personalities and partner with specific people, somewhat like Anne McCaffrey's Brain ships and their Brawns, though these are trading ships and have full crews.Hobb has peopled the book with many wonderfully developed characters. Most of the primary ones are members of the Vestritts, an Old Trader family which owns the liveship Vivacia. Their stories are intercut with those of Kennit, the ambitious pirate Brashen, the disinherited scion of another family who served on the Vestritt's ship, and Paragon, an abandoned old liveship believed to be insane. The sentient sea serpents have their own story which is hinted at as well.
Though Ship of Magic is full of action, none of the plot lines is resolved in this book. Readers who resent being left with many questions and few answers after almost 700 pages should think twice before starting, or wait until the rest of the series is out so that their suspense won't be too prolonged. But Hobb's writing draws you in and makes you care desperately about what will happen next, the mark of a terrific storyteller. --Nona Vero
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In Ship of Magic, Robin Hobb introduced us to the Bingtown traders and their comfortable world, just at the point where it starts to fall apart, a process which accelerates in this second book of the Liveship Traders series. Slavery and slave trading have come into fashion, and the old trading alliance with the strangely disfigured colonists of the Rain Wilds is falling apart. Their distant overlords in Jamailla are making demands of tribute and a slavery hating pirate captain has ambitions of his own. Hobbs' characters are complex and usually attractive; her sense of the conflicts that arise between imperfect goods is sophisticated. Above all, she shows a capacity for sympathy in unlikely places--Kennit, the pirate who constantly tries to deny that he has a conscience; Althea, who will sacrifice almost everything to her desire to get back control of the family ship; the ships themselves, intelligent beings whose grace and charm hide the fact that they are the victims of a crime nonetheless gross for being inadvertent. Like the Assassin trilogy before it, the Liveship Traders books take us to a world of beauty and strangeness, where actions plausibly have terrible consequences. --Roz Kaveney
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