alynnidalar wrote: ↑Tue Sep 24, 2019 7:54 am
Salmoneus wrote: ↑Mon Sep 23, 2019 3:38 pm
Anyway:
Assassin's Apprentice is likeable, but I think she becomes a much better writer over time. Although, admittedly, gradually a less accessible, mass-audience writer.
Ha, and here I was worrying I'd be pilloried if I confessed I didn't like the Farseer Trilogy all that much. It was good enough that I happily read all three books, but when I finished them I had very little desire to return to the world or writer. Perhaps I would like her later books more. (or perhaps not. She wouldn't be the first renowned author who just isn't my cup of tea, despite writing the sort of thing I otherwise enjoy...)
It may depend on why you didn't like them.
I think I'd distinguish three main reasons people have for not liking them: quality, style, and content.
In terms of quality, I think AA is slightly rough, particularly at the start, as she tries to work out a new style and voice (under her previous/alternative name, she wrote modern urban fantasies). I think the next two books are better, but the third suffers from a bad pacing issue in its second half. I think in terms of technical ability, both prose and structure, she becomes better and better from then on.
In terms of style, Hobb is... well, she's generally reflective, interested in characters and relationships, quite a lot of internal thought processes, quite a bit about social norms and duties - a bit Victorian, in that sense. She can write great action sequences, but she's mostly a slow-paced writer who only uses action as occasional punctuation. The really important bits are usually intensely emotively-charged but restrained conversations. Over time, she actually becomes more like this, rather than less - Farseer is probably as action-packed as it gets. She's also a very confrontational author: she's constantly undermining expectations and refusing to give her readers what they think they want, and even recontextualising what they think they knew. One of my favourite demonstrations of this is the difference between Farseer and The Tawny Man - in the latter trilogy, we return to a Fitz who is not just a couple of decades older than the protagonist of Farseer, but also older than the narrator of Farseer, and he's pretty scathing about the naivity of the earlier character - not just the naivity of his actions, which the original narrator points out, but the naivity of the worldview that the character shares with that narrator, and by extension the reader of the earlier trilogy. The early trilogy lures us into seeing through the eyes of a teenage boy and his twenty-something older wiser self, and then the second trilogy has a more paternal thirty-something version of the same guy (and HIS some-years-later, older wiser narrator in turn) pointing out how stupid we all were to accept what that foolish boy was thinking at face value...
And speaking of Fitz, the content: the two big objections to the content of Farseer are usually that a) we see everything through the eyes of Fitz, a teenage boy whom many people don't like; and b) lots of unhappiness occurs.
Regarding the second: this remains true in all her books. Farseer isn't the happiest, but it's certainly not the unhappiest either. Hobb has depression, and although she usually has happy endings, sort of, and moments of elation along the way, most of her books have a sort of background atmosphere of tragedy, and most of the protagonists are put through the wringer quite heavily.
Regarding the first, however: there are three Fitz trilogies, and although Fitz changes considerably over time, he's still always Fitz. And we always see everything in the world through his biased, depressive, paranoid, intense, and ignorant eyes.
Alongside those, however, there's a trilogy and tetralogy set in the same world without Fitz, and a trilogy set in a different world. I haven't read the latter, which is her least popular work. But both the trilogy (Liveships) and the tetralogy (Rain Wild Chronicles) abandon the single perspective, and are massively multiple-POV affairs. It means we don't get to know and love anyone as closely and strongly as we know and love Fitz... but for people who hate Fitz (and there are lots), that's a good thing. You're more likely to find a protagonist you like, and more likely to get to explicitly see different perspectives on things.
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I'll just give a quick stylistic summary, if anyone's interesting in trying any:
The Farseer Trilogy: closest to a conventional epic fantasy, with an angsty teenage boy as Our Hero (though he's actually mostly just around while other people do the heroism, and also he murders people for the government). Wolves and true love and the demands of duty, and training and growing up and viking raids. Essential for the two later Fitz trilogies. Warm, intense, painful.
The Liveship Traders: probably the most ambitious, in a way. It remainds me of some Victorian family saga - a dozen protagonists, across multiple locations, a family business in decline, clash between cultures, revolutionary sentiments, social change, and also sea monsters and a dragon and pirates and talking ships. It's kind of, I think, an exploration of the nature of womanhood, as most of the protagonists are women who try to explore different roles to deal with the dangerous world around them - so there's a dutiful wife, a matriarch, a tomboy, a spoiled prom queen type, a prostitute, an imperial concubine, a female dragon and so on, plus some of the men and boys around them. Including a fantastic villain (weirdly, her only great villain - villains are her achilles' heel...).
A warning: while it's less angsty than Farseer, quite a few characters experience, are under threat of, or have in the past experienced rape, and indeed a lot of the thematic content is about cycles of abuse and different ways people try to heal from pain and abuse. It's mostly not graphic (indeed, it's mostly not even described directly) but it may be too hard-edged for some readers to be comfortable with.
You don't have to have read Farseer first. Basically, if you haven't read Farseer, you miss out on hints about one character's backstory, you have even less understanding of their motivations than everyone else (but to be fair, it's intentionally never entirely clear anyway), and you don't understand one in-joke. Anyway, it's I think a better series than Farseer, but it is also colder and more distant - there are more characters, none of them 100% admirable, and it's third-person narration.
The Tawny Man: sequel to Farseer. The protagonist is older, wiser, and more traumatised than before. It's less about being a teenage boy, and more about being a father, or at least having fatherly feelings. It's better, but slower, than Farseer. You pretty much need to have read Farseer. You don't have to have read Liveships. It does help, both in giving a general context and in explaining who some tangentially-encountered character are and what they're doing. But it's not necessary - the essential backstory is provided explicitly by the characters, and if you don't recognise some minor characters, nor does the narrator, and don't worry, they really are minor.
The Rain Wild Chronicles: mostly starts from scratch. There's a more YA-ish slant, with a handful of teenage protagonists - but there's a group, and the lead protagonist is female, and nobody is a child assassin, so it feels quite different from Farseer. With themes of growing up and of (literal as well as metaphorical) exploration, it feels the freshest and most optimistic of the series, although there are certainly some tragedies along the way. The pacing's a bit weird because it was designed as two books, each of which has been broken in half in a rather ungainly way. You don't have to have read Farseer, or The Tawny Man (the latter helps very, very slightly). You don't HAVE to have read Liveships, but it is set in the aftermath of that series, in the same part of the world, so it helps. And then some characters from Liveships arrive in the second half of the series - you don't NEED to know who they are in advance because it is explained, but their appearance will mean more to you if you do. Personally, I think it's the weakest of the four series, but it does have its virtues. Also: probably the ONLY epic fantasy series I've read featuring a thrilling action scene in which one of the protagonists is in labour...
The Fitz and the Fool: sequel to Tawny Man. Fitz is older, more self-aware. Perhaps the most divisive of the series, not just for what happens in it, but also because her style is most unapologetic: very slow, intense, incredibly emotional, deliberate, closest of the series to being 'literary'. When it's good, it's fantastic. I really don't like the ending (not for the reasons other fans don't like it, but because I think it's too ideologically depressed). Fitz's battle against mental health problems is more explicit. An interesting element is that narration is now split between Fitz and a new character (about whom we can only pray we get more series in future...), so we finally get to see Fitz and his worldview from 'the outside', as it were. You need to have read both Farseer and Tawny Man. You don't NEED to have read Liveships or RWC, but characters from both appear in the final novel, and so it would probably really, really help if you have.
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...sorry. Hobb's one of my favourite writers.