prog | Farseer

Robin Hobb is an amazing writer. I think the Farseer novels -- I am reading the second book, Royal Assassin, now -- easily qualify as the finest fantasy novels I have ever read.

Well, maybe not so easily, now that I think back. Maragret Weis and Tracey Hickman's Darksword trilogy simply floored me, when I read them in high school. And indeed, I can see elements between these two beloved trilogies that map onto each other... both series feature a main character of a young man who bears a world of internal conflict from the moment of his ill-fated birth (Farseer's hero is the bastard son of a prince; Darksword's hero is born "Dead", without magic ability, into a world that equates magic with life). In both, he is assisted by a mysterious Fool.

But Hobb's books strike me in the strength and definition of all the characters beyond the male lead. There is one clear good guy (the story is told in first-person, after all) and one obvious boo-hiss villain, and they live in a world of interesting people (and other creatures) with their own motivations and goals. Out of this weave of characters rises the main character's paths and obstacles; no mystic quests or mighty magic or sword battles, at least not yet, and I'm loving it.

Maybe someday if I get bored enough I'll try rereading Darksword again, see how they stack up now, after 15 years of reading and growing on my end. Who knows.

(I was about to say "Where fantasy is defined as..." and go on about swords and sorcery as story elements, but then I recalled Ray Bradbury's much more elegant distinction between fantasy and SF; a fantasy story, by its nature, simply can't happen as told, and an SF story could actually happen, someday. Among his own novels, he categorized Fahrenheit 451 as SF, and The Martian Chronicles as fantasy. (While Chronicles had Martians and space explorers and so on, it was really a collection of social-ethics parables with a spoonful of rocketships to help it go down easier.))