![]() It turns out Fitz also has a talent for magic, which in this world is a dangerous, rare ability known as “the Skill”. His father is dead, and he is raised in the stables, rejected by all his family apart from his uncle Chade, who trains him as an assassin. The book is told in the voice of FitzChivalry Farseer, or Fitz, an illegitimate son who is dumped at the royal court in the medievalesque kingdom of the Six Duchies. People who are meant to do it are going to do it whether they are published or not.”įurther titles under the name Lindholm followed, before the story that would become Assassin’s Apprentice, the first she published as Robin Hobb, began to flow. Writing is partially an obsession or a compulsion. And my husband was away at sea.” (He’s a submarine engineer, whom she married at 18.) And I had the kids and then ended up with a tiny farm, so I was trying to keep that going. When I was writing Harpy’s Flight I was working as a waitress. Midlist means it’s a nice little addendum to your income but don’t quit your day job. “It did OK but it never earned out, and so in the US I was a midlist writer for a lot of years. The story of a woman whose family has been slaughtered, and who is fleeing from vengeful harpies, it “got good reviews and mediocre sales”, says Hobb. She published her first novel, Harpy’s Flight, at the age of 30, in 1983, under the name Megan Lindholm (her real name is Margaret Ogden). She sold these stories to magazines, but then decided to try writing in the genre she preferred reading: science fiction and fantasy. “I had been trying to write before I had kids, and then I had kids and I kept on writing, working mostly on short stories, mostly for children.” Hobb had been dabbling in writing for years before she really committed. Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Return of the King … ‘The filming of The Lord of the Rings made people realise these stories can be taken seriously’. If you put a little magical umbrella over your characters and say ‘yes, we’re going to scare you a little bit but ultimately you know that at the end of the book everything is going to be much the same way it was when we started the story’, well then, why write the story, what’s the point?” It is also, as Martin knows so well, about not being afraid to draw the final curtain for your characters when the time comes. And I think silly is more dangerous than impossible.” Good fantasy, Hobb believes, is about “lowering the threshold of disbelief so the reader can step right into the book and not feel blocked out by something that’s impossible or at first glance silly. And the way she pulls together multiple disparate strands from the preceding volumes in Assassin’s Fate is a joy to read. ![]() Her writing is superb, her world-building irresistible, her storylines both hell-for-leather exciting and deeply introspective. Hobb is the author whose books Martin described as “like diamonds in a sea of zircons”, the writer to press on those who turn up their noses at fantasy. It’s really hard to say when you’re this close, ‘Did I get that right or is it just diffusing?’” Hobb is the author whose books George RR Martin described as 'like diamonds in a sea of zircons' “What was hardest for this one was 15 volumes of backstory – trying to keep it all coherent and cohesive so I’m not contradicting something I said before.”Īnd she was wary of the trap many fantasy writers fall into of letting their story get away from them, unravelling hopelessly over an endless series of volumes. Embarking on the final novel was, she says, a scary prospect. ![]()
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