Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool, book 3: Assassin's Fate

Why couldn’t the dragons just fly the ring to Clerres?

Cover illustration by Alejandro Colucci

Ok, I’m going to confess something. I’ve been calling this whole project a ‘reread’, but in fact, I’ve never actually read this last trilogy. So I didn’t know what was coming when I wrote the last two posts, and I feel VERY SILLY now that I’ve gotten to the end about my ignorant comments blithely asserting that Hobb mellowing in her cruelty, softening her blows, pulling her punches. 

She wasn’t. She was just taking a deep breath before this last book. Be aware: I'm going to abuse italics. I'm very worked up about this.

And although I’ve seen the kinds of blows she can land, still – this book seems the worst, because it was all unnecessary. In the Farseer trilogy, Fitz getting tortured to death in Regal’s dungeons was part of the path to extract himself from his identity as a Farseer bastard, freeing him up to do things like find Verity and help him build his Skill-dragon to defend the Six Duchies from the Red Ship raiders. In the Liveship trilogy, Vivacia had to become a slaver so that she’d get taken by Kennit, which would send her (and Paragon) on the path to recovering their draconic roots, thereby enabling them to guide the serpents to their spawning grounds and start a new nest of dragons. In Tawny Man, the Fool getting flayed alive in the Pale Lady’s ice cave was necessary to bring the other dragons back from extinction. These were horrible things that happened, yes, but they served a purpose. They made the world better.

What did we accomplish here in this book? Yes, we rescued Bee (although, honestly, she was doing a pretty awesome job of rescuing herself), but that’s personal. The Farseer line is doing just fine without her: Nettle’s got a baby, Elliania’s got a baby. On the large scale, rescuing Bee is a good thing for Fitz to do as a father, but it’s a very small story for a Robin Hobb trilogy.

But wait! you might say. What about the destruction of Clerres? you might say. That’s a huge thing! That’s incredible! That’s an amazing improvement in the world at large! you might say.

Yes. But Fitz and the Fool didn’t do it. First of all, it was Bee who burned the archives, and second of all, it was the dragons who finished the job. Fitz and the Fool didn’t even need to go to Clerres! For that matter, the Fool didn’t even need to go to Fitz! He could have sicced the dragons on Clerres, left poor Fitz out of it, and everything could have ended happily. Properly happily. Not whatever this together-forever White Prophet and Catalyst nonsense is. Clerres would be rubble, Fitz would be Tom Badgerlock, raising his little daughter Bee and meeting his grandbaby, and the Fool would be  . . .

Well, probably dead. But as I consult my feelings about this book, I find that I don’t really care about the Fool as a character on his own. We have a good few chapters at the end when he’s trying to be a father to Bee, because they both think Fitz is dead and he’s all she has left, and everything about that attempted relationship just falls flat. The Fool on his own is not an interesting person. He only works with Fitz. 

I don’t think that’s an accident. I think that’s actually a masterful bit of character work. By seeing how grim and lonely and empty the Fool’s life will be without Fitz – denied even by his own child (for a given value of ‘his own’), bereft of purpose – it is satisfying to see him come to his end, united forever with Fitz (and Nighteyes) in the Skill-wolf. 

But I still don’t like him. I cannot forgive him for the misery he brought. The unnecessary misery. In the previous sub-serieses of this saga, it was possible to argue that there was no other way to bring about the events that had to happen.  But here, after all we’ve endured, the dragons rock up and just . . . tweet it out destroy Clerres to the bedrock, and it’s hard to ignore that big smoking sign trumpeting THIS WAS THE OTHER WAY. 

Yes, fine, we’ve had 15 books so far establishing that Fitz will do whatever the Fool asks him, and the Fool loves Fitz and their relationship is complicated and deep and there are layers, and I get it. And also, yes, fine, the Fool was desperate and dying and going to the only person who could help him, the person who knew more of him than he had ever revealed to anyone else who breathed. He wasn’t thinking straight, so it’s understandable he wouldn’t think to ask why the eagles dragons couldn’t just fly the ring their vengeance to Mordor Clerres.

And, yes, we’ve had 15 books in which these sorts of character motivations have been key supporting elements of the plot, resulting in a united, coherent through-line of motivation to justify the troubles. But notice my phrasing there: the character arcs supported the plot.  They united with the plot to produce motivation. They were not the sole load-bearing components. Until now. 

It’s a cruel author who gives us dragons, shows how the dragons can easily right the most hideous wrongs -- and then chucks Fitz into the meatgrinder anyway.

All throughout the book, I was taking notes for a very different write-up. I had all sorts of thoughts about the differences between identities that are assigned to you, versus identities you take on yourself. Gender, of course: Fitz trusts the Fool, but not Amber. But also not just gender. Is Bee the Destroyer or the Unexpected Son? Is Beloved or the Pale Lady the true White Prophet? Are liveships liveships, or dragons?

But I don’t have the heart. I am disheartened. Hobb has stolen my heart, enchanted my heart, and then crushed it in her claws. I knew she had it in her. I just didn’t think she would do it to me.

--

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Assassin's Fate [Del Ray, 2017]. 

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Book Review: Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer

Traumatized but healing mechas and humans building community in a ‘cozy’ post-apocalyptic setting

Suzanne Palmer’s Ode to the Half Broken is, somehow, a cozy post-apocalypse near-future science fiction story about a former military mecha. And, unlike some extremely valid recent critiques of the ‘cozy’ genre in general, Palmer manages to take seriously the traumatic events in the past of her characters as well as what might be required for them to heal.

The story begins with the former military mecha, our protagonist [1], injured and awakening alone in a “highly degraded urban interior space”. It quickly becomes clear that they were attacked by mysterious assailants. A cyberdog named Atticus, who is an organic-mecha hybrid, becomes their sidekick and helps our protagonist begin to acclimate to actually talking to other beings, which they have not willingly done in nearly 20 years.

As we are introduced to the world, we learn that things are not great. Through flashbacks and some past Global News Feed alerts, we are shown glimpses of how most of the planet was destroyed: proto-fascist paramilitaries with nuclear weapons; storms with radioactive, toxic airborne particulates; misinformation tearing people apart; global pandemics, some of them human produced; and engineers creating sapient mechas which are being used on the battlefield. 

Some humans do survive, but the mechas created by humans thrive in various types of bodies: from trains to carts to gravedigger bots to humanoids like our military mecha protagonist. There are also a lot of single purpose ‘internet of things’ bots that are not necessarily intelligent, but have at least a basic sense of self, like, for example, a smart toaster. At some point in the past, the mecha declared their independence. Now, some live independently and some live cooperatively with humans. But something seems to be going wrong: there are reports of antisocial behaviour from some mecha and rumours of shadowy forces gathering in old abandoned shopping malls.

The plot of the book follows our protagonist, with their cyberdog friend, looking for repairs and finding out who attacked them. They are also looking for some long-lost sibling bots: other mecha that were built, along with the protagonist, by a past engineer named Dr. Milton. The plot is fun! Our protagonist is joined by excellent supporting characters, like a human mechanic named Murphy; a drone called Teal-A3-Charp (“Charp” for short), and eventually a train mind named 44-Mongoose that gets transplanted into the body of a vintage 1966 Volkswagen van that was retrofit with a steam engine.

I think this book falls pretty neatly into the cozy sci-fi subgenre. There has been some recent debate about cozy sci-fi. What even is cozy sci-fi? On a recent episode of The Coode Street Podcast [2], Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe traced the origins of the term back to the 1950s and British science fiction author Brian Aldiss. Aldiss described works like John Wyndham’s Midwich Cookoos, as “cozy catastrophe” because they portrayed a disasters in a small village. Cozy fiction tends to focus on a small group of people, a manageable scale, not the whole world. On Coode Street, they contrasted this with “large management fiction,” like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.

There seems to be part of a bigger movement towards ‘cozy’ as a reaction to The Times We Live In. John Rogers, well-known producer of the tv show Leverage, recently commented on Bluesky that, right now, “the biggest movie is about science bros and the power of friendship and sacrifice[;] the biggest TV show is about good people doing their best under impossible circumstances to help suffering people[;] even under our culture’s institutionalized greed and cynicism, people are desperate for fellowship.” I agree with this.

Cozy is not limited to science fiction, of course. It was probably a reaction to the popularity of cozy mysteries. But the focus on building community in the face of larger disasters makes a good story engine for sci-fi. I very much enjoy cozy fiction and I want people to be able to enjoy things! But I have also been convinced by some excellent critiques that I need to ask for my cozy fiction to do a bit more. If nothing else, it needs to take seriously the trauma done to the characters within the world.

Palmer absolutely does this. What might look like simply a fun story about some robots and humans working together also tells a deeper story about trauma, building community, and resisting the desire to demonize the other. Our protagonist mecha was so traumatized by events in their past that they literally hid out for twenty years doing research on insects and speaking to no one. Then, of course, they were forced out of their hiding because they were violently attacked. This is not a recipe for having a great relationship with the world! But we get them see them figuring out how to reenter the world. How to build trust. How to enjoy companionship. And how to heal. But Palmer also shows us that not all trauma victims can do this. We also get to see characters who are absolutely too traumatized to forge a new path.

In the acknowledgements, Palmer notes that she wrote this book during a period of personal grief. She wanted to tell the story of a near-future apocalypse, but needed that story "to still communicate hope and friendship, have humor, allow for light, without being crassly slapstick or flippantly dismissive of the days we are all now currently living in.” I think she succeeds in this; and it’s an approach where she’s excelled in the past. I am a longtime fan of her Finder Chronicles, which follows a character named Fergus Ferguson who travels the galaxy finding lost things. If you liked Finder, you will absolutely like Ode to the Half Broken. If you've never tried tried her other work, Ode is a good place to start.

[1] I am going to be referring to the main character as the protagonist throughout this review because, well, they declined to provide a name for themselves until nearly the end of the book. 

[2] Episode 716: Dystopias, Cozy Fiction, and Other Dilemmas

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The Math 

Highlights: 

• Found family with mechas and humans building community
• Dealing with trauma and loss in a world of technological change
• Sarcastic cyberdog sidekick for comic relief

Nerd Coefficient: 8.5/10 Well worth your time and attention edging towards very high quality/standout in its category.

Reference: Ode to the Half Broken. Suzanne Palmer. [DAW Books, 2026].

POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com.