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 was 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 Rey, 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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, book 4: Blood of Dragons

 Sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced

I don’t want to call Blood of Dragons a shallow book, but something about it reveals the structural skeleton of Hobb’s method more clearly than her other books. It is . . . gaunt, perhaps. Not quite as rich and lush as it might be. Some people like that kind of thing; but when you’ve been with Hobb for this many thousand pages, when you’ve grown to like the shapely, well-developed muscles of plot and callipygous curves of character overlaid on top of her structural skeleton, then it can be a bit disconcerting to see the bones underneath, no matter how beautifully articulated they might be. Oh dear, you think, I wish this poor half-starved creature had been fed a bit more before publication.

This impression comes through most strongly in the character arc of Selden, the youngest Vestrit child who became Tintaglia’s Elderling back in the Liveship Traders. He’s been popping up occasionally in between then and now, travelling around in an attempt to better the plight of these dragons. We saw him very briefly through Fitz’s eyes back in the Tawny Man trilogy, when he came with a delegation of Bingtowners to beg aid of the rumoured Six Duchies dragons. Fitz was impressed then at how Elderlingish he looked. Now, Selden's made his way to Chalced, and discovered to his misfortune that appearances which read ‘Elderling’ in other parts of the world read in Chalced as ‘all scaley and draconic’.

The thing, is, it is not safe to be scaley and draconic in this part of the world. Slave-keeping Chalced has a pretty permissive approach about putting people in cages, especially people who are weird looking. After all, if your caged prisoner looks weird you can charge a high admission price to gawp at them. But on top of that, recall that the Duke of Chalced is dying and will pay anything for dragon body parts to preserve his life. And since it’s proving difficult to harvest those body parts from real dragons, a scaley prisoner offers another revenue stream: cut off bits of him and sell them to the Duke. Sure, this guy is not a real dragon, but he’s dragonish! Just look at the scales! So Selden, already caged up as a carnival sideshow, gets sold to the Duke of Chalced. 

Throughout the rest of the book, set firmly in the Rain Wilds, we return intermittently for brief scenes surrounding Selden’s plight, which, in a return to Hobb’s form, goes from bad to worse. First, he’s in a cage, starved and deprived of clothes and blankets, the better to show off his scales to viewers. Then people start cutting bits off of him to feed to the Duke of Chalced. Before the end the Duke is drinking Selden’s blood direct from his veins, vampire-like. And to top it all off, he’s got some bronchitis-pneumonia-type illness, so he spends a lot of time feverish and coughing. 

It’s this last detail, the pneumonia, which, of all that Hobb inflicts upon her characters, feels gratuitous. Sure, Fitz was literally tortured to death in a Evil Prince Regal’s dungeon, but that revealed a lot of important detail about how the Wit operates. Sure, Kennit’s leg rotted off from gangrene following a sea-serpent bite, but it was also really important for his character arc, as well as the development of Wintrow and Etta. Sure, the Fool got flayed alive, but that was necessary to drive home the importance of his role as the White Prophet, Fitz as his catalyst, and the lore of the Rooster Crown. 

But Selden’s pneumonia? What the point of that, beyond just making him suffer? 

This pneumonia is the bony rib of Hobb’s gaunt story structure showing through. Hobb just plain likes whump. Usually she manages to connect these components to enough of the rest of the story/character/worldbuilding that it is well-clothed in narrative flesh. In contrast to his pneumonia, Selden’s cannibalistic dismemberment is one of those well-fleshed bits of whump. It’s all part of the Duke of Chalced’s attempt to ward off his death, which is the same motivation that caused him to send agents into the Rain Wilds in previous books, suborning Sedric into accompanying Alise, forcing Hest to follow her, thereby forcing a resolution of the whole domestic drama surrounding those three. The outrage of being hunted for their meat further serves as the motivation for the dragons to rise up and attack Chalced at the end of this book, rescuing Selden from the human version of that same fate. So the cannibalism component of Selden’s treatment is rock-solidly embedded in the rest of this series.

The pneumonia, though? That’s a bit of a harder sell. There’s a gesture at using it to connect Selden to the Duke’s daughter, Chassim, who’s been trying to carry off her own Chalced feminist revolution. Her attempts at writing seditious poetry and distributing it among the women of Chalced are uncovered, and she’s imprisoned by her father, and tasked with looking after Selden. So his pneumonia works as an excuse to put them in a room together. If he weren’t sick, he wouldn’t need looking after. When the dragons come to burn everything down at the end, Chassim has earned his trust and as a result gets put in charge of the new transitional government. It’s tidy, I guess. But it’s thin. The connections are limited to the very proximate plot surrounding the events, rather than developing those far-reaching tendrils of interconnectedness that we see in the best parts of Hobb's work. 

Part of the limited interconnectedness problem springs from the simple fact that  Chalced itself is underdeveloped. I don’t have a sense of who Chassim is, what her life is, or what life in Chalced is under the dying Duke. Without this, I have no investment in removing (or preserving) the Duke, and no stake in who gets put in charge after the Duke is gone. And because I’ve spent so many thousands of pages in this world already, I know that it’s reasonable to expect to know these things. Throughout these series, we’ve seen the internal workings of the Six Duchies, the Mountain Kingdom, Jamaillia, Bingtown, the Pirate Isles, the Outislands, and the Rain Wilds, and we’ve been given a feel for them as real places. Even very brief sequences, such as the bit in the Mountain Kingdom at the end of Assassin’s Apprentice, can be effective illustrations of the life and culture and people of these places. Done well, these sequences can reveal how the different nations work, both internally as nations, and internationally as networks, bound by ties of trade and allegiance and marriage and shared heritage and fiercely defended independence. 

But throughout all of this worldbuilding, Chalced has only ever been those assholes over there. The slave-trading assholes. They are the Nation of Hats. Sooner or later there is always war with Chalced, people intone, and that’s been enough to explain whatever Chalced does. So now, with a chunk of the plot taking place in Chalced proper, with narrative POVs encompassing key political actors, you’d think this would be the chance for this nation to get the same treatment that the rest of the nations have gotten.

And I think that’s Hobb’s intention here, in setting so much of the plot so far from the Rain Wilds. But in this particular case, it doesn’t work. It feels too stretched, like skin over bone. Yes, the Duke is brutal and court life is unsafe and precarious, full of backstabbings and betrayals. But that’s not new. We’ve already seen competent, intelligent agents of Chalced in action in the Rain Wilds, and we’ve learned that they behave as ruthlessly and cruelly as they do to protect his loved ones back home. That right there shows just as clearly – and more economically -- what the Duke is capable of than any number of on-page executions. Moving the narrative to Chalced down not show us more; it show us merely more of the same. Structurally, yes, it’s absolutely time for us to see Chalced from the inside. The skeleton of that narrative purpose is absolutely clear. But the skeleton is all that's clear, because the rest of it is not fleshed out.

Selden’s pneumonia is a rib. Chalced’s cruelty is a collarbone. Hobb has constructed a good story. But without the rest of the flesh of narrative and character and plot and theme and worldbuilding, the bones are showing through.

-- 

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Blood of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2013].

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, book 3: City of Dragons

Memory defines dragons and Elderlings, but humans need less of it

When last we left our intrepid band of misfits, they had finally arrived at the lost city of Kelsingra. The dragons have needed to put aside their ideas of what makes a traditional dragon in order to recover the core of what draconic characteristics remain to them. No more can they rely on dignity and inherited memory if they want to fly. They must work, human-like, to develop abilities that once came effortlessly to them as their birthright. Like humans, what they become is a function of what they, as individuals, put into it, not what their ancestors, as dragons, have bequeathed them in inherited memories.

But if the first two books follow the dragons’ journeys to learn human skills and develop a more cooperative, human-like society, City of Dragons allows humans the opposite opportunity. Kelsingra is an intact Elderling city, and one key component of such cities is the heavy use of memory stone to save or record the thoughts and experiences of the inhabitants. Some of this is useful: it’s nice to know how to work the hot baths and lighting. But a lot more than functional infrastructure is recorded in these memory pillars, and not all those recordings are safe for humans to experience. Those former lives are glamourous and addictive, and too much indulgence can overwhelm a person’s identity, leaving them more like a ghost of the original bearer of the memory than their own person. Such is the case of Rapskal, whose own identity of a cheerful, dopey, optimistic, childlike teenager becomes entirely erased and replaced by an arrogant, martial Elderling whose memories ensnare him beyond his ability—or conscious desire—to resist.

For dragons, these ancestral memories form a core part of their identities, Without them, they are less draconic than they should be. But for humans, these ancestral memories are a threat to their own individual identities. It is not an accident that it is only Elderlings—those humans who have been changed by close association with dragons—are the ones who indulge in memory stone. This component of Elderling magic is not arbitrary. It is a reflection of dragons’ tendency to make their Elderlings like them. We see this tendency on the small scale with Sintara and Thymara. Sintara transforms Thymara into an Elderling with wings, but the wings are purely decorative, an expression of art rather than function. Sintara claims that this was the intention the entire time, but surely it’s no accident that Thymara’s wings remain purely decorative as long as Sintara herself is earthbound. One of Rapskal’s last acts as his own identity is encouraging Thymara to try to fly anyway. She has wings. Wings are for flying. He got Heeby to fly, and he is confident that he can do the same for Thymara.

So, as with decorative or functional wings, so it is with memory: dragons remake Elderlings in their image, and a core part of what they are is stored and shared ancestral memories. And this fundamental artificiality of what Elderlings are—where “artificial” means both not natural, and also a work of artifice, of intentional art—does dampen, somewhat, the glory of Elderlings that we’ve been taught to revere as something lost and wonderful throughout this entire series. Even the images of Kelsingra at its former height cannot be properly mourned as a vanished heritage, because there are hints that, even when the Elderlings and dragons were at their grandest, Kelsingra was still a city of memories. It was never full of bustling magic, alive and magnificent. It was always half-populated by ghosts; its wonders were always just a veneer of lives laid over memories of other lives. The apparent richness came from the layering, not reality.

It’s tempting to make a simple dichotomy here: with dragons, losing ancestral memories and being forced to develop individual identities human-like is a catastrophic loss. With humans, gaining ancestral memories at the expense of individual identity is equally bad. And certainly, watching Rapskal’s gentle dopiness become overwritten by an alien, long-dead personality feels like a similar loss. It is a loss. But Hobb would never let something as simple as good-for-dragons-but-bad-for-humans structure her plot. The loss for the dragons tempers their arrogance, and forces their partnership with humans into something slightly more equitable than it had been previously. In parallel, gaining those memories allows Rapskal and Thymara to access the skills that came with those memories. To jump ahead into the last book for just a moment, Rapskal’s acquired ability to lead military attack is useful in an encounter with Chalced (sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced), and Thymara’s acquired memory of Kelsingra’s infrastructure maintenance allows her to restore the well of Skill that is so vital for the dragons’ well-being. In moderation, then, the cross-pollination of humans and dragons can build greatness.

I will still always mourn, however, the realization that the Elderlings themselves relied on a palimpsest of ghosts.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. City of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2012].

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, Book 2: Dragon Haven

To build a new society, you must understand what worked (and didn’t) about the old

Dragon Haven is, at its heart, a meditation on self-determination, both on the level of the individual, and society more broadly. (In fact, both Dragon Keeper and Dragon Haven are organized around that idea, but I wanted to talk about other things last month, so we’re going to pretend that this theme is specific to this book.) When last we left our little band of adventurers, Alise had accomplished her heart’s dream, to accompany dragons in a quest for the lost dragon city of Kelsingra. She embodies the ideal of this book's thematic messaging: someone who rejects a role thrust upon her, creates her own role in the world, and thrives therein. At pivotal moments throughout this series, she will encounter people who compare the new self she has constructed to the old self she left behind. Although the comparison is complicated, in a Hobbian way, overall it turns out as well as is possible in the Rain Wilds. Alise is no longer the cultured society lady that she was at the start of the book: her hair and skin are roughened, and the man she comes to love is coarse and dirty. Nor does she grow into an elegant Elderling, the way the other dragon keepers start to do; and there are moments of tension that emerge as a result, a growing us-vs.-them sprouting between the dragon keepers and the still-humans. In every external metric, her transformation is a downward one. She loses money, power, even whatever physical charms she ever had. Her scholarship of those lost wonders is no longer valuable in a world with dragons and Elderlings returned, and Elderling cities rediscovered, with memory devices sharing their secrets with anyone and everyone who passes by. And yet, internally, she is happy and she is loved. And she has the strength of character to recognize those things as paramount. This is as close to a happy ending as you’ll get in a Hobb book.

The dragon keepers themselves have a less straightforward trajectory. They have no difficulties casting off their old life. Indeed, their old life cast them off first, by assigning them this one-way mission to take the dragons away. But people are people, and although they revel in the opportunity to build a new kind of life among themselves, nevertheless they reproduce, in microcosm, the same societal tensions that plague every society. Thymara, young and naive, basks at first in the feeling of having friends and peers, released from the strictures of a society that thinks she should have died as an infant. The other, older dragon keepers, clock immediately that this freedom from social constraint means that they can start getting down with each other. Back in the cities, people as heavily marked as them were allowed to reproduce, but here there’s no such constraint. Jerd, a young woman, sleeps around with most of the young men, before eventually settling down with Greft, the oldest and most cynical of the keepers. It’s made reasonably clear that this decision is not about personal preference or connection, but instead is because she becomes pregnant with (probably) his child. It’s not quite a life of hedonistic abandon, since the dragons keep them working pretty hard to feed and care for them, but it’s a lot more freedom than they’ve known.

But sex comes with consequences, and those consequences lay bare the problems inherent in building a new society. We’ve already talked about why they kill babies back in Trehaug. Jerd’s pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage is one of the most compelling demonstrations of how a society can get to that point. At every stage, I found myself nodding along: yes, I agree with Thymara that Jerd’s behaviour has directly resulted in her inability to pull her share of the work. Yes, I agree with Bellin that the work of caring for a sick pregnant woman falls on other people, and if you don’t have a committed partner willing to take on that task, then you are imposing it on other people who didn’t agree to be liable for it. Yes, if you die in childbirth and leave behind an infant who must be cared for, you have deprived the group of your labour, and left them with only a burden. There are reasons why casual unprotected sex outside of committed relationships is discouraged, and it’s not (only) thoughtless puritanical conservatism.

But what is the solution? So far, societies have tried constraining women’s sexual agency (Bingtown) or murdering babies (Rain Wilds). Neither seems like a good solution. These dragon keepers are not going to arrive at a better one on their own, but they have a much better understanding now of why the rules that they want to break so freely were put there in the first place.

Or rather, some of them do. Greft, Jerd’s cynical paramour, seems to think he has a much better understanding of human nature than the rest of them. In fact, his ideas about how society should be—based on power and enforced hierarchies—are fed to him by a Chalced spy who’s snuck into the expedition, and even that little detail is a beautiful example of the macrocosm rendered small into this group of explorers. Sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced, even if that war means a single Chalced spy stirring up discord in the Rain Wilders.

Hobb uses Greft’s adoption of these odious Chalced ideas as a means to have her say in a conversation that will be depressingly familiar to fantasy fans over the age of, say 25: namely, the need for “realism” in one’s worldbuilding. But in this conversation, “realism” somehow has less to do with complications of exchange rates and currency devaluation and tariffs (unless you’re Daniel Abraham or Seth Dickinson), and more to do with the insistence that it’s more “realistic” to write a world in which women should be childbearing machines and settle down with men to protect them from sexual violence perpetrated by other men. I’ve had to wade through this Disc Horse myself in my own family, multiple times. Hobb, in her turn, allows it to play out between Thymara, who’d rather not choose a man, thanks very much, and Greft, who insists that she must. She represents the argument faithfully enough, but at the very end of that conversation, she does something very satisfying. Thymara says that she will not choose any man, and walks away. And in her mind, her dragon Sintara says, Now you are thinking like a queen. There may be hope for you yet.

In other words, Hobb ends the conversation by reminding her readers, We’re in a world with DRAGONS. Who cares about your stinking “realism”? It’s an elegant way of integrating the meta-discourse into the dialogue of her book, and I enjoyed the smackdown immensely.

Oh, yes, dragons! We’ve got dragons too! And like the humans, the dragons are working on building their own society. Because unlike their forbears, who were ruthlessly individualistic, these dragons require some degree of social cohesion to survive. Not all of them have the memories that a dragon needs to be properly draconic; some seem properly half-witted. Heeby, Rapskal’s dragon, seems more like a beloved pet in Rapskal’s care than the magnificent, overpowering marvel that a true dragon should be. And yet it is Heeby who manages to recover the power of flight first. The dragon who recovers what all the rest of them aspire to is the one who is willing to let go her thoughts of what she should be, and instead make use of what she has: Rapskal’s clumsy, good-hearted, unfailing encouragement. Yes, it’s undignified to run around flapping her wings, trying and failing over and over again. Yes, OG dragons did not do anything as pathetic as failure. But—in a choice reminiscent of what we saw with the Liveship Traders—these dragons cannot have it all. They need to choose which element of dragonhood they will preserve. Sintara chooses dignity, and stays earthbound in the mud. Heeby releases dignity, and flies.

And then there is Relpda, who is more animal even than Heeby at the start of the book. She’s the one that Sedric targets when he eventually builds up the courage to steal scales and blood in his wildly foolish and politically unwise agreement to provide dragon parts for the Duke of Chalced. To Sedric, all the dragons are mere beasts. He cannot even hear their voices as anything other than animal noises. But he drinks some of Relpda’s blood, more out of curiosity than any other reason, and so forces a connection with her. She did not consent to this act of blood-sharing, but the connection is forged nonetheless, and what follows is one of the most beautiful elements of the story. In contact with Sedric’s mind, Relpda awakens. And their relationship—which is the beginning of Sedric’s redemption arc—deepens during a deadly flood of the river, in which she saves his life (multiple times). Why? he wonders. Why would she save someone who had so wronged her? And she responds, Less lonely. You make sense of the world. To me.

That thought is so enlightening. What must it be like to be a stunted, half-conscious dragon? Sintara is frustrated and furious because she knows what she should be. Relpda didn’t know even that. But she knew she was lonely. And then along comes Sedric, and wrongs her in a way that is the worst possible way a human can wrong a dragon. And yet, in his presence, she is no longer lonely.

It’s the same setup that allowed Hest to ensnare Sedric in his net: Sedric was lonely. Hest made him not lonely, even though he is unkind and cruel. But where Hest takes advantage of that power dynamic and uses it to control Sedric, Sedric does not do anything like that to Relpda. Perhaps it’s because even a half-awakening dragon is immune to mere human manipulation. Perhaps it’s because Sedric’s deeply buried but still present decency manages to struggle to the front. Whatever the reason, the two of them develop together, and forge a new kind of relationship, one built not on domination but understanding and gratitude and genuine affection. This new society will not be like the old, either the purely human, or the human-dragon partnerships of the past. OG Dragons could never. But these ones can, and must. And do.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Dragon Haven [Harper Voyager, 2010].

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, Book 1: Dragon Keeper

The character arcs are familiar, but it's all in service of building something new 

We are on to the fourth subseries of this fantastic saga! The Rain Wild Chronicles is, in a way, atypical of a Robin Hobb series, largely because it is strikingly lacking in misery and structural complexity. The character motivations are straightforward and driven by no more than the usual amount of discontent with the status quo; the main character arcs mostly avoid catastrophe, except inasmuch as a lively flood or brief skirmish enlivens typical fantasy plots; and the plot is a very simple quest structure. We don’t even get the Fool, in any of his many identities. At the end, the evil are punished (hooo boy, are they ever!), the good are rewarded, dragons kick ass, and. . .  fin. 

By now, I’ve reread enough Robin Hobb to recognize that the character arcs are mostly recycled from previous books. This is not a criticism; more an observation. Hobb evidently had a lot to say about certain types of personal journeys, and she didn’t say it all the first time round. Take Alise Finbok, the dragon scholar who yearns to study dragons, yearns so hard that she insists that a study trip up the Rain Wild River be included as a condition in her marriage contract. This is her only point of joy in a loveless marriage to a husband who is powerful and overbearing, who oppresses her and belittles her and makes her feel small. When she finally gets the opportunity to travel to the Rain Wilds and observe the dragons, she is disappointed to find the creatures so different from how she’d expected them to be. Yet nevertheless she takes advantage of circumstances and manages to remake herself  into a new person in their company. She is thus freed from her asshole husband, and learns what it is to be loved and valued for her own skills and self and personhood. This is a lovely character arc. It is also in many ways a repeat of Serilla’s arc from the Liveship Traders. Serilla, recall, begins her arc as the companion of the asshole Satrap of Jamaillian, who belittles her, ignores her experience and political acumen, and tries instead to treat her as a sexual object. She finds her purpose in her scholarship of the history and politics of Bingtown. When she finally gets the opportunity to travel to Bingtown, she is disappointed to discover that the life she’d imagined for herself there is not feasible. Yet nevertheless she takes advantage of circumstances and – with some false starts – manages to remake a new existence for herself, freed from the asshole Satrap, and – if not loved and valued – at least respected for her knowledge and experience. The worst parts of Alise’s story are really not all that terrible compared to Serilla’s. As I’ve said, these books lack the typical Hobbian misery that we see elsewhere, and Alise’s arc is shifted substantially upward on the despair-to-joy spectrum. But still: the shape of the arc is the same.

Likewise, Sedric, Alise’s childhood friend and the amenuensis-cum-secret-lover of her dastardly husband, gets his own dragon-fueled redemption arc that feels a lot like Malta Vestrit’s. But again, like Alise’s, it’s a bit gentler. Malta, recall, starts as the most glorious 13-year-old brat who has ever bratted, and ends as a full-ass Elderling, negotiating the fate of nations. Both Malta and Sedric begin their respective stories sheltered and selfish, accustomed to a life of pampering and wealth, and ready to make all kinds of foolish decisions to pursue that comfort without thinking through or properly understanding the consequences of their decisions. 

The particularly interesting contrast between these two arises from how respective horriblenesses are tempered. Malta is a literal child at the start, and whomst amongst ust has not indulged in 13-year-old brattiness? Sedric, by contrast, is a full-grown adult. He regularly travels internationally, and has a firm grasp on politics and trade. He knows the consequences of his actions, or should know, and that expectation of competence makes his behaviour much harder to forgive. 

 Consider, for example, his decision to accompany Alise to the Rain Wilds, where he will acquire dragon parts to sell to the Duke of Chalced. These dragon parts represent the sole chance of saving the dying duke’s life, so Sedric expects to get a huge payoff upon delivery. What Sedric doesn’t seem to realize is that this is, on many levels, a terrible idea. Leave aside the ethics of butchering and selling sentient creatures for medicine, and think about the politics for a moment. The Duke of Chalced is dying. Dragon parts can save him. Dragons can only be found in the Rain Wilds. Last time Chalced tried to make trouble in that part of the world, Tintaglia fought them off, but Tintaglia is not here anymore.  So why in the world would Sedric want to (a) demonstrate to the desperate Duke of Chalced that life-saving resources are to be found in the Rain Wilds, and (b) do it at a time when Tintaglia is no longer defending them against Chalced? Sooner or later, the saying goes, there is always war with Chalced. Sedric’s actions are going to make it much sooner than later.

Malta’s brattiness is tempered by the fact that she’s a child. What excuse does Sedric have? In a word: Hest. Hest is Alise’s asshole husband, but he is also Sedric’s lover, and he is a classic narcissistic asshole. He glamours Sedric with  his handsomeness, his masterful exercise of wealth and power and taste; and he combines that glamour with a fair amount of manipulative emotional abuse. It is to please Hest that Sedric suggests Alise as a potential wife, and coaches Hest on how best to win Alise’s agreement for a marriage of convenience. It is to please Hest that he indulges in really foul semantic wordplay when Alise tries to invoke the clause in the marriage contract that dissolves the union in the event of infidelity. Oh no, says Hest, I’ve never slept with any other woman, right Sedric? And he is right: He’s not sleeping with women — because he’s sleeping with men. Sedric knows perfectly well that it makes no difference to Alise which people Hest is sleeping with. What matters is that she’s found evidence of infidelity and wants to invoke that contractual provision to dissolve her marriage. But because of her mistaken assumption that Hest is exclusively attracted to women, Hest wriggles out of the accusation. And because Alise has been friends with Sedric so long, she trusts him when he backs up Hest’s word; and so because of Sedric, she loses her opportunity to end her miserable marriage. Sedric is friendly, but he is not a friend.

As with Malta, Hobb does not insist that we feel sympathy for Sedric, at the start. The facts and actions and motivations are simply presented to us, and we are left to draw our own conclusions. Is Sedric a victim of domestic abuse, too enthralled to his abuser to do the right thing, for fear of the consequences for his own well-being? Or is he just a weak, sad man, who will prey on dragons and betray his friends to please an asshole he’s sleeping with? For my part, I am intellectually aware of the former interpretation, but emotionally I really lean toward the latter. Malta as a 13-year-old brat was gloriously, hilariously smackable. Sedric, as a full-grown failure of a man, is just sad. 

Let us turn now to the themes. Thematically, this book is fantastic. We’ll start with Tintaglia. Recall that we left the Liveship Traders trilogy with magnificent Tintaglia shepherding a massive tangle of 100 serpents to cocoon and transform into dragons, ready to take to the skies. We left the Tawny Man trilogy with the discovery and rescue of Icefyre, another adult dragon, mating with Tintaglia and ensuring another generation of eggs on the way. But the consequence of these triumphs is that Tintaglia abandons the Rain Wild dragons. When they were her only hope for the continuance of her species, she had time to help feed the pathetic specimens that emerged on the riverbed outside the Rain Wild city of Cassarick. But now, with a proper dragon at her side, she has no use for them. 

Yes, it is selfish. It puts the individual above the community. But this is how dragons are. They are not human. They do not have human-like loyalties to each other. And this ruthless, selfish independence works very well if you have the capacities of a dragon, if you can hunt and fly and feed yourself and defend yourself. Dragons are strong. Humans are squishy and weak. 

So humans must form societies to compensate for their squishy weakness, societies where they combine their capacities and work for the good of the whole, rather than the individual. This is especially important in an environment as harsh as the Rain Wilds, where people struggle to bear children, become disfigured with growths and scales as they age, and sicken and die young. However, this harshness of the environment, and the need to focus on the collective good, engenders harshness in its treatment of individuals. Any child born too ‘changed’ from the start is exposed at birth, to die. The reasoning of this regularly practiced infanticide is that these infants will only ever turn out to be a burden to society, sickening early, and unable to bear healthy children of their own. Why, conventional wisdom asks, must society welcome and support people who cannot contribute to the next generation? 

So life in the Rain Wilds is governed by these questions: How much of a burden of dead weight can a society bear? How much must an individual contribute before they are allowed to be a member of that society? Under what circumstances is it permissible to kill babies? It’s all very ‘Cold Equations’.

It’s an uncomfortable kind of conversation, and it’s not made any easier when we consider the case of Thymara, one of the primary viewpoint characters. Thymara is a young woman who ‘should’ have been exposed at birth. She was only given a chance at life because her father decided at the last minute to defy custom and expectation, and bring her back home, to raise her and train her in hunting and foraging and all the other life skills that Rain Wilders need to master for survival. It turns out that Thymara is an excellent hunter and forager. She brings in far more food than she eats. In her particular case, then, it would have been a mistake to leave her to die. Even if she never has a baby, and does not contribute to the next generation, her contributions are still a net positive to society.

But by even having this conversation, and pointing out that Thymara is a contributer rather than a burden, we are conceding an important point – namely, that it is reasonable to evaluate people’s right to live in a society as a function of their numerical contribution.¹ This reasoning needs only a statistical evaluation of expected value in the long term aggregate to justify and indeed require infanticide. Sure, in Thymara’s case, to be sure, there is no danger of her being a burden, because she grew up to be a good hunter. But statistically it was unlikely, so in the long run, just to be sure of optimizing the collective good . . . 

It’s the Tragedy of the Commons pitted against the belief that killing babies is bad. And every member of the Rain Wilds knows this. There’s a wonderful moment quite early on, where Thymara’s father points out how good a hunter she is, and his companions get all shifty and uneasy. Because every Rain Wild parent who’s ever left a child to die, after nine months of hope and fear and love and waiting, after hours of agonizing labour and the crushing grief at seeing one’s baby born with claws instead of fingernails – those parents are not comforting themselves with calculating expected values. These parents are not thinking well, in the aggregate, statistically these changed children consume more than they produce, so society as a whole is stronger if. . . No. Rather, these parents are looking at Thymara and thinking, if I had possessed the strength of character; if I had defied the rules, then my little one might be here today, like she is.

So: what does society do with these extraneous people, the ones who should be dead, the ones who cannot produce a new generation? Well, if you have a bunch of dragons wallowing on your doorstep, hemmed in by trees and flightless; sickly and stunted and unable to hunt, consuming far more than they produce, the answer is clear. You pull up your algebra notes, combine like terms, and offer the deadweights a job: Lead the dragons upstream, hunt for them, tend to them, and find them a new place to live, far away from here. 

This gives us the heart of the plot: two sets of outcasts, human and dragon, must work together to find a new place to live. And they both engage in this endeavour whole-heartedly. They do not feel like they have been cast out of their homes, rejected by their society – though they absolutely have been. The humans are the rejects of the Rain Wilds, and the dragons have been entirely abandoned by Tintaglia. Nevertheless, they see it as an opportunity to build a new future. 

But they approach this opportunity with a different end goal in mind. The humans are released from the constraints of the Rain Wild society, freed to negotiate a new set of customs, and figure out how far their new freedoms can take them. They envision an entirely different society, built from scratch, attuned to their own specific needs. By contrast the dragons don’t hope to build something new. Their entire abnormal life, stunted and sickly, flightless and wallowing in mud, has been an education in how the old ways were better. Yet they cannot recover anything resembling those old ways without the help of their human keepers, and so the very task of returning to their former greatness is going to require a certain amount of concessions to circumstances. 

Next month, we’ll see how those concessions work out, and what kinds of negotiations the humans and dragons must make with each other in their quest for a new home, and the new type of society they must build together.

---

1 This type of reasoning is not restricted to fantasy settings. UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced this week that  immigrants must now perform unpaid labour as a precondition for the right to live in the UK. ^↩  

References: 

Hobb, Robin. Dragon Keeper [Harper Voyager, 2009]. 

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Liveship Traders Book 3: Ship of Destiny

A magnificent tapestry of genius, marred by an unfortunate dog turd in the corner

Cover art by Stephen Youll

Robin Hobb is rightly acknowledged to be a wizard of characterization, and I have seen many people opine that The Liveship Traders is the best entry in the Realm of the Elderlings series. I agree with both statements. I cannot stress enough how much I agree with these statements. In fact, I agree with them so hard that I'm not actually going to go into much depth about characterization per se here, because they have already been discussed by everyone else with an ounce of sense and taste. Instead I'll talk about two other elements of this fantastic book, by this fantastic author, the culmination of this fantastic series. To wit, I'm going to poke at what I think underlies her fantastic characterization, and then also dissect why That One Thing about this book feels like such a betrayal of the otherwise untainted fantasticness. Be warned: this will include discussions of rape.

But first, let's revel in what works. My argument here is that the characters in this book sing so sweetly because they're all scaffolded by a thematically consistent structure: deal-making.  It's in the title, actually: The Liveship Traders. These people, the inhabitants of Bingtown, live and die by trading. They founded their city on a deal with the Satrap of Jamaillia; their current troubles originate in the Satrap's decision to renege on that deal; and as we find out, the solution to their troubles requires making new deals. Everything is deals. And every deal, in this book, is centered around a tripartite choice:

You can preserve your life. You can preserve your dignity. Or you can preserve your identity. Which do you concede, and which do you protect? Not every deal allows you to preserve all three.

Everyone comes up against this choice, at one point or another. And the decisions they make as they negotiate their way through the story forms the foundation of their character.

Let us start with Malta Vestrit, who finally reaches the apex of her arc in this book. We have already seen her first steps in deal-making in Mad Ship, most notably her negotiation with Tintaglia, the dragon. In that deal, she agreed to help free Tintaglia from her buried cocoon in return for Tintaglia's help rescuing her father (Kyle Haven, ptooey). In other words, Malta's first bargain is a straightforward trade: survival for survival.

But as her development proceeds, her deals become more complex, making use of the full tripartite structure of values. In the aftermath of the earthquake that indirectly frees Tintaglia, Malta has been flung together with the deeply pathetic and incompetent Satrap of Jamaillia, Cosgo; and throughout this final book she must make deals of increasing complexity, all of which require compromises between survival, dignity, and identity. First, when she and Cosgo are picked up by some Chalcedeans, the stakes are small and personal: she must swallow her own dignity and hide her identity, pretending to be Cosgo's slave girl, because only by propping up his own dignity can she ensure his survival. And only if he survives, and is recognized as the Satrap, can he have the power to protect her, ensuring her own survival. Later, when Cosgo meets Captain Red, one of Kennit's pirates, Malta again takes the lead in bargaining, this time not just for personal survival, but to enlist the aid of the pirates to return Cosgo to his throne. Cosgo is fully ignorant of this calculus. He fumes, "'This is degrading! You would reduce my life and the fate of the throne to the squabbling of merchants... But what else should I expect from a Trader's daughter? Your whole life has been buying and selling." Malta, taking no shit from him, returns, "Merchants broker goods. Satraps and nobles broker power. You, noble Magnadon, deceive yourself if you believe there is a great difference in these mechanisms" (pg. 580-581). She is a Bingtowner through and through in this moment: She recognizes that everything can be negotiated, at all levels, from personal survival to the fate of nations. Indeed, when Cosgo eventually meets Kennit, it is Malta who leads the negotiations for a treaty between the Pirate Isles and Jamaillia proper. She is magnificent. All hail Queen Malta!

We get the same tripartite deal structure with non-human characters. Consider the sea serpents, who we know now are baby dragons, on a desperate quest for their old spawning grounds. They eventually find their way to the liveship Vivacia, who, recall, is now under the control of Kennit, and also has a dead dragon in her. The serpents make a deal with this dead dragon, who calls herself Bolt. Bolt agrees to lead the serpents to their spawning grounds, if they lend their strength to Bolt's ends—which, at the moment, involve serving Kennit. Sea serpent armies are useful things for pirates on a mission, after all. But the serpents are uncertain that Bolt will be able to follow through on her end of the bargain, because, as one serpent says, "To help us, she will have to beg help of the humans. While she insists she is all dragon, I do not think she can humble herself to do that" (pg. 456). In other words, the serpents will make a deal that concedes their dignity and identity for survival, but they are not certain that Bolt can do the same. Bolt is already dead; Bolt does not stand to gain survival, so the serpents doubt that she would concede her identity and dignity as she must do to uphold her promise. She has nothing to gain by this bargain.

This tripartite structure of bargaining becomes more complex in Serilla's character arc. When we first met her in Book 2, she'd been envisioning a future for herself in Bingtown, that magical city that she'd studied from afar for so long. However, en route to Bingtown, she disagrees with Cosgo, and Cosgo responds by withdrawing his protection from her. She suffers exactly the fate that Malta negotiates so skillfully to avoid: without Cosgo's protection, there's nothing to prevent the ship's captain from kidnapping her, an unprotected woman, and holding her as a sex slave. (The captain is from Chalced—the super-duper sexist slaving bad nation. Not to be too ethnically essentialist about it, but boy does Chalced suck.) It's rough, and it leaves a mark. Even after Serilla manages to escape the captain's power and scrape together some sort of power for herself as the voice of the Satrap in Bingtown, she is haunted by what she had to endure. Yes, she survived, but she survived because she prioritized survival, and in so doing gave up her identity and dignity.

The Serilla who escapes the Chalcedean captain is no longer that same accomplished scholar and respected voice in Jamaillia's government—and that loss explains a lot of what she does in her brief period in power in Bingtown. She bargains with the wrong people, and makes the wrong deals. Rather than seeking to find a path for the good of Bingtown as a whole, smoothing over the roiled waters of New Trader against Old Trader, Satrap loyalists against conniving Jamaillian traitors, she instead makes deals that protect her position and status as the voice of the Satrap. She has survived, and is now scrabbling to recover dignity—but at the expense of her identity. Or maybe not! Whether she was ever the expert on Bingtown matters that she fancied herself to be is an open question, but after the Chalcedean captain was through with her, she is emphatically not that person anymore. Her character arc is about how she can regain an identity for herself, renegotiate it, in light of what she endured.

Serilla's arc, as well as the importance of being willing to renegotiate one's identity, is mirrored by Bingtown as a whole. Bingtown's original foundation was a concession of dignity and survival against identity: they agreed to crushing fees and tariffs owed to Jamaillia, and died early deaths for generations, in order to build the Bingtown that we now have. There's a lovely moment early in the book featuring a meeting of the Town Council, when it seems that Bingtown's troubles are purely internal. Ronica Vestrit arrives early at the neglected Traders' Concourse, whose upkeep was traditionally the responsibility of Trader families. It's fallen into disrepair, but Ronica begins cleaning it, and slowly other Traders arrive and begin to help her. When the meeting begins, Serilla expects to control matters (insisting on her dignity), but the Traders themselves don't quite realize that, and their old habits emerge: consensus-seeking, self-governance, shared responsibilities. Bingtown's core identity asserts itself, despite Serilla's attempts at control.

So, naturally, in proper Hobbian fashion, things promptly get worse. A Chalcedean fleet, allied with the conspirators who kidnapped the Satrap and set off the whole mess in the first place, arrives to besiege their waters. In the same way that Serilla was held captive by the Chalcedean captain, so too is Bingtown now besieged by the Chalced fleet; and in the same way that Serilla had to concede identity and dignity for survival, so too must Bingtown consider what it will give up in the face of Chalced and the conspirators' challenge.

Roed Caern, an Old Trader who allies with Serilla, suggests that preserving the 'real' Bingtown, the heart of Bingtown's identity, means preserving the Old Traders and only the Old Traders. The New Traders are not Bingtown, he says. They don't live in Bingtown, they don't die in Bingtown, they don't pay the price in survival and dignity that 'real' Bingtowners pay. They live in Chalced, they are loyal to Chalced. They do not deserve to remain in Bingtown—especially not now when Chalced is the aggressor! And given what we, the readers, have seen of the prices that Old Traders have paid—the plagues, the deformities, the early deaths—and given what we've seen of how horrible Chalced is, this is a persusasive argument. Until, of course, you hear Roed's proposal: gather together the New Traders, force them to leave, and slaughter them all if they refuse.

It's easy to tell a story about remaining true to one's identity in the face of challenges, as Bingtown did when they cleaned the Trader's Concourse; but what makes Hobb's take so much subtler is how she pokes at the underside of that platitude: what is one's identity, truly? What does it mean to be true to it? What kinds of atrocities can be condoned in defense of it?

Later, Ronica pursues an alternate course. She meets with the rest of the groups that live in and around Bingtown: the Rain Wild Traders, the Three Ships Immigrants, the Tattooed (i.e. enslaved people from Chalced who have been imported by New Traders). She makes a different deal with them: if they rally together to defend Bingtown against Chalced and claim its independence, in return the new Bingtown will be kinder to them. Slavery will be truly outlawed, not just relabeled 'indentured servitude,' and they will be able to own land and build their own lives. This alliance is the opposite of Roed Caern's offer: concede the idea of 'traditional' Bingtown identity, and in turn its people—all its people—gain dignity and survival.

But this is Robin Hobb, remember. Such a lovely conclusion would be too easy, so instead we get a dragon. Tintaglia has very different ideas about human dignity and identity from these Bingtowners. Humans are naturally subservient to dragons, thinks Tintaglia. Of course they must praise her and serve her and acknowledge her as their overlord. But wait a moment, think the Bingtowners, dragons can do useful things like chasing Chalcedean warships away from Bingtown harbour. So the Bingtowners decide, in inimitable Bingtown fashion, to Make A Deal. And in this deal, we see them concede their dignity, bowing down before Tintaglia, in favor of survival. And their identity, so newly renegotiated, doesn't survive untouched either. Bingtown may claim independence from Jamaillia, but its self-governance will not be complete, because now humans live in a world of dragons, who will always claim mastery over them. It is a bit of a blow to this new city-state, but they are Bingtowners still; and Bingtowners negotiate. And so they bargain with Tintaglia, and in so doing, they illuminate the core part of Bingtown identity that has been preserved: they are traders. They make deals.

Do you see? Do you see how it all ties together? Everything is bargains, negotiations, about what is conceded and what is defended. It structures the plots; it structures the characters. It is a web of intricacy and brilliance.

And because it is so intricate and brilliant and consistent and structured, I must now take a moment to talk about Kennit. Specifically, Kennit's decision to rape Althea towards the end of the book.

What?

Why?

First, it was entirely gratuitous. You can just feel how every scene involving the rape, the lead-up, and the aftermath could easily be chopped out of the book entirely. It sits very uneasily on top of this otherwise tightly woven tapestry of the narrative. It's like a dog turd on the carpet. It doesn't match, and it makes everything around it gross.

But second, it's wildly out of character for Kennit. Everyone says so. Althea says, "He raped me," and they say, "Kennit? He would never!" Yes, this is a whole Believe Women plot point, and yes, there is a place for such plots in books. But not, I maintain, in this particular book. Because I myself do not believe Kennit would do such a thing. I saw him do it on the page, and still I thought, "Kennit? No! He would never." It goes against everything about his character that we've come to know so well throughout the book.

(Arguably) Worse, it undermines the effectiveness of the end of his character arc. His journey, the secrets of his childhood, his bond with Paragon, his identity as a Ludluck, leading up to his eventual death—all that could be incredibly moving and powerful: the complicated legacy of a complicated man who died a complicated death. His fantastic character arc, as we discover, turns out to be built around his own negotiation of the foundational tripartite bargain structure: his childhood identity is erased so that he can survive; and his adult identity is built around a ferocious defense of dignity, because his survival came at such a cost. Even his bond with Paragon is core to that, because Paragon preserved all that remains of his identity, in keeping him alive during his horrific abuses at the hands of Igrot the pirate. Kennit dies in Paragon's arms. How can this not bring tears to your eyes?

Well, the instant Kennit becomes a rapist, I no longer care about it. Any of it. All that character work, wasted. I look at it and think, "Huh, what an incredibly skillful revelation of his motivations and backstory. Gosh, I really wish I cared." But I don't. Rapists don't deserve that from me.

And I just don't understand why it's there in the first place! If the goal here was to make him a villain, rather than just an antagonist, we've already got thematically consistent hints that he's a bad dude. First, he negotiates in bad faith. He does not intend to keep his bargains with Malta. Leave aside all the piracy and killing of people; a man's clearly a villain if he negotiates in bad faith with a Bingtowner! And, more subtlely, in re-inventing himself, he does not renegotiate an authentic identity, but builds an entirely new one, while insisting that Paragon, the only clue to his old name, must be destroyed. That's not cool. You don't get to sidestep a whole third of the tripartite foundation of this book's thematic structure! And you definitely shouldn't be killing a liveship. In a trilogy called The Liveship Traders, a person who kills liveships and does not trade honestly is pretty clearly the villain. He does not need to be a rapist.

So: Kennit-the-rapist was a very unfortunate decision. It is so wildly unfortunate, and so clearly uncomfortable with everything else in the whole-ass trilogy, that I have decided in my head-canon that perhaps it's not Hobb's fault. Maybe the publishers didn't trust Hobb or her readers, and wanted to force her to shove in some gratuitous on-the-nose signal that Kennit is a villain, because heaven forbid a book written in the 90s not have a rape scene in it; and goodness knows we can't trust readers to pick up on who the villain is if we don't bonk them over the head with it. And it is out of the question for a book to have a complicated antagonist instead of a villain! Hence the rape. Thusly I have decided in my revisionist-head-history.

So I shall step around this turd on the carpet, and instead admire the colours, the pattern, the wool, and the complexity of the design that make up the rest of this book. The master-weaver Robin Hobb cannot be held responsible for the leavings of an incontinent dog.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Ship of Destiny [Bantam, 2000].

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: So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole

A YA, Jamaican-inspired, dragon-filled fantasy dealing with friendship, family, and cultural clashes. 

The premise of Kamilah Cole’s YA fantasy So Let Them Burn had my attention as soon as I read the description: Jamaican-inspired; dragons; sisters. As a Jamaican-born, old school nerd who devoured Anne McCaffery as a teen, this story seemed tailor made for me. But I have been disappointed by seemingly perfect stories before. Fortunately, So Let Them Burn is an enjoyable page-turner filled with likeable characters and engaging Jamaican references.

The island nation of San Irie had been struggling under the suffocating and violent colonialist rule of the oppressive Langlish Empire. So Let Them Burn opens five years after San Irie’s defeat of the Langlish. The island is now free but still reeling from the devastation of war and wary of the nearby Langlish Empire which still seeks to re-conquer them. The Langlish forces are made up of fearsome dragons and their psychically bonded human dragon riders. The people of San Irie (Iryans) have powerful weapons of their own. They can summon the spirits of their ancestors to help them fight and their military forces use drakes—semi-sentient airships which can defeat dragons. But the biggest weapon is the protagonist Faron, the Childe Empyrean, a teenaged girl who has been granted the power to summon the three Iryan gods: Irie, Mala, and Obie. The novel focuses on Faron, the rebellious, sharp-tongued, reluctant hero who would prefer to footrace and play rather than walk around in her Empyrean robes.

There is a lot of backstory in the set up for the novel but it’s neatly woven into the adventure so it doesn’t slow the rapid pace of the book. During the great war, the Langlish forces killed and maimed thousands while trying to destroy the temples and cities in a quest for something mysterious. Ironically, their defeat was partly brought about by the military commander’s son, Reeve, who became a traitor to aid the Iryan fighters. By stealing his father’s military secrets, he gave the Iryans the boost they need to fully defeat the Langlish. But Reeve’s betrayal comes at a high price for him. He must now live in exile, hated by the people he helped save (because he represents the murderous race who attacked the island) and despised by his home country who views him as a traitor. His only allies are Faron’s strong but kind sister Elara; Aveline, the young queen of the island; and a few of the locals who take him into their household as a foster child.  

All of this happens before the book begins. At times, it feels like we are joining the adventure midway because of the complicated but fascinating set up. The history is so interesting that I wish we had some of that backstory on the page, even if just in a prologue. The passing references to Faron becoming the nation’s savior at age twelve or Reeve betraying his parents to help the Iryans, are worth more than a footnote. When the novel begins, those twelve year-old heroes are now seventeen, looking back on their past choices with more tiredness than pride.

The main plot of the book starts with the Iryan queen’s peace summit on San Irie attended by various nations including the enemy Langlish. In violation of the intent of the summit, the Langlish bring dragons, who are parked on a nearby isle. When one of the dragons gets loose, Faron’s sister Elara unexpectedly bonds with it and with the dragon’s lead rider, Signey. Faron is able to draw on an unknown astral power to control the chaos. However, the dragon’s psychic bonding with Elara is irreversible, so the Langlish commander proposes that Elara move to Langley to learn dragon riding. No Iryan has ever bonded with a dragon and the turn of events means Elara must leave her home country and live with the enemy. Knowing the situation is probably a scheme by the Langlish, the young queen Aveline decides to use Elara as a spy, which Elara readily accepts. However, Faron is furious about her sister’s departure and reluctantly decides to work with Reeve (who she dislikes) to find a way to free Elara from the bond. While Reeve wears himself out in research, Faron secretly connects with a sinister force to get what she needs. Meanwhile Elara gradually builds a friendship with her dragon, her fellow riders, and particularly her co-rider Signey to whom she grows attracted.

So Let Them Burn delves unexpectedly into toxic love.  Reeve’s cruel parents go to terrible extremes to save the son who ultimately turns against them. Faron’s love for her sister is unrelentingly intense. Both Elara and Reeve are victims of oppressive acts of love that have been forced on them with devastating results.

The ensuing adventure is a page-turner that’s hard to put down, especially with the appealing references to elements of Jamaican culture including patois, dancehall music, and food like breadfruit, saltfish, and guinep. However, I miss the days when a YA fantasy novel would tell a complete story and leave just enough room for a sequel. So Let Them Burn is the opening act of a larger story. But the addictive pace, likeable characters, and appealing references to nuances of Jamaican culture ultimately make this journey worthwhile.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Jamaican-inspired references
• Toxic family relationships
• Page turning, dragon-riding fun

Reference: Kamilah Cole, So Let Them Burn [Little Brown Book Group, 2024]

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.  

 

Review: Damsel

Netflix's new CGI dragon and Millie Bobbie Brown vehicle is a perfectly fine fairy tale romp aimed at the YA audience.  

Like many a fairy tale, Damsel begins with a young woman, Elodie, who is given away in marriage to the noble family of Aurea, her dowry a last-ditch effort to save her people from starvation. Little does she know that her new family has a sinister secret — they have to sacrifice three brides to appease the evil dragon who lives in the nearby cave, and Elodie is the first to be tossed callously into the yawning chasm. 

The vast majority of the movie is spent following Elodie as she explores the dark cavern evading the vengeful dragon (her dragon infants were mercilessly slaughtered once upon a time, so in recompense she demands the same sacrifice in perpetuity, a scaly, fire-breathing Miss Havisham if ever there was one). We see the names of dozens of women who were sacrificed before carved into the wall, a gruesome reminder of the brides that preceded Elodie.

This being a Netflix movie, though, and Elodie being Millie Bobbie Brown, things will be different this time around. She manages to outsmart the dragon and convince her that she's been tricked for generations, leading her to join Elodie's quest for vengeance against the evil royal family, complete with a finale scene of fire-breathing destruction against the House of Aurea. My favorite Letterboxd review aptly quipped, "Targaryan origin story."

One part The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, one part How To Train Your Dragon, and one part Dragonheart, Damsel is an entertaining YA fantasy-horror romp. I say horror because there are some fairly gruesome wounds and dragon-induced deaths — more than I expected, actually. 

As I thought about it for a bit, I've decided that the dragon sacrifice plot could be seen as a metaphor for the unknown horrors that awaited young women throughout history who were given away unwillingly in marriage. 

At one point in Damsel, Elodie's father expresses sincere regret about trading her for a jewel-laden dowry. In real life, of course, women don't ritual blood sacrifices to reptilian creatures, but they are taken far away from their families, isolated in cold and dank castles, and often times neglected by their new family. 

It's a scary prospect, maybe ever scarier than facing an enormous dragon eye to eye. Fortunately, in this film, the damsel saves herself and ends up back with her family — and a new scaly family protector. 

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The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: Robin Wright and Angela Basset are always a fun addition to any cast; the dragon special effects are stellar

Penalties: Not particularly groundbreaking.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Novella Project: The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar

A thoughtful meditation on memory, identity, and coming of age, which does not quite deliver on the promised dragons

Cover illustration by Tran Nguyen

With novellas, there simply isn’t enough space to do everything. A novella is not a short novel. It is fundamentally a different thing. It can do one thing well. There isn’t space for info-dumps about the history of Olde Kingdom if you also want to fit in the characterization; and if you give the characterization due weight, then you’re not going to be able to complete your quest for the MacGuffin of Keyboard’Smash in your allotted forty thousand words. Novellas must focus.

With his novella The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar, Indra Das shows that he understands this assignment. There is very little plot, and the world-building underlying its premise is hinted at in the corners rather than developed in any depth. Indeed, Das makes a virtue of necessity, because in his tale the vagueness of the magical backstory is part of the point. It centers around the coming-of-age of a boy, Reuel, whose family keeps him fully in the dark about who they are or where they come from. Or rather, they tell him, but they do not let him remember. His daily routine is punctuated by regular doses of a tea that makes him forget what he has learned: That his family grow dragon eggs in the backyard; that they use kerosene to breathe fire, soothing the infant dragons by  mimicking the behaviour of dragon parents to soothe the infants. That they fly, the sky above them and the sky below them, on the backs of dragons. That they eat dragon flesh.¹ And then Reuel drinks his tea, and he forgets.

The narrative intersperses memories of Reuel’s family’s draconic nature with fumbling interactions between Reuel and others outside his family. As a child he goes to public school, and the boys of his class demand to know who he is, keenly aware of ethnic divisions in Kolkata: are you Bengali, Anglo-Indian, Marwari, Naga? Are you Chinese? Are you Christian? He can’t answer their questions, and so they call him the boy from nowhere—which turns out to be more accurate than they could know. Indeed, Reuel’s lingering ability to retrieve the core of those suppressed memories also turns out to be more accurate than his family could wish. In an attempt to defend himself from the accusations of being from nowhere, he makes up stories—or thinks he makes them 

up—which make their way back to his parents. Uneasy, they pull him out of school, completing the isolation that his uncertain ethnic identity had already put in place. He grows up with no peers, only one friend (the daughter of some neighbours), and a misty, incomplete sense of identity.

Das chooses to focus his novella on this question of identity—not my own personal favourite type of story, but a perfectly valid narrative decision. The book follows a character arc as old as time: Reuel’s coming of age; how he grows and learns to be a person in his family, despite the isolation, despite the withholding of culture and history. For all his driving desire to learn about his family’s history, the book is not about that, per se. We do not get plot, except in throw-away references, of the historical world-wrenching upheaval that led his clan to flee their world of origin. We do not get worldbuilding, except in breaths and oblique images, of the place they left behind. There’s not room for that in a novella. So instead we focus just on Reuel: his growth and development as a person within such a family, and his eventual assumption of the role he must take to preserve his family’s heritage.

This last is no easy task, given how hard Reuel’s family worked to isolate him from that heritage. There are reasons for it, of course, and this decision is presented quite sympathetically, acknowledging the harmful consequences. Yet I couldn’t help but think how, despite the sympathy, this upbringing is fundamentally cruel. It’s not that his family keep secrets from him or isolate him. It’s that they share secrets, and then take away the knowledge, over and over and over again. It is sad if a child never has a birthday celebration; but suppose a child does have such a celebration, is showered with gifts of magic and wonder and dragons, only to be forced to give them all back? The isolation, too, is not in itself a cruelty; but it becomes so much worse when his family gives him nothing to satisfy an existance that he might otherwise have filled with friends and belonging. 

This story's relation to its title mirrors Reuel's relation to his identity. Who are the Dragoners? What are their dragons? Where is Bowbazar? Why are they the last? None of these questions are ever really answered. But in the voids, the absences, the missing knowledge, there is a different story to be told. Like a lake in a volcano's caldera, this tale shaped by what is missing, but it has a life of its own all the same.

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1 Longtime readers of Indra Das—especialy The Devourers—will recognize his characteristic earthy style, otherwise mostly absent in this book, in the description of these meals. ^↩

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Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 7/10, an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws

• Light-touch, low-calorie world-building
• The memory of dragons
• The psychology of coming-of-age
• Navel-gazing and identity
  

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.

References:  

Das, Indra. The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar [Subterranean Press, 2023].

Review: A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon

 Sometimes the need to live up to the hype is what undermines the book.

I have heard Samantha Shannon referred to as the "sapphic daddy" for The Priory of the Orange Tree, and credited to an extent with kickstarting the current trend of lesbian high fantasy. Whether that's true or not is by the by, but the sentiment exists. Especially in the wake of the success of the sapphic trifecta (The Jasmine Throne, The Unbroken and She Who Became the Sun), and the sudden resurge of popularity of The Priory of the Orange Tree on tiktok. And, riding off the back of this surge in popularity, comes the new prequel - A Day of Fallen Night.

If you watch the tiktoks, you will notice a pattern in a lot of them - praise for the worldbuilding, the sapphic relationship, and also a number of people urgently wanting to reassure you that while it looks like a heckin' chonker of a book, it's really not that bad, honestly, truly it isn't. There's a whole microgenre of tiktoks that are people telling you books you may already have read that have a longer wordcount than it. The enormity of it has become part of the mystique and the selling point. And so it's no surprise that A Day of Fallen Night is also enormous. She is, as the kids say, thicc. And why shouldn't she be? If we cannot be sprawling and epic in high fantasy of all places, where can we be? But that chonkitude has, I think, come at something of a cost here. It's a slow book, and frankly, a book that feels bogged down by unnecessary fluff. It feels, if I'm being honest, like it's been made so big purely to fit into the brand that Priory created, rather than as necessitated by the story it wants to tell.

And that story is a good one! It's not all doom and gloom here. We follow primarily four viewpoint characters through a time 500 years before the story of Priory, when the world is becoming hotter and drier, and strange forces seem to be awakening. A mysterious plague has sprung up, spreading through the lands, and terrifying beasts are awakening from the dark recesses of the world. The viewpoints are arrayed initially at the four points of the compass, showing us the way this threat affects various places, and giving us different understandings and approaches to such mystical and deadly forces. These four characters are all close to, but not holding, great temporal power, and allow us to watch the political machinations that ensue from all the chaos. They're also all pretty compelling as people.

We have Glorian, the young princess of Inys, whose bloodline supposedly holds in check a great beast once vanquished by her ancestor the Saint, and who must, at all costs, produce an heir to that bloodline, as well as help her mother bolster their unshaky rule after a run of weak or terrible rulers before them.

Then there's Wulf, housecarl to the great uniter of the northern kingdom of Hróth, but originally from Inys, keen to prove himself and hoping to escape the dark rumours that have followed him everywhere since he was found abandoned at the edge of the supposedly haunted wood at the heart of the kingdom.

Then Tunuva, a sister of the priory of the orange tree, a woman trained from birth to defend the world against the great beast she knows Glorian's ancestor had no part in defeating, alongside her sisters, but also a woman carrying with her an old, old hurt in her heart that she cannot bear to let go, and trying, with her partner Esbar, to steer their daughter into good decisions as she grows to adulthood.

And finally Dumai, a godsinger living at the top of a mountain, waiting for the return of the ancient Seiikinese gods from the ages long slumber, wanting nothing more than to succeed her mother as the most senior of their number at the temple, and to climb the mountain with her closest friend, Kanifa.

All four are pulled into the threads of the great threat to the world, and must play their often disparate parts in trying to defeat it, or at least survive it.

And in that, the book is interesting - Shannon herself has talked about how this is not just a novel of defeating evil, but of enduring, of living through it. And that does show at points - the world, as is so often the case in epic fantasy, faces a threat absolutely insurmountable to mortal means, and maybe some part of how those threats are dealt with has to simply be getting through them. To survive is to win. And that is, at points in the story, something of a novelty and a boon.

But it is also part of the problem - because the characters are called to endure, to survive this thing they cannot possibly vanquish, they are at times stripped of agency. Which is part of the interest, but which leaves them unable to drive the novel forwards with the pace something of this size desperately needs. Especially during the middle third, the pace feels boggy and slow, and the various threads the characters are wandering along feel meandering and irrelevant. You know they'll resolve, because they always do, but it makes it a much less fun journey when they don't feel as if they will. And this feeds into the feeling that the book has been made long simply to be long. It covers the span of several years, and maybe, just maybe, we don't need such a long view? Maybe we can hurry things up, just a little bit.

It is also let down by the need for many of its arc-readers to reassure people that yes, you absolutely can read it if you've never read Priory, of course you can. And... yes, I suppose, technically, that's true. But so much of what is meaningful in this story landed for me precisely because Priory had already done the work for it. Yes, it is reiterated here, but none of that repetition managed to do for me what Priory did and infuse a sense of wonder and mystery into the world, and an appreciation that this ancient danger that threatens the whole of that world might be real and imminent.

What it instead does - and does well - is embellish what Priory did before. It adds richness to a world you already know. In my opinion, the Inys storyline in Priory is the best fleshed out one, and thus it is Inys I most remember. So getting to see more of Inys, and the ancestors (and indeed, namesake) of the queen I read first is a delight. Shannon has not lost her touch for worldbuilding - her Inys is one that feels reminiscent of both England of old and the England of myth and legend, and that balance of the real and the magical is one of the best parts, for me, of both Priory and A Day of Fallen Night. She's... less good at the world outside of fantasy-medieval-England, and the people there, though never without commitment to the world she's creating. It is always rich, and deep, and obviously thought through, there are just occasionally some choices that make me go "hmmm". What she has done here, however, is to swivel the focus a little less closely onto Inys, and give the other places in her world that bit more time to breathe, thus lifting them a little compared to how they fared in Priory. It's not perfect, but it's better, and in parts very good, and if immersive, sprawling and rich worldbuilding in a fairly traditional epic fantasy world (though one that does admit to and embrace the existence of places outside of Europe) is what you seek more than anything, this book is likely for you, especially if you've read Priory and want to inhabit that world longer, and pick up some threads of histories mentioned briefly there, and to understand some parts of it more.

But as a new book, for someone who hasn't read its predecessor? I'm not so sure. I think it's a book more concerned with fitting itself into the particular little legend of Priory, both in-story and in the meta, than in creating a standalone masterpiece. And that's fine. Just don't let the people who love it convince you it's anything else. And don't necessarily expect the drama of the plot or the people be what carries the most weight here. In my view, the primary purpose of A Day of Fallen Night is in that worldbuilding, in that creation of more content in Inys, and in Seiiki, and in all the other places we saw or heard about in Priory, and it is only in the secondary that it's concerned with a strong plot, or compelling character relationships. It lacks the substance that the central romance of Priory managed, because while there are romance threads, and the characters involved in them are individually delightful or interesting or complex, none of them have that focussed, slow burn chemistry that came through in Priory. Which, for me, is a real shame, as that was one of the things I really took and remembered from it.

On the whole, while I mostly enjoyed reading it, I definitely kept coming up for air with a sense that his really did not need to be quite as big, and slow and lumbering as it has ended up being, and wondering if the mythos of the first book has found its way into the creation of the second. I think there is a tighter, more elegant book that could have existed in the place of A Day of Fallen Night's place, but it's not what we go. If you go in wanting world building, wanting sprawl and slowness and to just sit in and immerse in the world? Then it may well be what you want. But it lacks, for me, the special something that made Priory sing, despite its flaws (A Day of Fallen Night is, by far, the better paced of the two, without the dramatic frenzy of happenings at the end that Priory has), and so I never felt I loved it, despite its connections. For me, it did not live up to the quite intense hype I've seen it get, and for that, I am a little sad.

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The Math

Highlights: a re-examination of the lore of a well-constructed world, a genuinely interesting cast of varied characters, an interest in the place of motherhood in an epic fantasy narrative, sapphic as heck

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Reference:  Samantha Shannon, A Day of Fallen Night [Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2023]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea