Robin Hobb's Soldier Son Trilogy

Been meaning to post about these books for a while now. Having ripped through The Liveship Traders, followed by The Farseer Trilogy and then The Tawny Man Trilogy basically as fast as I could afford to buy the books, I was quite keen to read the new novels. Note to others who follow in my footsteps (ha!) - I read the three trilogies out of order, mainly because I had the first book in the Liveship trilogy sitting on my shelf for about five years after acquiring it 'on special offer' from a BCA membership.

I got Shaman's Crossing a few months ago and I finished the sequel, Forest Mage, last month. I was all set to write up a review and link it in to some insightful remarks about Hobb's rather aggressive attitude to fan fiction, but then she went and replaced the rant on her site with one about books to movies and that took the wind out of my sails somewhat.

OK, so I'm all ready now! First off, the fan fiction thing. I read the rant and, while I can empathise with her feelings that other people making her characters do things she never wanted them to is kind of disgusting, a sort of combination between masturbatory 'fiction porn' and being forced to do something very horrible indeed against your will, I wonder if her feelings on the subject are so strong because 'Robin Hobb' (real name Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden) is herself a fictional creation? Despite my (probably very unfounded) opinion of her underlying motivations I did find myself agreeing strongly with her sentiments that, as a fledgeling writer, you're much better off trying to write in your own world with your own characters then trying to steal someone else's. Whatever her opinions, it doesn't seem be stemming the tide much - the Robin Hobb Yahoo! Group has in the tagline 'Fan fiction always welcome'.

So, now the Soldier Son Trilogy. This has, it seems, excited a certain amount of controversy among diehard Hobb fans, some have claimed to hate it, others have claimed to really enjoy it, and still others have been a bit guarded saying, it'll get better when we have the whole trilogy to read. The comments on Amazon about the first book are really quite entertaining - ranging from one to five stars and with varying degrees of vitriol, here are some (negative) outtakes:

I suppose it just goes to show that the well of creativity for some writers definitley runs dry.(J. P. Nowlin)

Out of hundreds upon hundreds of books I have read I have only not finished a book twice, this one being number 2. Highly disappointed. (Jon Corbett)

I wonder if Robin Hobb is embarassed that she wrote this book. ( Shannon B Davis)

I think a lot of people are concerned about the nature of the competing factions in the story - basically the 'environmentalists' are the bad guys, which is fairly unusual in my experience of the F&SF genre. This is a typical quote:

It created quite a dilemma for me - although the main character survived and saved his friends, I found myself wishing that the "bad guys" had won, and been able to keep their land and forests free from logging, etc. ( Shannon B Davis)

I think this highlights the central issue here - people are obviously not reading to be challenged, to look at things from a different perspective, but to have their current views encouraged and endorsed. It also seems to be a very common opinion that the whole plotline is some sort of parallel to the way fledgling America dealt with the Indian tribes - personally I think this is a bit of a reach, the story of a nation cut off from it's own harbours turning inland to battle an indigenous people that they've lived with, basically peacefully, for centuries, in an attempt to rebuild their own natural resources is not really analogous to a bunch of foreigners turning up on the coast and then using a combination of military muscle, betrayal and disease to exterminate a race they'd never met before through the course of three hundred years (in fact, in the book, even the disease is backwards). If it seems the same in some people's heads I suggest that's more to do with what's in their heads than what's in the book.

The other common criticism is that the protagonist is, well, a bit dull. In this case the criticism is a little more fair, but I personally didn't have too much trouble seeing him as a product of his upbringing, and I'm sure I didn't find him nearly so tedious as many others have claimed. In fact, I'm inclined to agree with this reviewer:

Excellent first book, if a bit too subtle for some readers ... I think that some of the delight of this book (and I suspect this trilogy) is watching his perceptions change as he is thrown into the "real world." (A. Galaitsis)

Overall, I liked both books, certainly I had no trouble finishing them like some of the above critics, though I also didn't stay up late into the night to read 'just one more chapter' like I'd been doing for the previous nine Robin Hobb books I'd read.

PS. What's with Amazon and this 'Real Name™' mularky? I have a real name, it doesn't belong to Amazon, why would it be a trade mark?