The Novels of Megan Lindholm

Due to p/o/p/u/l/a/r d/e/m/a/n/d one person's suggestion, I am reprinting two posts I first wrote on usenet here. I will edit and also update them a bit to add books I hadn't read at the time, but if they seem familiar, that's why.

Due to the success of the novels written under the name of Robin Hobb, the earlier novels written as Megan Lindholm are slowly but surely being reprinted. You can order them from amazon.uk.

Whatever you feel about Hobb, be aware that Lindholm is extremely different: slim and pithy rather than fat and sprawling, far more tightly plotted, often dark and sometimes very dark but without lurid suffering, determinedly different rather than using standard fantasy tropes. Her knack with worldbuilding and characterization remains the same.

WIZARD OF THE PIGEONS
An urban fantasy set in a vividly pictured Seattle. Wizard is a homeless-- surprise!-- wizard, a loner Vietnam vet who performs small helpful magics while trying to make it on the streets. The portrayal of homelessness, while nowhere near what I'd call realistic, is still considerably grittier and less sentimentalized than in the usual (and, in my mind, rather unfortunate) genre of "magical street people.") It's also worth noting that this was one of the very first urban fantasies to deal with that terrain.

A very well-written and well-detailed book. A sequence where Wizard goes about his day, using the tricks of survival necessary to get so much as a cup of coffee and someone's leftovers and, almost incidentally, changing the lives of a father and son, is particularly striking.

Unfortunately, there is also a standard-issue fantasy plot involving a mysterious evil force chasing Wizard. Everything connected to it is forced, confusing, and unnecessary, and leads to a final confrontation in which I'm still not sure exactly what happened.

Was it like the end of A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA, or like a traditional Evil Force overcome at great cost? I have no idea. Lindholm probably felt that she needed a big evil magic force in a fantasy novel, but I think the book would have been better without it. It's still a very good book.

THE REINDEER PEOPLE; WOLF'S BROTHER
Prehistoric fantasies that read as one book, more historical than fantasy. Well-written as usual, but perhaps because I'm not fond of the setting, I don't recall them well.

THE KI AND VANDIEN SERIES
A terrific small-scale fantasy series, set in a peculiar world populated with inventive aliens/weird creatures and starring an engaging duo, the Gypsy-turned-trader Ki (how do you rebel against Gypsy heritage? By being as practical and straightlaced as possible) and her partner/boyfriend, the wild man and swordfighter Vandien. Ki and Vandien are great characters, and I'd marry the latter in a second.

HARPY'S FLIGHT
A striking, intense novel, in which Ki is recovering from the loss of her _first_ husband and children. In a smoothly structured sequence of flashbacks/present day action, Ki stays with her late husband's family, which turns out to have some very weird secrets, and after that has disastrously fallen through, she braves the snowy mountains in the company of an unwanted passenger, a down-on-his-luck man named Vandien. The opposite of any save-the-world fantasy, and much better than most of those.

THE WINDSINGERS
This one has its dark passages, and continues Lindholm's unsentimental characterization, but is lighter in tone and often funny. Ki discovers that her heritage is not what she'd thought as she undertakes a weird cargo assignment, hauling the disassembled pieces of a magician, and Vandien undertakes an equally peculiar mission to rescue a sunken chest from an underwater temple, with an even more peculiar team of rented amphibians pulling his wagon. Gripping, ironic, and often touching.

THE LIMBRETH GATE
Ki's heritage comes back to haunt her, Vandien goes to the rescue, and we sojourn in a very eerie country like something out of C. L. Moore. A good solid story, but without the emotional weight of the others.

LUCK OF THE WHEELS
This one's apparently somewhat controversial. I think it's the best of the bunch. Ki and Vandien are forced by financial troubles to take on a passenger, an obnoxious teenage boy named Goat. Goat is much more dangerous than he seems, and is also entangled in a small-scale rebellion. The ensuing consequences are as dark as anything in HARPY'S FLIGHT, but, in the end, as life-affirming.

A sequence toward the end in which Vandien is forced into a brutal swordfighting contest, his solution to the either-way-he-dies situation that leads to, and a party with a bunch of samurai tiger-creatures constitutes some of Lindholm's most intense and blackly funny writing yet. Emotionally wrenching and very rewarding.

ALIEN EARTH
Lindholm's only sf novel. Like all her work, unusually small and personal in scale for a genre known for big sprawling important epics. In a somewhat dystopian future, the lives of a modern man who's been cryogenically preserved, two humans of the time, an unpleasant insectile alien, and a living starship, the Beastship Evangeline, become entangled. Absorbing and with an exquisite final page, but a trifle slow and dry.

CLOVEN HOOVES
A beautifully written, intense, and painful novel about a contemporary woman's relationship with a faun. I don't know if it actually is autobiographical in any sense, but it has the flavor of lived experience. The protagonist grew up a wild girl in wild Alaska, running with the dogs, butchering moose, and wandering the woods with her friend the faun. Now she's a grown woman, married to an all-American man and with a young son. But circumstances drag her and her family to stay with her husband's realistically dreadful family... and then the faun returns.

Lindholm's most emotional and unclassifiable novel, and maybe her best. If you're a mother with small children, you may not want to read it.

THE GYPSY. A collaboration with Steven Brust.

An oddball urban fantasy, not as good as either author's solo work. A cop tangles with figures from Gypsy legend. Neither characters nor plot are as vivid as one might expect, though the prose is good. The folk-rock-worldbeat soundtrack by Boiled in Lead can be purchased on CD, and I like it better than the book.

The Novels of Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb, that easy, catchy, bestsellerish name, is a pseudonym for Megan Lindholm, that more unusual, quirky, and difficult name, which is itself apparently not the author's real, or at least original, name.

The difference in names is the difference in authors: Lindholm's books are unusual, quirky, and sold badly; Hobb's are bestselling fat fantasy with all the fat fantasy tropes and many of the common fat fantasy flaws... and yet are also a little unusual, a little more rewarding, a little... diffferent.

THE ASSASSIN TRILOGY

ASSASSIN'S APPRENTICE

Fitz, a young boy of mysterious heritage and unusual gifts is trained as an assassin, despite growing evidence that he's poorly suited for the job. As he weaves in and out of the lives of the numerous and well-drawn inhabitants of the castle and nearby village, an weird and creepy invasion is underway by rampaging pirates with the baffling ability to steal their victims' souls, leaving them mindless psychopaths.

All sorts of fascinating mysteries are set up here, and the pace is swift, with some surprises to rank with the ones George R. R. Martin regularly pulls off. (For instance, that marvelously shocking scene involving Kettricken's brother.) The worldbuilding is solid and intriguing, the writing is of the "good transparent" school, and the characterization is exceptional. An excellent example of fat fantasy, and Hobb's best book as Hobb.

ROYAL ASSASSIN

The continuing adventures of Fitz, as his life goes from bad to horrible. His faithful wolf companion provides some much-needed playfulness, but overall the tone is dark. Maybe too dark. This is where it starts becoming apparent that Fitz is a total incompetent as an assassin, an almost-total incompetent at relating to human beings, and prefers to spend his time in self-pity and drug use rather than effective action. Still a page-turner, though.

ASSASSIN'S QUEST

Uh-oh. Fitz's life goes from horrible to unbelievably horrible, and the book goes off the rails. New, incredibly annoying, and ultimately pointless characters are introduced, from the know-it-all Kettle to the misconceived TV journalist, I mean singer, Starling. Interesting characters like Burrich, Patience, and Chade move offpage, or, like Verity and Kettricken, mutate into monomaniacal and therefore uninteresting characters.

Mysteries set up as huge big fascinating conundrums-- who was Fitz's mother? what was the White Ship? How exactly is Forging accomplished? Who was Kebal Rawbread? Why did the Red Ship Raiders start raiding _now_-- are left unsolved. The mysteries that _are_ solved, primarily, why are the Red Ship Raiders attacking at all, have dumb solutions. It concludes in a resounding whimper.

THE LIVESHIP TRILOGY

SHIP OF MAGIC

And this one begins with a bang. It has all the virtues of ASSASSIN'S APPRENTICE, but is more sprawling and lighthearted. Magic talking ships ply the seas, a beach where bizarre trinkets wash ashore is guarded by weird beings who will answer one question truthfully, an acid river washes the shores of a land where those who dare to live on it can touch great magic but will be hideously mutated, sea serpents search for their true heritage and ancient wisdom... you get the picture. It's great stuff. Again, fascinating mysteries are set up.

MAD SHIP

Why wasn't this called SHIP OF MADNESS? Oh, well. More of the same and thoroughly enjoyable as such, and, surprisingly, by the end most of the major mysteries and plotlines reach satisfying resolutions. What will Hobb do in the third book, I wondered.

SHIP OF DESTINY

Vamp for four hundred pages, throw in a gratuitous and unmotivated rape, and spend about thirty pages on a terrific plotline involving the destiny of Malta, a spoiled brat who learns something. Another vastly disappointing third book. Is there a pattern forming here? It also becomes clear in this one that the most intriguing
character from the ASSASSIN series appears here under a different and less interesting identity.

THE TAWNY MAN TRILOGY

FOOL'S ERRAND

More vamping. We meet up with Fitz again, living a pathetic hermitlike existence. If he had a livejournal, he'd post more than I do, and at least half his pots would go into great and dull detail about his physical problems. People ask him to come to the city and help the prince with a problem. He says no. Repeat for the first two hundred pages.

Then he goes the city, and things start getting interesting. Quite readable and enjoyable after that point, but not as inventive as SHIP OF MAGIC or intense as ASSASSIN'S APPRENTICE. And I don't have high hopes for the third book, which I predict will be a wet squib with a very long fuse.

GOLDEN FOOL

This one was pretty interesting. Chade is back! The Fool is back! Fitz gets off his ass and starts considering a life based on something other than mopiness! There are plenty of delicious details about Hobb's two intriguing telepathy systems, the Skill and the Wit. It is suggested that all the loose ends from the previous trilogies will be tied up and the remaining mysteries solved, and so the book concludes with the sort of rousingly promising conclusion Hobb does so well, and has yet to deliver on as Hobb. Oh, the frustration.

FOOL'S FATE

I haven't read it yet. It's on reserve at the library. But like I said, my expectations are not high.