Robin Hobb (the pen name of Margaret Ogden, who also writes as Megan Lindholm) is one of the more mainstream fantasy authors I like.
She is the author of the Farseer trilogy (also known in my household as the Assassin trilogy, given the titles), the Liveship Traders trilogy, and the Tawny Man trilogy (the Fool trilogy; sequel to the Farseer trilogy). These three trilogies are set in the same world and are interlinked though they follow different characters. There is also an unrelated trilogy, The Soldier Son, which I haven’t read.
While I didn’t go out of my way to seek these novels, I did enjoy them. Hobb is good at presenting characters, and I certainly did get very fond of Fitz, lead character of the Farseer and Tawny Man series, to the extent that I was wincing as the bad luck and beatings piled up by the third book of his first trilogy, and a little teary for the last 100 pages of his second trilogy when it became apparent (spoiler alert, spoiler alert) he was going to get a happy ending after all.
I’m not trying to be insulting when I say Hobb is, for me, the equivalent of TV series Stargate SG-1: generally a good, steady performer, only rare flashes of brilliance, but also only rare moments of drek too; while there’s no need to feel obliged to catch every episode, you can enjoy the ones you do see.
With Hobb, I don’t feel obliged to follow the works obsessively, but if someone hands me the series I haven’t read, or I see it in the library or for sale cheaply, I’ll get it. There’s other authors I enjoy more, but there’s a whole lot of authors I enjoy less.
Hobb is currently working on a stand-alone (hooray! Sometimes seeing Book 1 on the cover of a new book makes me put it down again…I think the emphasis on series in the fantasy genre is deadly) novel set in the Rain Wilds. Her website is here.
