[Since I’m
teaching the Intro
to Sci Fi/Fantasy class this semester, for my annual
Valentine’s series I wanted to focus on fantasy authors & stories I’ve
loved. Leading up to a weekend post on an emerging community who deserve more
love!]
On the prolific
author who helped change epic fantasy’s trite narratives of gender and
sexuality.
I’m not sure
exactly what percentage of my high school time was spent reading epic fantasy
series by David
Eddings, Robert
Jordan, and Tad Williams, but I know
it was a very high percentage indeed. Each of those authors and series offered
a distinctive and interesting spin on the epic fantasy genre, and it’s been fun
to watch my older son get into Eddings (as of this writing he just finished
reading every one of Eddings’ novels) and to imagine him continuing to trace
his own journey through these genre titans (while, I’m sure, finding his own
that he’ll share with me). But revisiting Eddings through his reading has
reminded me of a shared limitation of which I was only dimly aware when I was a
teenage reader: in how these authors and series depict female characters, and
as a result themes of gender and sexuality. They’re not identical by any means,
and each series does include powerful female characters to be sure; but I would
nonetheless argue that the ultimate role of even those powerful heroines is as
love interests for the male leads, and ones who need rescuing and protection at
least as often as they hold their own alongside those heroes. These series
might not be sexist, that is, but neither are they particularly nuanced (much
less progressive) when it comes to gender and sex.
Which is why
finding the fantasy fiction of Robin Hobb was such an eye-opening and important
moment for me. Beginning with 1995’s
Assassin’s Apprentice (which I’ll
be teaching in a couple months in my Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy class), the first
book that novelist Megan Lindholm
wrote under the pseudonym Robin Hobb,
Hobb has now published 16 novels (along with numerous short stories and a
novella) in the Realm
of the Elderlings world, a collection of interconnected epic fantasy series
set in different corners of the same universe. Those series include a number of
different themes and threads—one part of the world, the focus of the Liveship
Traders and Rain Wild series, is nautical and features pirate stories; another,
the focus of the Farseer, Tawny Man, and Fitz and the Fool series, includes
fantastic elements centered around the bonds between humans and animals—but one
thing they all share is an interest in pushing far beyond the traditional
depictions of gender and sexuality in epic fantasy. Indeed, as the Elderlings
books have evolved, Hobb has deepened both those elements and the ways they
challenge epic fantasy tropes: the first, Farseer series feels the most traditional
(it tells the story of a young boy who turns out to have a vital role to play
in a mythic battle); while the most recent, the Fitz and the Fool series,
focuses on that same character as a middle-aged man through the lens of his
complex relationship to a character whose gender and sexuality are themselves
central themes.
It's difficult
to write too much more about that latter series, and particularly about the character
of the Fool (present throughout the Elderlings books but increasingly central
in the later series), without spoiling more of Hobb’s plots and world-building
than I’m willing to do here. But I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler
(since these elements were present in that earliest series) to note that, while
the Fool is a deeply mysterious and ambiguous character (especially because
these books are narrated in first-person by Fitz, who can thus never truly know
any other character in the most internal way), they are also one of the first
(and to this day still one of the only) transgender characters I’ve ever
encountered in epic fantasy. To be honest, when I read that first series in
high school I had very little understanding of that identity, or even of LGBTQ
identities overall; my high school, like America
in the early 90s overall, did an excellent job pretending such identities
simply did not exist. If and when my son gets to Hobb, I’ll be very interested
to see how his engagement with this character and these themes is influenced by
the far more present conversations about those identities in 2020. But while I
didn’t quite have the tools yet to understand what Hobb was doing with
characters like the Fool, I knew that it was radically different from any epic
fantasy I had read—and very important (while at the same time wonderfully
readable and entertaining) as a result.
Last loving
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Favorite fantasy authors or stories you’d share?
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