Spoiler warning: This review contains some mild background on Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series, although it does not contain spoilers for Dragon Haven. If you haven’t read Hobb’s previous works in this series, you probably shouldn’t be reading Dragon Haven or this review.

With Dragon Haven, fantasy master Robin Hobb has begun to rekindle some of the magic that had left her most recent works, particularly the Soldier Son trilogy. The book represents a satisfying conclusion to the two book series –The Rain Wild Chronicles — Hobb has penned as a follow-up to her extended nine book saga The Realm of the Elderlings, while still leaving room for future works in that world.

What a seasoned Hobb fan will most note about Dragon Haven is that it contains a great deal of the subtle plot and character creation and gradual world revelation that Hobb had perfected in her Elderlings saga. There is a wonderful undercurrent of ideas and emotions swirling through Hobb’s prose that constantly leaves the reader both guessing and angsty that her characters don’t know the full picture and haven’t worked through their internal turmoil.

But the book doesn’t have the same kind of drawn-out pacing that plagued the Soldier Son trilogy. Instead, I found it a pleasure to read.

I came down pretty hard on Hobb after I finished The Dragon Keeper, the first book in The Rain Wild Chronicles. And now I have to admit Hobb has taken any criticism from myself and others she read on board, and created a book in Dragon Haven that her fans will simply love.

Like The Dragon Keeper, the plot of Dragon Haven takes place in the Rain Wilds, the exotic area located upstream of Bingtown, the city where much of the action in The Liveship Traders is set, at a time shortly after the concluding events at the end of The Tawny Man trilogy.

In The Dragon Keeper, dragons had returned to the world, but in a stunted and degraded form — they could no fly, and some appeared witless and bestial. In short, they were far from the magical and all-powerful beings of legend.

With the dragons becoming a danger to the humans who tend them and live nearby, the logical next step was to move them upriver to a more appropriate setting; a glorious ancient city the dragons themselves dream of: the fabled Kelsingra. Half of this journey was completed in the first book.

Dragon Haven is in many ways a story of being on the road. Like many novelists, Hobb uses the plot device of her characters travelling through various hardships as a method to force them to grow and develop.

In both the dragons’ and the humans’ cases, the journey is both physical, in the sense that as the book wears on, they endure various hardships and traverse much terrain, and internal, in that these external trials serve as mirrors which force the characters to look into themselves and find who they really are.

For the dragons, this means both becoming physically larger and stronger, while also re-learning and remembering much of their power and their glory. For the humans, the struggle is often tied up in their sexuality. For Rain Wilder Thymara, it’s getting past the idea that her physical defects don’t mean she can’t have a relationship or potentially even bear children. For Bingtown wife and dragon scholar Alise, it means dealing with the reality of her marriage and potential future happiness.

And for poor Sedric, it means coming to a dreadful understanding of what his own relationship with Alise’s husband has truly been about.

Like other ‘road’ books, the eventual fate of Hobb’s individual characters, and indeed the entire expedition, is unclear. Kelsingra was abandoned long ago and may not even exist any more. When you add the constant grinding labour involved in even surviving the Rain Wilds, let alone travelling through them, to internal plots within the expedition and even the dangers of sharing the journey with a bunch of unpredictable dragons, it’s hard throughout Dragon Haven to know where the characters and the book will end up.

But I will say this — the eventual ending of the book is satisfying and worth reaching. Although it leaves room for a continuation of the story — particularly with relation to the potential future revelation of more details about Hobb’s world — it does not leave too much hanging.

All of Hobb’s strengths as a fantasy writer are found in Dragon Haven. Complex, realistic, multi-faceted characters who change and grow. A plot that deceives you into thinking you can foretell its changes in direction — and then twists things around on you. Subtle writing that leaves barely traceable hints of information that you really want to know.

And most of all, lurking beneath the surface of everything Hobb does in Dragon Haven, is the gradual, almost scientific revelation of the secrets of the dragons, their magic, and what it all could mean for the future of the whole world.

If you were disappointed by the Soldier Son trilogy and even by somewhat lacklustre first book in the Rain Wild Chronicles series, The Dragon Keeper, don’t lose your faith in their author just yet.

Robin Hobb is back in form. And with Dragon Haven she’s cutting up the fantasy scene once again. I can’t wait to see what she’s got in store for us next.

Joe Haldeman‘s Marsbound can best be compared to the pop music of an idol like Britney Spears. It’s an easy and comfortable journey, but ultimately leaves the reader feeling unsatisfied due to its lack of deeper substance, real human emotion and complex ideas.

The book represents an unrealistic coming of age tale set in the context of a trite first contact experience with human-like aliens found on Mars. Its genderless main character and the holes found within its entirely predictable plot will leave many science fiction fans wondering what happened to the great science fiction author who penned The Forever War thirty years ago.

The main character of Marsbound is Carmen Dula, a 19-year-old who gets dragged along as her scientist parents join one of the first groups to make the still-risky trip to the great red planet for several years of habitation and research based in a semi-permanent facility humans have managed to erect there. First port of call for the Dula family is the Galapagos Islands, where Dula, her parents, and her annoying little brother Card are scheduled to ride a space elevator up to an orbiting space station.

Much of the information Dula relates from the first person perspective allocated to her by Haldeman are mundane, yet ultimately the sort of details that people will be fascinated with when emigration to space and other planets starts to become a reality.

For example, what sort of food do the travellers have available to them (generally it’s poor stuff, and all water is recycled; Dula ruminates to herself that all of the water has passed through her annoying brother Card several times), what sort of entertainment do they have (virtual reality technology is quite advanced), and what are the shower facilities like (bad)?

Dula also puts a high level of importance on the relationships of the various men and women around her; she has the late-teenager interest in sex and evaluates the young men in her life in terms of potential partnerships with them. With a 19-year-old female protagonist from the United States, it’s no surprise that she will eventually find love interests, engage in what we humanoids refer to as “sex” and so on.

But of course, as the book’s blurb aludes to, the humans who are taking the first, oxygen-hoarding steps in colonising Mars are shortly to discover they are not alone on the planet. An excursion beyond humanity’s facility leads to an accident, and the young Dula is rescued by an angel: “An angel with too many arms and legs, a head that looks like a potato gone bad — and a message for the newly arrived inhabitants of Mars: We were here first.”

Sound like an interesting read so far? You could assume so. The intricacies of Dula’s life as a relatively normal young adult thrust into humanity’s race to conquer Mars are fascinating, and Haldeman has clearly thought through many of the logistical problems humans will eventually face when we inevitably attempt to do so. His style of writing is comfortable and you’ll find yourself relatively absorbed while you’re turning pages and wondering … what exactly is it like to have sex in lower gravity?

However, that’s about all Marsbound has going for it. Haldeman fails abundantly in his attempts to either meaningfully develop Dula’s character or to provide an exciting plot for her to operate in.

Young adults grow, develop and change at an extremely rapid pace; especially as they are exposed to more older peers and role models, and they develop the sexual side of their lives and a sophisticated world view. They are not static, reasonable people, able to calmly and rationally accept every challenge thrown at them. And the different sexes, of course, have entirely different challenges and approaches to meeting them.

Joe Haldeman, credit: Mikko Aarnio

Yet this is how the mid-60′s Haldeman portrays the 19-year-old Dula. And for all the insight that is given into her female nature, she might as well have been male. Worse, most of the other characters are simply forgettable cardboard cut-outs.

Haldeman pairs this lack of character development with an entirely predictable first contact plot that contains all the elements of the traditional first contact science fiction tale; but without any of the excitement and alien-ness that is so fundamental to this type of story.

Remember Heinlein‘s Stranger from a Strange Land? Remember how you felt after the final climactic, mind-bending scene, how the book make you question what ways of thinking were essentially human, and which could be moulded, changed, developed, under the influence of an alien intelligence? Or what about the slowly developing and completely alien world contained in Arthur C. Clarke‘s Rendezvous with Rama, that you didn’t really understand even by the end of the book?

Yup. None of that grandeur here. Marsbound‘s “aliens” are as rational, reasonable and ultimately as boring as Dula herself.

Now it would be easy to say that Haldeman’s getting old — he’s been writing for more than 30 years. However it’s important to remember that the author won both the Nebula and Hugo awards back for his 1997 novel Forever Peace, and he appears to have been pumping out books regularly since then; about one a year, according to Wikipedia.

No, my theory is that Haldeman has actually underestimated the complexity of the first contact genre he undertook in Marsbound, given that much of his previous best work has been focused on the military science fiction sub-genre, informed very much by his own experiences in the Vietnam War. Then too, you could make an argument that his approach to the 19-year-old Dula didn’t ring right due to the age factor.

The cover of the paperback copy of Marsbound that I reviewed contains a quote from Stephen King. “If there was a Fort Knox for the science fiction writers who really matter, we’d have to lock Haldeman up there,” says King. Personally, I hope Haldeman can break his writing out of the chains he appears to have imposed on it and challenge himself and the readers once more for his next effort.

Dragonmount‘s Jason Denzel has just posted the first review of The Gathering Storm, the next book in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, and he says it’s a great read and true to the deceased author’s memory.

The Gathering Storm, one of three books still to be published in Jordan’s epic, was written by American fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, using Jordan’s notes and plan for the rest of the series. In this first review, Denzel gushes about the book.

“I would rank it up there in the top 4 in the series along with The Shadow Rising, The Fires of Heaven, and The Great Hunt,” he said.

Denzel had this to say about what he acknowledges is a “burning question” on the part of Jordan’s massive fan base (the series has sold over 44 million books worldwide) as to whether or not the book “feels” like a Robert Jordan novel:

“Well, truthfully, I thought the prose stayed very true to previous novels … There were only a few times where I suspected the scene I was reading was entirely from Brandon’s imagination. We may never learn which specific sequences he had to invent entirely, but in the end, you probably won’t notice or even care. It’s pretty seamless in that regard.”

The result, Denzel wrote, is that the book is a novel which belongs in the Wheel of Time series.

And the plot? Without spoiling it, Denzel says the story brings focus back to the characters that need it, notably the Dragon Reborn himself, Rand Al’Thor. ‘If you thought Rand was hard before, you haven’t seen anything yet,” he says.

The news today came as Sanderson had recently revealed he would take a brief break from working on the conclusion to Jordan’s masterpiece, after he handed in The Gathering Storm manuscript in preparation for publishing.

The author citied the need to recharge and work on his own books for a while.

The Gathering Storm is due to hit retailers on November 3.

Commentary
Denzel’s praise for The Gathering Storm will highly reassure Jordanites (including myself) that Sanderson can properly finish Jordan’s legacy.

As Denzel notes himself, he’s hardly divorced and independent from The Wheel of Time books. He runs the main fan site for them, a site that itself hosted Jordan’s own blog before he passed away.

And, he is friends with both Jordan’s widow Harriet McDougal and Sanderson, and has a relationship with Jordan publisher Tor. So if there was anyone who was going to be disappointed if The Gathering Storm was bad, it would be Denzel. The fans trust him. His site has done so much for them over the years.

Personally, his endorsement of Sanderson’s book has made me tremendously excited about its release in November; I’ll be lining up at midnight if necessary to get my copy, and I would encourage any Jordan fan to do the same. Let’s see this masterpiece completed and head to Tarmon Gai’don — in style.

Spoiler warning: This review contains some mild background on Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderling series, although it does not contain spoilers for The Dragon Keeper. If you haven’t read Hobb’s previous works in this series, you probably shouldn’t be reading The Dragon Keeper or this review.

The Dragon Keeper, the long-awaited continuation of the events set in Robin Hobb‘s Realm of the Elderlings series, represents a solid accomplishment that that the revered author’s steadfast fans will enjoy as much as a hearty meal.

However, the book is ultimately a disappointment due to its lack of challenging ideas. The experienced reader will be easily able to predict the plot and much of the character development ahead of time, due to the abundant clues Hobb leaves littered throughout her text. The sense of deep mystery and Hobb’s glorious ability to gradually reveal the true workings of her complex world are somewhat lacking in her latest effort.

The Dragon Keeper is not a direct continuation of the story of perhaps Hobb’s most iconic character, FitzChivalry Farseer, and his companion The Fool. Instead, it can perhaps best be seen more as a sequel to The Liveship Traders trilogy: the middle, and I feel the best, trilogy in the nine book Realm of the Elderlings saga.

The book takes place in the Rain Wilds, the exotic area located upstream of Bingtown, the city where much of the action in The Liveship Traders is set, at a time shortly after the concluding events at the end of The Tawny Man trilogy.

The gradually revealed grand theme of the Realm of the Elderlings saga was the restoration of dragons, and the associated magic and marvels that their presence brings, to a world which had almost forgotten them. The focus of The Dragon Keeper, then, is the triumphant emergence of the dragons from the cocoons they entered in the Rain Wilds. The creatures entered the cocoons as serpents; they leave them as dragons.

But, as long-time Hobb fans will perhaps have expected due to her penchant for introducing difficulties her characters are forced to resolve and live with, that re-birth is not quite as expected.

As the book’s blurb notes:

“The creatures which emerge from the cocoons are a travesty of the dragons of old. Stunted and deformed, they cannot fly; some appear witless and bestial.”

With the dragons becoming a danger to the humans who tend them and live nearby, the logical next step is to move them to a more appropriate setting; a glorious ancient city the dragons themselves dream of: the fabled Kelsingra.

Hobb primarily tells her story through the viewpoint of several key characters: Sintara, a stunted but arrogant queen dragon who cannot fly; Thymara, a young and somewhat mutated Rain Wilder who faces the pangs of growing up, and Alise Kincarron, a homely Bingtown trader’s daughter obsessed with studying the dragons and their attendant Elderings. Then there’s Leftrin, owner and captain of an old-style liveship.

The author describes the lives of her subjects with pinache. As with her previous books, I found myself fascinated by the details of their daily lives; their sufferings, joys, and ultimately their pursuit of their dreams. I can’t fault Hobb’s characterisation and ability to get her readers to identify with the characters she creates.

However by the end of the book I couldn’t help feel that Hobb did not give those actors a large and dramatic enough stage to play out their parts on.

Within the larger plot arch of the book there are several smaller ones; the strained relationship between Alise and her husband by arranged marriage; the struggle of Thymara with the hostility of her mother towards her malformed and societally ostracised daughter; and the mysterious actions of the rascal Leftrin.

The direction these plots take within the overarching theme of the dragons’ enfranchisement is entirely predictable, and the gradual revelations Hobb leads the reader to can be anticipated well in advance.

In this light, the book is a far cry from Hobb’s Liveship Traders and Farseer Trilogies, and more in the vein of her Soldier Son trilogy, which in many ways also demonstrated a level of plot predictability that leaves the reader with a lack of satisfaction.

Of course, readers wouldn’t be left with this feeling if we hadn’t experienced a much higher quality of writing from Hobb, particularly in the Liveship Traders trilogy, where the clues as to the dramatic revelations ahead are scattered few and far between.

Speaking with my friends, their most memorable moments in Hobb’s previous books came when she finally lets the reader in on a grand secret that had been haunting them through the pages. “Do you remember when you found out about the true nature of The Fool?”, they’ll exclaim. “Or when you found out what the liveships truly are, and why the Paragon is the way he is?”

Ultimately, if you’ve enjoyed Hobb’s previous books, you are pretty much going to pick up a copy of The Dragon Keeper. When I saw it in a Dymocks window during lunch one day, I barely remember paying for it, that’s how fast I handed over the money and started reading! But don’t expect the book to be the beginning of another grand masterwork from one of fantasy’s greats.