Son of Awesomely Bad Books

[rachelmanija]

See post below for context, ie, if you guys don't entertain me, I can't guarantee I won't flee into the cold night in my jammies.

Last week lady_ganesh asked me to name and briefly describe the five worst books I'd ever read. I replied:

Oh God, SO MANY! How to choose?!

1. Robin Hobb's Forest Mage (The Soldier Son Trilogy, Book 2)

Comments

[mroctober]

Really, the Hobb's book the hero is constantly derided for being fat?!? And all that misogyny. Amazing.

[rachelmanija]

To be fair, Hobb herself clearly thinks it is mean to constantly torment the hero for being fat. And he is magically fat, so it really obviously isn't his fault, in case some readers might blame him. However, the reading experience is still 700 pages of "You're FAT!"

Oddly, the Chalker book also involves magical fatness. It's a theme!

[mroctober]

Magical fat? Is it like a curse. So fat = ugliness or doom. Sheesh, that's horrid.

[helen_keeble]

Again, to be fair, pretty much the entire point of the books is the clash between two cultures, one of which venerates the "Great Ones" (aka magically fat people) and the other of which despises the obese for being lazy and undisciplined. The protagonist is a member of the latter group who is (against his will, and boy does he angst about it) moved into the former culture.

Personally I didn't find it offensive in terms of portrayals of body issues; it was just an incredibly depressing trilogy!

[radiotelescope]

My problem with the Hobb "Soldier" trilogy is not that the issues are *bad*, but that they're leaden. Body shape, colonialism, class, family. They're cannonballs lined up in a row in my porridge.

And when I got to the end of the trilogy, I realized that the main character *hadn't done anything important*. Not once, in the whole series. He is a puppet of the magic (native's POV) or of God (colonial's POV), and that's *good*; it's the only way anything gets done.

There's a more-or-less epilogue in which he gets to save the girl, but it has nothing to do with the main storyline of the trilogy or of any of the three component books. My theory is that the author tacked it on because her editor was weeping at her feet for the poor sod to have a *scene*.

[helen_keeble]

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a pretty poor trilogy as well. Although I've read many much worse books, for me it sticks in the mind in these sorts of discussions just because I was so disappointed in it (love Hobbs' Liveship and (first) Assassin trilogies).

I suspect Hobbs was trying to do something tremendously clever with a passive protagonist, but for me it utterly failed because I immediately equated "the magic" with "authorial fiat". The magic works in incredibly subtle and interconnected ways so that many seemingly unrelated events turn out to solve a problem? Of course it does! IT'S THE AUTHOR.

I thought the second Assassin's trilogy suffered from severe bloat and pacing problems as well, but it had the Fool in it, which redeems a great deal. After that series and Soldier Son, I'm afraid that Hobb has dropped right off my buy list and onto my "get it out of the library" list. *sigh*

[desayunoencama]

Don't the Chalker books have gender-switching? I thought all his books involved badly-done gender-switching for sexual escapdes. At least, that's all I remember about any of the various books of his I read when younger. Every single one of them seemed to involve a badly-written gender-switch.

[rachelmanija]

Jack C. Chalker: giving gender-switching a bad name since 1969!

[tekalynn]

Gender- and/or body-switching. And random nudity. I honestly can't think of a single Chalker I've read or heard about that didn't have at least one of these factors and usually all three.