The Blade Itself
Grimdark's defining debut: the close-voice, blackly comic register it established is now the house style of adult fantasy, and Glokta is the subgenre's signature creation.
Book Entry · Fantasy
Assassin's Apprentice
by Robin Hobb · 1995 · The Farseer Trilogy, book 1
What is Assassin's Apprentice about?
A six-year-old boy is dumped at a keep gate: the bastard of Prince Chivalry, whose name his existence destroys. Raised in the stables by the gruff Burrich, claimed by his grandfather the king with the words 'the bastard will be mine', Fitz is educated in two curricula — the courtly Skill, and quiet murder under the scarred master assassin Chade — while hiding the Wit, the despised beast-magic that bonds him to dogs and dooms him socially. Hobb narrates from old Fitz looking back, every triumph pre-shadowed by the wreckage the reader knows is coming. The Red-Ship Raiders and their Forging (humanity stripped, bodies left walking) supply the kingdom's nightmare; the court supplies Fitz's.
Why it matters
The opening of the Realm of the Elderlings, modern fantasy's great life-study: the book that put first-person psychological interiority at the centre of the epic form, with a generation of writers following.
Where does it sit in the series?
FitzChivalry Farseer — royal bastard, assassin's apprentice, Wit-bonded to a wolf — and the first movement of the genre's great single-life epic, the Realm of the Elderlings.
In the Guide from The Farseer Trilogy:
- Assassin's Apprentice (1995)
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