commercially unsuccessful. In 1993, she started writing the Farseer trilogy, an epic fantasy that was in a new style and subgenre compared to her earlier work. Feeling that her shifts across genres had prevented her from building a consistent readership, and also that "the drama of adopting a 'secret identity' was irresistible", Lindholm took up a new byline, Robin Hobb, to brand her Farseer work. She continued to write short fiction as Lindholm. Hobb felt her new pseudonym freed her from reader expectations of a Lindholm book, and she "wrote with a depth of feeling that I didn't usually indulge". The name Robin Hobb was intentionally androgynous and chosen to match the Fitz novels, which were written in a first-person male narrative voice. Hobb explained in an interview that she chose the pseudonym because many readers expected a male narrator to have been written by a male author. She continued concealing her identity after publishing the books, avoiding public readings or signings of the novels for multiple years, and eventually revealed her pseudonym in an interview with Locus, in 1998. Hobb has said that the core idea for the Farseer series was: "What if magic were addictive? And what if the addiction was destructive or degenerative?" She said she had mulled over that notion for many years before writing. The first book was initially titled Chivalry's Bastard before becoming Assassin's Apprentice. Hobb conceived Fitz's narrative as a trilogy, feeling that his story was too complex to fit in a single book and naturally broke into three parts. A half-wolf called Bruno that moved into her Alaskan home in the 1950s inspired the relationship between Fitz and the wolf Nighteyes. The enigmatic Fool was initially not a big part of the series outline, but grew into a major character as she wrote the novels. The first volume of the trilogy, Assassin's Apprentice, was published in May 1995 in the US, as a trade paperback by Bantam Spectra. Three months later, a hardcover edition was released in the UK by Voyager, a newly launched science fiction and fantasy imprint of HarperCollins. The second book, Royal Assassin, followed in 1996, first as a UK hardcover in March by Voyager, and then as a Bantam US paperback in May. The trilogy was completed in 1997 with the release of Assassin's Quest as a hardcover by both publishers, in March in the UK and in