Veggie Books: The Liveship Traders Trilogy

If you're a fantasy writer with organic leanings, then you've got a difficult choice to make. Are you going to call an orange an orange?

I've recently finished re-reading Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders trilogy, and enjoyed it very much this time around too, being a sucker for dragons and talking boats and stuff, but this particular sentence from Book One caught my eye:

From others came Kwazi fruit, whose rind yielded an oil that could numb even a serious wound and whose pulp was an intoxicant with an effect that lingered for days.

Made-up fruit. Way more exciting than real fruit. I think we should have more imaginary vegetables in books, personally. I'm going to put a tribblat in my next literary effort. My character will eat it and fall into an unpleasant dream about sharks. Tribblats attract sharks, you see. Tribblat trees grow on the shore and their full boughs hang down low over the water in summer. Then my character will awake to see a tiger shark make a twenty foot vertical leap to pick a particularly tasty tribblat with its teeth.

This will all be subtext, of course.