The Inheritance (short story collection)

[Farseer]

Thanks for the update, Jussi . The story I am most looking foward to is 'The Inheritance'(so I hope it's as definite an inclusion as we all expect it to be!) but I am glad to know that lots from here on thePlenty will soon be able to enjoy 'Homecoming', and join in on related discussions.

[Mervi]

Haha, I just came here to post the same blurb!

It seems that [[the Inheritance]], [[Homecoming]] and [[Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man]] are at least confirmed then. The fourth story seems to be a new one...

[Albertosaurus Rex]

This quote from the blurb makes me laugh:

A collection of novellas and stories from one of the most critically acclaimed authors in the fantasy genre, Robin Hobb. Including work written under her pseudonym, Megan Lindholm.

Granted, we are discussing elsewhere what she's actually called, but surely Megan Lindholm is closer to her real name than Robin Hobb, and yet that's the name they're calling a pseudonym?

[Mervi]

Hmm. Someone at Robin's newsgroup posted they found the book on amazon.com. The title seems to be a bit different: The Inheritance: And Other Stories and it's only listed available as a paperback... but the date (May 3, 2011) matches previous information about it. What's ALSO weird is that it lists Eos as the publisher... not HarperVoyager as I had hoped! There's also a page number (400) which I kind of hope won't be true (it's pretty small, even if you consider they're SHORT stories) and it's oddly even. (lol can you say "oddly even"?! I mean they're usually like 427, not EXACTLY 400 or 900).

[Mervi]

The official TOC for the Inheritance:

The Robin Hobb stories are:
[[The Inheritance]]
[[Homecoming]]
Cat’s Meat (new)

The Megan Lindholm stories are
[[A Touch of Lavender]]
[[Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man]]
[[Cut]]
[[The Fifth Squashed Cat]]
[[Strays]]
Finis (new)
Drum Machine (new).

So no Ki & Vandien stories and no Mother of Fey, but otherwise it looks pretty cool to me! I'm very happy to see Touch and Silver Lady listed as I still haven't read either.

[Nuytsia]

Yay I haven't read any of them so I'm looking forward to getting them all in the one place!

[Mervi]

6 out of the 10 are new to me too.

['thul]

9/10 are new to 'thul.

[Albertosaurus Rex]

ALL are new to me!

I'm happy to see The Fifth Squashed Cat in there, as the title has always made me wonder. I'm happy to see The Inheritance and Homecoming as well.

No Ki and Vandien, though. I thought those would be a shoo-in.

[Mervi]

This is pure speculation, but I'm wondering if there's some sort of a copyright issue with republishing the Ki & Vandien stories ([[Bones for Dulath]] and [[the Small One]]). I remember someone asking Robin once if there would be more Ki and Vandien stories and she replied something like she'd love to write about them if a good story came to her, but that those characters belong to Ace (the US publisher of [[Harpy's Flight]] etc) so it might be complicated. But this is from my unreliable memory (I could very well be mixing things up with the [[Liavek]] characters), so don't treat it as gospel. It's funny though, because those two shorts were never published by Ace - Bones has only been released by DAW and the Small One has only ever appeared in an unrelated magazine - and the four novels have been published in the UK by HarperCollins.

I've been trying to spice up the wiki articles about the Inheritance stories today, but it's so hard to write story summaries - I don't want to spoil them, and with short stories that is particularly difficult!