Art by John Howe
Last week we wrote that Robin Hobb was scheduled to read from an unpublished Realm of the Elderlings story at LACon V, this year’s World Science Fiction Convention. I was lucky enough to be there and for the first time in a while, we have a few real details to work with.
The story is a novella. It is currently being pulled together from a larger work in progress. And it is tentatively titled From Ash to Spark.
What Robin Hobb read at LACon
Before she started reading, Hobb framed the piece as a novella that retells a story we already know, this time from a different point of view.
The excerpt she read covered Ash and Spark’s childhood in real detail, from her birth, to meeting Chade, to the death of her mother. The whole thing is told from her own perspective, looking back and recounting how it all happened.
The novella was “pulled out of a work in progress”
The most interesting part may be how Hobb described where this piece came from.
At the start of the reading, she explained:
“If it becomes a novella, it will be… These are actually chapters I pulled out of a work in progress and said, ‘maybe this will do better by itself.’ But it’s tentatively titled From Ash to Spark.”
So this is not a story she sat down to write as a standalone. It started as part of something larger, and at some point she decided this material worked better on its own.
What this might mean for the Bee book
If Hobb pulled a run of Ash and Spark chapters out of a larger work in progress, it is fair to wonder what that larger work originally looked like.
We have talked before about the long-discussed Bee project, the one Hobb confirmed in 2023 does feature Bee, the daughter of FitzChivalry Farseer. One possibility here is that the work she has been building was never only Bee’s story. It may have started with several points of view woven together, Bee and Ash and possibly others, the way Hobb has structured plenty of her books in the past.
And if that was the case, one reading of Sunday’s comments is that somewhere in the process she decided to narrow the larger book down, keep it closer to a single perspective, and lift the Ash and Spark chapters out into a novella of their own.
That is only one possibility, and I want to be clear that it is only speculation on my part. It is the same question fans have been circling since the original Reddit discussion about the LACon listing, and Sunday’s reading did not settle it.
But it is the kind of detail that makes you wonder.
What we still don’t know
We still do not know whether From Ash to Spark will actually be published as a novella, or when. We do not know for certain that it comes from the same manuscript as the Bee material, even if the timing invites the question. And we do not know how, or whether, it slots into the future of the Realm of the Elderlings as a whole.
What we do know is that Robin Hobb sat in front of us at Worldcon and read new Realm of the Elderlings prose out loud for the first time in many years, and that the material is real, finished enough to share, and was as fantastically written as you’d normally expect from Hobb.
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