Matthew Hughes | |
---|---|
Born | May 1949 Liverpool, England |
Occupation | Author |
Language | English |
Nationality | Canadian |
Period | 1994 – present |
Genre | Fantasy, science fiction, mystery |
Notable works | Archonate series, To Hell and Back, What the Wind Brings |
Website | |
www |
Matthew Hughes (born 1949) is a Canadian author who writes science fiction under the name Matthew Hughes, crime fiction as Matt Hughes and media tie-ins as Hugh Matthews. Prior to his work in fiction, he was a freelance speechwriter. Hughes has written over twenty novels and he is also a prolific author of short fiction whose work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , Asimov's Science Fiction , Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine , Lightspeed , Postscripts , Interzone , Pulp Literature , and original anthologies edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. [1] [2] [3] In 2020 he was inducted into the Canadian SF and Fantasy Association Hall of Fame. [4]
Matthew Hughes was born in Liverpool in May 1949. [5] His family moved to Canada when he was five. As a teenager, he was a member of the Company of Young Canadians and worked a variety of jobs before becoming a journalist. He then moved into speechwriting, first on the staff of the Minister of Justice and the Minister of the Environment and subsequently as a freelance writer for corporate executives and politicians in British Columbia. [6] While working as a speechwriter in 1982, he wrote a 27,000 word novella for a competition which he saw advertised in the Vancouver Sun . Although he did not win the contest, he returned to the story years later and expanded it into his first published novel, Fools Errant, which was released in 1994. [7] Since 2007 he has worked across the world as a housesitter to support his fiction career. He has been married since the late 1960s and has three sons. [6] One of his sons has high-functioning autism, which led Hughes to write the "To Hell and Back" books from the perspective of a high-functioning autistic character. [7]
Hughes's Archonate stories and novels have been compared to the works of Jack Vance: Booklist called him Vance's "heir apparent" in their August 2005 review of The Gist Hunter and Other Stories. [8] Hughes has written an authorised Dying Earth story ("Grolion of Almery") for the 2009 Vance tribute anthology Songs of the Dying Earth and in February 2020 was working on an authorised sequel to Vance's Demon Princes books, [8] which was published in August 2021 as Barbarians of the Beyond. [9] Hughes has praised Vance as being "a unique voice of genius." [9] However, Hughes has cited his 2008 novel Template as being "the only time I’ve consciously tried to write a “Jack Vance novel,” although the themes and concerns embodied in the story are my own." [10]
Other significant early influences include P. G. Wodehouse, Thorne Smith, L. Sprague de Camp (especially historical novels such as An Elephant for Aristotle ), Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Philip K. Dick. [7] Hughes still rereads Jack Vance, P. G. Wodehouse and Gene Wolfe but has not followed the science fiction and fantasy field since the mid-1980s [11] and instead reads mostly crime fiction by authors such as Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Robert B. Parker and James Lee Burke, whom Hughes considers to be "the finest American crime novelist of them all." [7]
Hughes's work has been shortlisted for numerous major science fiction awards, included the Nebula Award, Philip K. Dick Award, Locus Award, Aurora Award (English-language) and Endeavour Award. [12] In 2000, his story "One More Kill" won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Short Story presented by the Crime Writers of Canada. [13] In 2020 his contributions to science fiction and fantasy were recognised with the CSFFA Hall of Fame Trophy. [4] What the Wind Brings, a slipstream historical magical realism novel was nominated for the 2020 Neffy Award [14] and won the 2020 Endeavour Award. [15]
In the far-future setting of Hughes's Archonate stories, the operating principle of the universe changes at intervals of several thousand years between science and magic with catastrophic effects. [16] Science is dominant in stories set in the Penultimate Age of Old Earth and almost all of the characters are initially unaware of or disbelieve in magic: these stories tend towards space opera and planetary romance influenced by Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe. More recently, Hughes has also written stories set during or after the change in the mode of Dying Earth genre. The stories and characters of the Archonate reflect Hughes's interest and passion in crime fiction: he has described himself as "a hard-boiled crime writer working in a science-fictional mode." [16]
The two Filidor Vesh books follow the picaresque adventures of the title character, nephew and apprentice to the ruling Archon of Old Earth.
The stories concerned with the Commons were originally intended to form one long novel. As this book did not meet the word limits imposed by Tor Books, Hughes published the shortened novel as Black Brillion and turned the excised material into a series of six short stories about Guth Bandar, a scholar dedicated to exploring humanity's collective unconscious. [17] Hughes sold these stories to Gordon Van Gelder at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; the first three were collected in 2005 as part of The Gist Hunter and Other Stories and Robert J. Sawyer assembled all six as a fixup novel (titled The Commons) in 2007. In 2014, Hughes self published the stories as they first appeared in F&SF as The Compleat Guth Bandar: differences between this volume and The Commons are slight. [17] Black Brillion was nominated for the Aurora Award while "The Helper and His Hero" was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novella. [12]
Henghis Hapthorn is the foremost freelance discriminator of Old Earth in its penultimate age. Hapthorn first appeared in a sequence of six stories sold to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, where the arch-rationalist and sceptic discovers to his horror that his rational world is about to come to an abrupt end with the dawn of an age of magic. [18] Hapthorn's story continued in three novels published by Night Shade Books: more recent Hapthorn stories have been set before his first encounter with magic ("The Immersion") or after Hespira ("Fullbrim's Finding", "Hapthorn's Last Case").
Template follows Conn Labro, the star duellist at a gaming house on the planet Thrais, who travels the worlds of the Spray with Old Earth dancer Jenore Mordene to investigate the murder of his only friend on the planet and the mystery of his own origins. Hughes began writing a sequel as a series of eight 10,000 word episodes but after the sale of the first episode to Amazing Stories decided to release the entire story as a novel provisionally titled Passengers and Perils, which will also feature many of Hughes's other recurring characters such as Henghis Hapthorn and Ern Kaslo in supporting roles. [19] Hughes began serialising the novel in April 2022 as a series of Amazon Kindle ebooks, and released the full novel at the end of the month.
Luff Imbry is a con man, forger and thief inspired by a pair of Sydney Greenstreet characters, Kaspar Gutman ( The Maltese Falcon ) and Signor Ferrari ( Casablanca ). [20] Luff was originally intended only as a supporting character in Black Brillion and was killed off towards the end of the novel in the first draft. Luff was spared in the final book by the intervention of Hughes's editor at Tor, David G. Hartwell and first appeared in a lead role in "The Farouche Assemblage", beginning the character's long association with Postscripts and PS Publishing. The 2011 Luff Imbry novel The Other was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. [12] Hughes has called Luff his favourite of his own Archonate characters and has expressed interest in completing the story begun in The Other. [20]
In the Lightspeed serial "The Kaslo Chronicles", Hughes for the first time showed the apocalyptic moment of transition from the age of rationality to that of magic [16] through the eyes of Erm Kaslo, a confidential operative in the Ten Thousand Worlds whose client, the aristocratic dilettante Diomedo Obron, intends to become a powerful thaumaturge in the new era. Kaslo, by contrast, is a poor fit for the dawning age as his practical competence does not translate to a talent for magic [21] but he nonetheless attempts to salvage what he can and fight back against interplanar threats. After this serial was collected as A Wizard's Henchman in 2016, Hughes returned to the character in prequel stories set when Kaslo was still "a hard-boiled, Sam-Spade-type private eye." [22]
The character of Raffalon, a skilled but seldom lucky thief in the Dying Earth, was created when George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois invited Hughes to submit a story to their anthology Rogues . [23] After writing the first Raffalon story, "The Inn of the Seven Blessings", Hughes realised the potential of the character and went on to write eight more stories about Raffalon's earlier adventures, which he collected in 2017. [23]
The creation and subsequent development of the Baldemar series is comparable to that of the earlier Raffalon stories. Hughes was invited by Gardner Dozois to submit a story to The Book of Swords : the resulting story, "The Sword of Destiny" introduces Baldemar at the end of his career serving the ambitious but incompetent thaumaturge Thelerion. [24] Subsequent stories have followed Baldemar's life from his streetwise beginnings through the rest of his time as a wizard's henchman. [25]
Cascor, a former policeman turned private detective who covertly practices magic, was originally a supporting character in Hughes's Raffalon stories.
Hughes has to date written three standalone short stories and four novels in the same Dying Earth setting as the Raffalon and Baldemar series.
To Hell and Back is a contemporary fantasy trilogy about mild-mannered actuary and superhero fan Chesney Arnstruther, who causes chaos in the spiritual realm when he accidentally summons a demon and refuses to sell his soul. His actions cause Hell to go on strike but also provide Chesney with an opportunity to live out his comic book fantasies.
Hughes's authorised sequel to Jack Vance's Demon Princes quintilogy, Barbarians of the Beyond, was released by Spatterlight Press. [27] The book was published in the "Paladins of Vance" series, a line dedicating to preserving Vance's legacy by permitting authors to create new stories about new characters in Vance's worlds, avoiding the commodified "Frankensteinian reanimation" of characters Hughes criticised in posthumous continuations of series such those by Robert B. Parker. [9] Hence rather than continuing the story of Vance's protagonist Kirth Gersen, Hughes's novel instead focuses on the new character Morwen Sabine, whose parents were enslaved in the Demon Princes' Mount Pleasant Massacre, as she returns to their much changed homeworld seeking a treasure she could use to buy her parents' freedom. [28] The critic James Nicoll positively received the book as a "worthy companion to Vance's series" which was also accessible to readers who hadn't read the original Vance books. [29] An audiobook narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir was released by Skyboat Media in February 2022.
Hughes has called his magic realist historical novel What the Wind Brings (Pulp Literature Press, 2019) his "magnum opus". It was inspired by a footnote Hughes read in a university textbook in 1971, which described how African slaves shipwrecked on the coast of Ecuador in the mid 16th century created a mixed society with the indigenous peoples and successfully "outfought and out-thought" the conquistadors to gain their independence. [8] Hughes was unable to pursue the idea at the time due to the lack of English-language scholarship but forty years later a Canada Council grant and the increased attention to this passage of history in North America enabled him to complete the book, [8] which received critical acclaim and won the 2020 Endeavour Award. [15]
The 2022 novel Ghost Dreams is a contemporary fantasy story about a commercial burglar who helps the ghost of a woman who died wrongfully confined in an asylum in the 1940s to discover what happened to the child taken from her.
Stories set in the Archonate are marked with a *:
Dying Earth is a speculative fiction series by the American author Jack Vance, comprising four books originally published from 1950 to 1984. Some have been called picaresque. They vary from short story collections to a fix-up, perhaps all the way to novel.
John Holbrook Vance was an American mystery, fantasy, and science fiction writer. Though most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance, he also wrote several mystery novels under pen names, including Ellery Queen.
Michael Shea was an American fantasy, horror, and science fiction author. His novel Nifft the Lean won the World Fantasy Award, as did his novella Growlimb.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is a U.S. fantasy and science-fiction magazine, first published in 1949 by Mystery House, a subsidiary of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press. Editors Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas had approached Spivak in the mid-1940s about creating a fantasy companion to Spivak's existing mystery title, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The first issue was titled The Magazine of Fantasy, but the decision was quickly made to include science fiction as well as fantasy, and the title was changed correspondingly with the second issue. F&SF was quite different in presentation from the existing science-fiction magazines of the day, most of which were in pulp format: it had no interior illustrations, no letter column, and text in a single-column format, which in the opinion of science-fiction historian Mike Ashley "set F&SF apart, giving it the air and authority of a superior magazine".
Kate Elliott is the pen name of American fantasy and science fiction writer Alis A. Rasmussen.
A fantasy fiction magazine, or fantasy magazine, is a magazine which publishes primarily fantasy fiction. Not generally included in the category are magazines for children with stories about such characters as Santa Claus. Also not included are adult magazines about sexual fantasy. Many fantasy magazines, in addition to fiction, have other features such as art, cartoons, reviews, or letters from readers. Some fantasy magazines also publish science fiction and horror fiction, so there is not always a clear distinction between a fantasy magazine and a science fiction magazine. For example, Fantastic magazine published almost exclusively science fiction for much of its run.
Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky is an American author who works primarily in speculative fiction genres, writing under the name Elizabeth Bear. She won the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the 2008 Hugo Award for Best Short Story for "Tideline", and the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for "Shoggoths in Bloom". She is one of a small number of writers who have gone on to win multiple Hugo Awards for fiction after winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Richard Dirrane Bowes was an American author of science fiction and fantasy.
Joseph Hillström King, better known by the pen name Joe Hill, is an American writer. His work includes the novels Heart-Shaped Box (2007), Horns (2010), NOS4A2 (2013), and The Fireman (2016); the short story collections 20th Century Ghosts (2005) and Strange Weather (2017); and the comic book series Locke & Key (2008–2013). He has won awards including Bram Stoker Awards, British Fantasy Awards, and an Eisner Award.
Charles Coleman Finlay is an American science fiction and fantasy author and editor.
Terence William (Terry) Dowling, is an Australian writer and journalist. He writes primarily speculative fiction though he considers himself an "imagier" – one who imagines, a term which liberates his writing from the constraints of specific genres. He has been called "among the best-loved local writers and most-awarded in and out of Australia, a writer who stubbornly hews his own path ."
Charles Chowkai Yu is an American writer. He is the author of the novels How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Interior Chinatown, as well as the short-story collections Third Class Superhero and Sorry Please Thank You. In 2007 he was named a "5 under 35" honoree by the National Book Foundation. In 2020, Interior Chinatown won the National Book Award for fiction.
Will McIntosh is a science fiction and young adult author, a Hugo-Award-winner, and a winner or finalist for many other awards. Along with ten novels, including Defenders,Love Minus Eighty, and Burning Midnight, he has published dozens of short stories in magazines such as Asimov's Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, Clarkesworld, and Interzone. His stories are frequently reprinted in different "Year's Best" anthologies.
Satellite Science Fiction was an American science-fiction magazine published from October 1956 to April 1959 by Leo Margulies' Renown Publications. Initially, Satellite was digest-sized and ran a full-length novel in each issue with a handful of short stories accompanying it. The policy was intended to help it compete against paperbacks, which were taking a growing share of the market. Sam Merwin edited the first two issues; Margulies took over when Merwin left, and then hired Frank Belknap Long for the February 1959 issue. That issue saw the format change to letter size, in the hope that the magazine would be more prominent on newsstands. The experiment was a failure and Margulies closed the magazine when the sales figures came in.
Lightspeed is an American online fantasy and science fiction magazine edited and published by John Joseph Adams. The first issue was published in June 2010 and it has maintained a regular monthly schedule since. The magazine published four original stories and four reprints in every issue, in addition to interviews with the authors and other nonfiction. All of the content published in each issue is available for purchase as an ebook and for free on the magazine's website. Lightspeed also made selected stories available as a free podcast, produced by Audie Award–winning editor Stefan Rudnicki.
Ann Leckie is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. Her 2013 debut novel Ancillary Justice, which features artificial consciousness and gender-blindness, won the 2014 Hugo Award for "Best Novel", as well as the Nebula Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the BSFA Award. The sequels, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, each won the Locus Award and were nominated for the Nebula Award. Provenance, published in 2017, and Translation State, published in 2023, are also set in the Imperial Radch universe. Leckie's first fantasy novel, The Raven Tower, was published in February 2019.
Maurice Broaddus is an American author who has published fiction across a number of genres including young adult, horror, fantasy and science fiction. Among his books are The Knights of Breton Court urban fantasy trilogy from Angry Robot, the steampunk novel Pimp My Airship from Apex Publications, and the young adult novel The Usual Suspects from HarperCollins. His Afrofuturist space trilogy Astra Black will be released by Tor Books beginning in March, 2022. He has also published dozens of short stories in magazines such as Asimov's Science Fiction, Black Static, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Weird Tales along with anthologies including Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy and Sunspot Jungle.
This is a list of the published works of Aliette de Bodard.
This is a bibliography of American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson.
Neon Yang, formerly JY Yang, is a Singaporean writer of English-language speculative fiction best known for the Tensorate series of novellas published by Tor.com, which have been finalists for the Hugo Award, Locus Award, Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, Lambda Literary Award, British Fantasy Award, and Kitschie Award. The first novella in the series, The Black Tides of Heaven, was named one of the "100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time" by Time magazine. Their debut novel, The Genesis of Misery, the first book in The Nullvoid Chronicles, was published in 2022 by Tor Books, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, received a nomination for the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Science Fiction, and was a Finalist for the 2023 Locus Award for Best First Novel and 2023 Compton Crook Award.