Category: Reviews

• Template
  • by Matthew Hughes
  • TPB, Planet Stories/Paizo, © 2008, 188 pp, ISBN 978-1-60125-264-7

Template

There are many refreshing things about Matthew Hughes’ novels: The old-style galactic empire feel of the setting, and quirky sense of humor he puts into his writing, and even the brevity of his novels, which pack a lot of ideas and plot into stories typically under 300 pages. Template weighs in at under 200 pages, yet it’s not only one of his best, but it’s an excellent introduction to his Archonate universe.

Conn Labro is a professional duelist on the world of Thrais, and also an indentured servant on a world where everything is for sale. But when his owner and patron is killed, Conn is bought by an off-world consortium – or nearly so, as a man he’s gamed with weekly for his entire life has also been murdered, and willed Conn enough money to pay off his debt. More significantly, he’s given Conn a bearer chip which seems to be what the assassins are after. Accompanied by a woman from Old Earth, Jenore Mordene, Conn leaves Thrais to learn what his friend really left him, but he also finds the galaxy to be a much more diverse place than he’d ever expected.

Template wanders all over the place, and yet it’s a pretty terrific book. Initially I’d summarize Conn Labro as being “a Libertarian Mr. Spock”: His upbringing on Thrais makes him believe that all aspects of human endeavor of transactional, things being bought, sold and exchanged, and that anything else is irrational. Yet every other world is considerably different from Thrais, not least the archipelago on Old Earth where Jenore grew up, which is based around art and lacks monetary currency. Hughes comes up with a nifty way to consider different cultures in the Archonate via a brother and sister who have come up with the idea that every human society is based on one of the seven deadly sins. It’s a fun mental exercise.

Conn’s story is his personal odyssey to learn where he comes from (and why that matters), and where he belongs. So he has to grow emotionally to understand how to relate to other people, and a lot of the suspense comes from him making some poor choices along the way. For much of the book he has Jenore to help guide him and inform him, but eventually he has to control his own destiny. Fortunately he’s not without skills of his own (professional duelist, remember?).

While the book drags a bit in the middle when Conn and Jenore are on Old Earth and the plot doesn’t move forward very much (what does it mean when a book under 200 pages “drags a bit in the middle”?), and one could argue that the cultures Hughes portrays are too simplistic to be plausible, it’s still a really fun story. And besides, Hughes at his best – and this is him at his best – portrays both the people and the cultures of the Archonate as a little absurd, having a bit of the feel of a fable even in an otherwise serious story. (It’s not so different from, say, the races in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, actually.)

Overall Template is one of Hughes’ best books, and should appeal to anyone who likes space opera, adventure, or just good old galactic empire science fiction.

• The Commons
  • by Matthew Hughes
  • HC, Robert J. Sawyer Books, © 2007, 313 pp, ISBN 978-0-88995-389-5

The Commons

If you haven’t read Hughes’ earlier novel Black Brillion, I suggest reading it before reading The Commons, as this novel’s second half replays the events of the earlier novel, but from the point of view of Guth Bandar, a supporting character in Brillion, but the protagonist here. The Commons is a “fix-up” novel, reworked from a series of short stories featuring Bandar, plus the Brillion material. So it doesn’t entirely hang together as a novel, but it’s pretty entertaining anyway. (For what it’s worth, I read The Commons first, not realizing the connection between the two.)

Guth Bandar is a “noönaut”, a man who can enter into humanity’s collective unconscious and explore representations of our racial memories. This domain is known as The Commons, and while it’s a rich source of information, it’s also a dangerous place, as explorers can get trapped in a story or legend, or get wrapped up in the doings of archetypal figures which represent undiluted facets of human experience. The book opens with Bandar as a student at the Institute for Historical Inquiry, and its first half consists of short stories in which he attempts to become a full scholar, encountering repeated setbacks in his competition with another student, Didrick Gabbris, for favor with the capricious and insular faculty. These stories show how the Commons works, and the exotic techniques the educated traveler uses to try to insulate himself from the influences of the scenes he visits. Bandar’s adventures include:

• A visit to a planet where the native life forms are exploited into adopting human archetypes to perform in plays for the human colonists.
• Being waylaid in a contest with Gabbris and having to take the long way around to reach the finish line. (This is the most absurd story, as Bandar alters parts of his body in comical fashion in each episode, but has the best payoff when he gets stuck in a representation of the eternal war between Heaven and Hell.) You can read this story on Hughes’ web site.
• Getting caught up in the collapse of an Event in the Commons – which he inadvertently causes himself – and which reveals something hitherto unknown about the Commons.
• Getting stranded – for reasons I won’t reveal here – as the Helper to a Hero in an ancient scenario of a slaves’ revolt, which leads to a pivotal development in Bandar’s life.

As I said, the second half of the book revisits the events from Black Brillion, in which Bandar meets the policemen Baro Harkless and Luff Imbry, and learns that Harkless has an unusual and disturbing talent for entering the Commons himself. Bandar helps tutor Harkless for a while, and then gets caught up in the case the pair are investigating on the wasteland on Old Earth known as the Swept. Here he becomes the Helper to Baro Harkless’ Hero, a key component but ultimately largely a watcher in the younger man’s story.

Taken as a whole, some key elements of the novel are not very satisfying: Bandar’s life is disrupted by powers beyond his ken in order to accomplish a goal of great importance to all of humanity, but I don’t think Hughes really sells the manipulation of Bandar very well, and the ultimate goal that he and Baro Harkless manage to achieve just doesn’t feel like the sort of thing that the powers that be would have known about years ahead of time, much less manipulated Bandar to be the right man in the right place at the right time. And as a character arc the payoff for his troubles hardly seems adequate: While he finally achieves something like his life’s goals, he’s lost a big chunk of his lifetime because of his career getting derailed, and he ended up being a supporting character in someone else’s story. I really just felt sorry for the guy. Also, it felt like most of Bandar’s maturation occurs off-stage between the first and second halves, when he’s growing from a young man to an experienced one through the natural day-to-day progression of life; he definitely feels more mature in the second half, but we don’t see it happen, which makes it feel like a big part of his character arc is missing.

I think Hughes’ sense of whimsy – particularly the ludicrousness of the situations Bandar ends up in – isn’t as effective here as in other books. Indeed, a problem with both Bandar and Harkless in their respective novels is that they’re both too serious, too humorless, to feel like characters that fit into these situations. While Henghis Hapthorn is himself a pretty serious character, he has both the style and the verbal wit to be an effective actor in ridiculous or belittling situations, in ways that Bandar isn’t.

The book is at its best in portraying the narrative potential of the Commons, especially in the first half, which runs through a number of inventive situations, with clever puzzles for Bandar to figure out within the confines of this strange environment. The story involving the war between heaven and hell is my favorite precisely because Bandar takes advantage of the peculiar nature of a scenario within the Commons, and the fact that it’s not a real event, to be able to get out of his predicament.

So overall I was disappointed with The Commons; I don’t think it measures up to Hughes’ other novels. I hope he revisits the environment again sometime, but with a story that holds together better.

• Black Brillion
  • by Matthew Hughes
  • PB, Tor Books, © 2004, 272 pp, ISBN 0-765-35049-1

Black Brillion

I’m working my way more-or-less backwards through Matthew Hughes’ tales of the Archonate, his far-future galactic society which is marked more by his own wry and whimsical turn of phrase than anything in the setting itself. Black Brillion is the tale of Baro Harkless, rookies member of the Scrutinizers (or “Scroots”) who follows the con man Luff Imbry as Imbry tries to pull a job in an unusual city on Old Earth. As is Hughes’ tendency, the opening sequence is merely a lead-in to the main story (not unlike the pattern in the James Bond movies): Baro’s success in arresting Imbry and others leads to his being instated as a full officer, but his boss, Ardmander Arboghast, quickly sends Baro off on a new assignment with a new partner – Luff Imbry, himself now a fully-deputised Scroot. Their mission is to capture another con man, Horslan Gebbling, whom Imbry once worked with, who’s apparently working a scheme to separate sufferers of an affliction known as the lassitude from their money, claiming to be able to cure them while on a voyage across a wasteland known as the Swept.

One of their fellow passengers is a an named Guth Bander, a Nöonaut, able to enter the Commons, the manifestation of the collective unconscious of mankind. Baro finds himself intrigued by the notion, and even finds that he has an unusual talent for entering the Commons, drawn by the archetypal entities that dwell there into accomplishing some task. All of this greatly alarms Bandar, who is keenly aware of the dangers in the Commons and in interacting with the archetypes. Baro finds himself torn between his mission – and following in his father’s footsteps – and his sudden new calling in the Commons.

While the story is largely that of Baro Harkless, a coming-of-age and a journey of personal discovery, Luff Imbry often overshadows the young man. Hughes does a masterful job of contrasting the inexperienced and rule-bound Baro with the worldly and clever Imbry. Indeed, while Baro comes into his own by the end of the novel, if Hughes were to write more novels about one of these characters, I’d rather see how Imbry develops as a man of the law who’s spent most of his life on the other side of it. (Of course, the character Hughes actually wrote a novel about is Guth Bandar, which I’ll cover shortly in another review.)

The plot itself is both interesting and peculiar: The pursuit of Gebbling develops into a much more serious scenario which threatens all of Old Earth itself, and that Hughes makes this transition naturally is impressive stuff. On the other hand, the introduction of the Commons and the degree to which it dominates the second half of the story is a very strange departure from the straightforward police investigation the book starts out as. It feels like a big distraction until it ends up playing a key role in the resolution of the case. It makes the book feel like a bit of a patchwork, though, but the focus on Baro’s feelings about his father and his efforts to find where he belongs in life makes it work in the end.

While not as ambitious as Hughes’ later novels starring the detective Henghis Hapthorn, Black Brillion is still a fun romp. (Although the title bears only a passing resemblance to the story; perhaps not the best choice for the book.) Overall this is actually a fine introduction to Hughes’ Archonate universe, and his writing style overall.