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August 25, 2008

Last summer, Jeremy Lassen from Night Shade Books asked me for a blurb to accompany the Hespira listing in the NS catalogue. I hadn't begun to think about the book, and all I knew at that time was that it would have a woman in it named Hespira (or maybe that would be the name of the world she came from). So I dashed off a blurb that left a lot of avenues open, but assumed that the character would somehow come between Hapthorn and his alter ego, Osk Rievor. Funny thing, though, when I actually start in on a book, it often takes on a life of its own. That's what happened with Hespira, and it turned out the book would not be about a Hapthorn-Rievor-Hespira love triangle. Instead, it's about HH tackling a case all on his own, so that he can put the whole business of magic's resurgence out of his mind. So here's a more accurate blurb for the book, and my apologies for anyone who's been desperately waiting for the experience of Hapthorn in love.

As magic begins to reassert its ancient dominion, Old Earth's foremost freelance discriminator, Henghis Hapthorn, and his intuition (now a separate person named Osk Rievor), are living apart, though they remain on good terms. But now the Archonate's foremost freelance discriminator encounters a woman of deep mystery. Who is Hespira? What secret enemy has marooned her on Old Earth, her memories expunged? And is it only chance that has thrown her into Hapthorn's arms, just as he seeks to prevent a willful tycoon and a rising power in the Olkney underworld from making him a prize in their deadly private war?

August 21, 2008

George R.R. Martin, who is co-editing, along with Gardner Dozois, the Jack Vance Tribute anthology, Songs of the Dying Earth, has posted the almost complete table of contents. It's a heck of a crowd.

I'm relocating back to Canada for a while, taking up a four-month housesit in a small town on the prairies. I haven't been out in the wide open spaces since I drove my old 76 Dodge Dart from Vancouver Island to Toronto back in 1997. I'm looking forward to being under those skies again.

August 19, 2008

Charles Tan, the Philippines-based uberfan who maintains the Bibliophile Stalker blog, recently conducted an interview with me that has now been posted on the Nebula Awards site.

August 15, 2008

I had an email from a fan today asking, as fans occasionally do, whether there will be any more Hapthorn books after Hespira. I thought I'd post my answer here: I don't know yet. The Hapthorn books have sold well enough for Night Shade to make a profit, but not well enough that they're ready to commit to more titles at this stage. We'll have to see what the final sell-through is on both editions of Hespira, meaning no decisions before next year. In the meantime, you could try annoying all your friends and anyone you meet on the internet, telling them they ought to read me. Drop into your local library and, if they don't have me in their catalog, ask them to do so. And perhaps consider giving my books as gifts at Christmas and birthdays. It's all about the numbers in this game.

August 13, 2008

I've sold another novel. Transplant -- that's the working title -- is a medical thriller that I wrote in collaboration with one of the world's top heart transplant surgeons, Dr. John A. Elefteriades, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Yale University. The publisher is Robot Binaries Press, an innovative small press founded by Dr. Howard S. Smith, an engineer whose work in artificial intelligence was the foundation of those self-checkout systems that have begun to appear in supermarkets.

For those of you who have kindly pre-ordered Template, I have had a note from publisher Pete Crowther to let me know that the book is shipping this week. Template is probably the closest I've come to writing an unabashed Jack Vance-style space opera. And as far as I'm concerned, it's the best work I've done.

Normally, when I have a new novel coming out, I put the first chapter up on this site. But Jay Tomio, who runs the Fantasy Book Spot discussion site and who has been a steadfast supporter of my work since Black Brillion, asked me if he could have the first chapter as an exclusive. So here it is.

Template is being published in two limited, signed editions and is not available in stores or even from Amazon. The best place to order it is from PS Publishing in the UK, or from specialist mail-order booksellers in North America.

July 30, 2008

I've made a deal with Pete Crowther of PS Publishing to write three novellas featuring my engaging and portly master criminal, Luff Imbry, over the next three years, each to be issued as a limited edition chapbook. I'll write the first one this fall and it should be out sometime next year.

I'm doing a three-hour writers workshop for the Ripon Branch of the North Yorkshire County Library at 10 a.m., August 18. I'll be talking about elementary story mechanics, i.e., how stories work and how the pieces fit together, and the ins and outs of writing scenes, i.e., the dreaded "show, don't tell." For more information, contact team leader Karen Thornton at 01765 604799. The general email address for the library is: ripon.library@northyorks.gov.uk .

July 28, 2008

One of my stories that I thought would be among the least memorable, "Petri Parousia" (F&SF, February 08), has generated two requests for reprints in the last week: one from the Romanian magazine Sci-Fi, and the other from an outfit called The Institute for Children's Literature, which wants to use it in an anthology intended to assist young writers who want to learn about the craft and the business. The story is a spoof on the Dan Brown, da Vinci Code concept that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and they had children whose descendants walk amongst us today. "Petri Parousia" is a shaggy dog story mainly written for the pun inherent in the last line. Maybe the Institute wants to use it as a bad example.

July 27, 2008

I've sold another Luff Imbry novelette, "Enemy of the Good," to Postscripts Magazine. In the same week, I was busily signing 400 front sheets to be bound into Postscripts 15, which contains another Luff Imbry story, "The Eye of Vann," and which will be on sale in the next few weeks. Each of the authors with a piece in the issue has to sign all the sheets for the limited edition hardcover of the magazine (there's also a paperback edition), so the sheets are mailed from one author to the next. The next person on the list after me was Brian Aldiss, whose far-future novel, Hothouse (also known as The Long Afternoon of Earth), was one of the first sf novels I ever read, more than forty-five years ago. Because of the peculiarities of my upbringing -- don't ask, wait for the autobiography -- I'm largely disconnected from my own past, but every now and then something happens that briefly joins my current compartment to one I long ago left behind; and, for a moment, I can remember being that particular iteration of me. Seeing Brian Aldiss's name just above mine on the Postscripts 15 sig sheet took me back to how I felt reading his book all those years ago. If you can find a copy, I recommend it.

Template, coincidentally also from the same publisher that produces Postscripts, will soon be shipping. I get a few author's copies of the book and I've decided to give away one of the limited slipcovered editions, (which retail for $100 and will likely go up in value), in order to boost my profile. As I mentioned a little while ago, anyone who can send me a receipt of purchase, dated July 15, 2008 or later, for a copy of my short story collection, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, will be eligible to win the limited edition. I'll also give away signed copies of The Spiral Labyrinth trade paperback and Hespira hardcover to twenty or so runners up. The contest started July 15, and will run until sometime in September, when I will be housesitting back in Canada for a few months and when I receive the various books I'll be giving away. Watch this space in September for where to send your receipt.

July 25, 2008

I've put up the first chapter of Hespira, the third Henghis Hapthorn novel. My thanks to all those kind souls out there who have been posting links to the page.

The folks at SF Signal have this occasional feature where they ask various authors how they go about handling this or that part of the craft. The latest one is on world-building, and it's fascinating to see how different writers do what they do. It's also pretty cool to find myself on a virtual panel with Gene Wolfe, Larry Niven, Jay Lake, Kage Baker and other lumninaries.

July 13, 2008

I've been offline lately, housesitting and touristing in rural Shropshire, Wales and the Lakes District. Along the way, I spent a couple of days in Liverpool and the town of Wallasey across the Mersey River, revisiting some of the sites of my earliest childhood. It was amazing how everything -- houses, streets, the river itself -- had become so much smaller than the images in my memory. I received no epiphanies, but I did come to understand at some deeper level that the past is well and truly gone, and all that lingers is our memories of what passed through our sensoria -- and even those are not to be trusted for detail.

Late next month, I'll be moving to a four-month housesit in western Canada. At about the same time, I will receive forty copies of the trade paperback of The Spiral Labyrinth, the second Hapthorn book. A few weeks later, I'll get forty hardcovers of Hespira. Since I'll be settled for a while, I've decided to do another give-away contest. Watch this space for details, but I can tell you now that anyone who can send me a receipt for a copy of The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, bought new and dated after July 15, 2008, will be in the running for a complete set of the Hapthorn hardcovers, signed by me.

In the next week, I'll put up the first chapter of Hespira for a free read.

June 26, 2008

About a year ago, my fellow Canadian author, Zoe Landale, with whom I was once in a local writer's group, asked me for a piece of nonfiction for an anthology she was putting together. I sent her "Ice and Fire, Mud and Water," a memoir of the time I spent living with Metis people in northern Alberta back in the 1960s. Now the antho has come together and will be published by the Toronto literary house, Wolsack and Wynn, in 2010.

June 25, 2008

Another milestone in my turtle's-pace career. I found this posting on my bbs page over on the Night Shade Books site. It's from a Vancouver-based sf discussion group: "Our next meeting takes place Thursday July 17, 2008 @ 7pm. As always the venue shall be "Our Town" coffee house, located at 245 East Broadway, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This month, we'll be discussing Fools Errant by Matthew Hughes."

June 24, 2008

Hespira, the third Hapthorn novel, is proceeding on course. I've just reviewed Marty Halpern's copyedit notes and the book is ready to go to page proofs. I'll put up a page with the first chapter in the next little while.

A warning to those who take publisher's catalgue descriptions as gospel: Hespira is not quite as advertised. Catalogues get printed months before the books they list are published, and in this case, the blurb copy had to be written before I'd even begun to think seriously about what would happen in the book. All I knew was that the story would involve a mysterious female named Hespira -- as indeed it does. But it's not a Hapthorn-in-love story, which will doubtless come as a relief to some. But I think it's a pretty good mystery and takes HH off to some odd worlds down The Spray.

The ToC for Postscripts 15, which contains my Luff Imbry story, "The Eye of Vann," is now out. It's the biggest Postscripts ever, with a stellar line-up of contributors.

June 17, 2008

This comes under the category of: what could it hurt to ask?

I came over to Britain seven months ago to try housesitting as a means of reducing my overhead while I continue to write fiction for not very much money. So far, it has been a qualified success. I've been housesitting about two-thirds of the time, which has cut the overhead during the sits, but the savings tend to get eaten up when we have to camp out in temporary accommodations (read, holiday trailer parks), between gigs. Unless I can get more sits, this is not going to work as a long-term strategy.

That will be too bad, because the fiction that I most want to write, now that the third Hapthorn novel, Hespira, and the story for the Jack Vance tribute antho, Songs of the Dying Earth, are done, is a serious historical novel that I've been researching, off and on, for over thirty-five years. If I have a great book in me, this is going to be it. I'm applying for an arts council grant to feed the bulldog while I write it, and I have the interest of a truly major New York agent who will rep it if the draft lives up to the outline. And I'm willing to live hand-to-mouth, as I have for most of my life anyway, to get this one done, and done right.

It would really help, though, if someone out there among my small but dedicated fan base just happened to have an empty in-law suite or untenanted guest house where I could move in and work for a year or so. In return, I can promise that hypothetical angel that the resulting book will be dedicated to no one else. And, if that person should also have ambitions to write fiction, I would be happy to provide one-on-one tutoring in the craft and the business. People do say I am a gifted teacher, by the way.

So there it is, a seed cast in the hope of fertile ground. If you've got the room, send me an e-mail.

Speaking of Songs of the Dying Earth, I see from co-editor George R.R. Martin's blog that the super-fancy lettered limited edition from Subterranean Press has already sold out, and the other limited is going fast on pre-order. This book is going to be a landmark.

June 10, 2008

"The Helper and His Hero," the two-part Guth Bandar serial that ran in the February and March 2007 issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, has been nominated for a British Fantasy Society Award in the novella category. It was previously shortlisted for the Nebula. The novella was also a large part of the fix-up novel, The Commons, published last fall by Robert J. Sawyer Books, an imprint of Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

For anyone who hasn't yet encountered Guth Bandar, fearless explorer of the collective unconscious, click on the link "A Little Learning" above.

June 9, 2008

There's an interesting review of the July Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction over at The Fix, an online site for short fiction reviews. Commenting on my Henghis Hapthorn novelette, "Fullbrim's Finding," Damien G. Walter says, "The thing to love about the [Hapthorn] stories is how they capitalise on science fiction's right to make sweeping philosophical statements about the universe with no basis in fact but simply for the hell of making them. That's a refreshing ambition in the face of so many timid, domestic stories coming out of the genre at the moment."

June 7, 2008

Yesterday, I turned in a story entitled "Grolion of Almery" to Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin, the co-editors of the Jack Vance tribute anthology, Songs of the Dying Earth. This morning I received e-mails from both editors saying the story had been accepted.

Tor will publish the US trade hardcover, while HarperCollins Voyager will handle the UK edition. Six months before that, Subterranean Press will bring out two deluxe, illustrated, limited editions, one of them signed by all the contributors, including Jack, himself.

The cover painting (and individual illos for each story in the limited editions), will be by World Fantasy Award-winning artist Tom Kidd, who has done the covers for five of my books. A not-quite-completed version of the cover painting is on Subterranean's site.

Last I heard, the following authors had turned in their stories: Robert Silverberg, Terry Dowling, Glen Cook, Tanith Lee, Liz Williams, Kage Baker, and Elizabeth Moon. Still to come were stories from Neil Gaiman, Dan Simmons, Elizabeth Hand, Mike Resnick, Phyllis Eisenstein, Paula Volsky, Howard Waldrop, Tad Williams, Walter Jon Williams, John C. Wright, and Lucius Shepard.

I have trouble finding the words to express my happiness at being included among such a cast in such a production. I'll offer a mental image: yours truly, executing handsprings and backflips, wearing an ear-to-ear grin.

June 4, 2008

My Luff Imbry novelette "Passion Ploy," which has so far seen the light of day only in the DAW anthology Forbidden Planets, edited by Pete Crowther, is now available for a free listen. It's this week's offering on the Starship Sofa site as an MP3. The podcast is a magazine format, but if you just want to hear my piece, it begins about fourteen minutes in.

June 2, 2008

Normally, I put up a chapter of each of my novels on my web page. But Jay Tomio, who runs the Fantasy Book Spot site, asked me if he could have an exclusive. Jay has been a strong supporter of my work, and I was happy to say yes. So the first chapter of Template is now up on Jay's site.

June 1, 2008

John Berlyne gives Template a strongly positive review in the June SF Revu. He says, "It's clear to me, having read Hughes's fine short novel Template, brought to us by the ever-forward looking PS Publishing and the first of Hughes's novel length works to be published in these shores, that we've been missing out -- big time!"

In the same issue, Sam Tomaino gives a "very good" rating to "Fullbrim's Finding," a Henghis Hapthorn novelette that opens the July edition of the The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

May 31, 2008

Publisher Jeremy Lassen tells me that the trade paperback of The Spiral Labyrinth is on schedule for release in about six weeks at $14.95(US). At the moment there are no plans for mass-market editions, so if you've been putting off the experience of Henghis Hapthorn trapped in a world where magic actually works, put off no more but wander over to the Night Shade site and pre-order a copy.

The trade hardcover and signed limited editions of Hespira are also on track for August/September release. Right now, I don't know if there will be more Hapthorn novels; it depends on how the first three do. There will be a decision in the spring of 2009.

If anyone's in the area and interested, I'll be doing a reading and giving a talk on what life is like for a struggling-but-cheerful sf author. The event is at the Harrogate branch of the North Yorkshire County Library, on Victoria Avenue in Harrogate, on Thursday, June 12, from 7:30 p.m. The English being a civilized race, there will also be light refreshments and a complementary glass of wine. Tickets cost two pounds. For more information, phone 0845 0349520.

May 23, 2008

Robert Runte has given Majestrum and The Spiral Labyrinth a warm review in Neo-Opsis Magazine. He says: "Conceited, self-satisfied, preening gasbag though he might be, Henghis Hapthorn is nevertheless oddly loveable and often rises to the occasion, demonstrating considerable genius and even heroism. And just underneath the irony lies a whole other layer of philosophical debate that underpins much of Matthew Hughes writing." He also says that if they ever make a Hapthorn movie, the title role should go to Kelsey Grammer, tv's Frasier. I agree.

May 19, 2008

I have received and accepted an offer from Editions L'Atalante to publish Majestrum in French early next year. I am delighted that my good friend Patrick Dusoulier, who translated Le Brillion Noir and is one of the foremost translators of Jack Vance's works into French, will handle the traduction.

May 16, 2008

I see that Night Shade Books is clearing space in the warehouse to make room for new titles. From now until May 25, they're offering 50 per cent off on all in-stock and forthcoming titles, with a minimum purchase of four books. So, if you've been thinking how much you'd like to get The Gist Hunter and Other Stories (before it goes out of print), and all three Hapthorn books, now's your chance.

May 15, 2008

I've been of two minds all day about whether or not to write what I'm about to write. Obviously, I've come down on the side of going ahead. I'm doing so because I have often taught struggling writers, and I occasionally get emailed questions from them, especially when they've had comments from friends or fellow internet-denizens on drafts of stories they're working on. One person will say, "I really liked x about your story but not y," while someone else will have exactly the opposite reaction. Struggling writers, often struggling with their own insecurities, can feel as if they're navigating a mine field, when every step can get them blown up.

I raise the issue after looking at responses to Template after James Nicoll and John Joseph Adams kindly promoted my free-read offer for bloggers (which is still open, btw). I've seen about a dozen now and -- no surprise -- some have loved the worldbuilding, while others thought it far too sketchy; some have loved the old-fashioned prose, while at least one reviewer found it "clunky."

The thing is, writers have to make choices. I've chosen not to write travelogues of the future; I write stories from the viewpoints of characters who happen to live there, and for whom aircars and integrators are a part of everyday life, as are the strange (to us) ways their minds and societies are organized. But the story is what counts for me. So I give the reader a passing visit to that "other country" that is the future, and a sketchy sense of what things are like there. But the characters are too busy with their own problems to stop and explain any more than the most basic realities. They've got problems to solve.

Some people just love that kind of writing. I always have when I've encountered it in the works of Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe. Some people just hate it. That's life. The only conclusion to be drawn is, as the old song says: "you can't please everybody, so you just got to please yourself." Here endeth the lesson.

May 13, 2008

Earler this year, I did an email interview with David Fuller, a writer for Prairie Books Now, who wanted to know about Guth Bandar and The Commons. The result has now appeared in the magazine's spring edition.

I've now seen a total of ten reviews of Template linked through James Nicoll's LiveJournal blog, all of them positive.

May 11, 2008

Reviews of Template are starting to appear in response to my free-read offer. James Nicoll, to whom I am most grateful for organizing a reviewathon, is posting links to them as he notices their appearance. So far they've been pretty encouraging.

The free-read offer remains open for the foreseeable future. If you want to read the book and will commit to blog or post about it, I'll send you an rtf file of the manuscript. Just send me an email at "himself(you know what symbol goes in here)archonate.com".

For those of you who have pre-ordered the book from PS, I now hear that it may not be back from the printers before July. Or that may apply only to the slip-covered limited editions, which naturally take longer to manufacture.

May 6, 2008

Another free read! Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, is offering to give away a free copy of the July issue to the first fifty people who commit to blog about it. The issue contains my Henghis Hapthorn story, "Fullbrim's Finding."

Paul Raven, the new publicity maven for PS Publishing, has posted the cover art for Template. I like it; it's simple, but carries an impact.

Further to yesterday's cool-things-about-the-internet item: because of the help I've been getting from good people like James Nicoll and John Joseph Adams, my free-read offer has come to the attention of Takashi Ogawa, a prominent translator and reviewer of English-language sf into Japanese. He's going to review the book for Hayakawa's SF Magazine, which means that thousands of Japanese sf fans will get an exposure to my work. We all get by with a little help from our friends.

May 5, 2008

One of the cool things about the internet, at least for authors, is that it provides venues for book reviews of titles that came out ages ago. Back in the days of dead-tree publications, if a book didn't get reviewed in the first few weeks or couple of months after release, it probably never would; too many new titles would be clogging the intake hopper. Hence my pleasure at finding this positive SF Signal review of Majestrum by John Denardo.

May 4, 2008

A few people who are considering participating in the Template reviewathon (see the April 28 entry below), have wondered if positive reviews are a requirement of the exercise. The answer is: no. Good reviews are welcome. Critical reviews are also welcome. As a struggling sf author, I need to have my work surrounded by noise; whether it comes in the form of purrs or snarls is, at best, a secondary consideration. As Sam Goldwyn once apocryphally said, "Publicity is good. Good publicity is better." Or, to reach for the Oscar Wilde, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

Nor is the May 11 deadline an issue. Anyone who wants to blog or post or otherwise bandy about my name is welcome to do so in all seasons.

May 2, 2008

We're housesitting again, this time in a big old place on nine acres of beautiful South Oxfordshire countryside. We should be here until the second week in June, then it's on to an 1850s vintage millworker's house in Keighley (pronounced Keethley) in West Yorkshire, near where the Brontes wrote their Victorian novels. The present sit comes with a mellow old baby grand piano; the next one involves three feisty young dogs, two cats and a rabbit. And I'm told my next door neighbor for the next five weeks is the lead singer from the old disco group Boney M. Somewhere in this experience is the wherewithal for an article for Writers Digest.

Between Turkey and this sit, we stayed for a week in a lovely little spot just on the southern edge of York: York Lakeside Lodges are a group of little cabins around a man-made (I assume) lake. It's a family-friendly place, though I think some people come there mainly to fish, because they sit by the shore in little tents with racks holding three or four rods; the day before we left I saw a man having his photograph taken holding a serious fish -- maybe twenty pounds of carp -- that he then let go back into the lake. If you're planning to visit York, I recommend it as a nice place to stay.

April 28, 2008

It's not every day one gets called "a towering talent" by one of science fiction's mega-authors. But that's part of the blurb Robert J. Sawyer has given Template. For which I am most grateful. It's the second big favor Rob has done me; the first was to publish my Guth Bandar novel, The Commons, under his imprint at Fitzhenry & Whiteside. The man's a mensch.

James Nicoll, a gentleman and sf fan extraordinaire, has taken the Template free-read offer an extra mile: via his LiveJournal blog, he is organizing a mass read and review of the novel. The tentative date for the reviews to appear is May 11.

My Luff Imbry story, "The Eye of Vann," will appear in the fifteenth edition of Postscripts later this year. Editor Pete Crowther promises it will be the magazine's biggest-ever issue, with stories by Brian Aldiss, Terry Bisson, Ray Bradbury, Ian McDonald, Michael Moorcock, Robert Reed, Chris Roberson, Brian Stableford and Steven Utley, among others. There's also an editorial by the late Arthur C. Clarke.

I now have almost enough Imbry stories for a collection. I should probably ask around and see if anyone's interested in publishing them.

April 27, 2008

While I was away, Peter Heck reviewed The Spiral Labyrinth in Asimov's. He says, "Hughes somehow catches the trick of combining dry understatement with a colorful, almost baroque, vocabulary that characterizes much of Jack Vance's best writing. If you enjoy the latter as much as I do, this series by Hughes may well be just your cup of tea."

To my complete and utter lack of astonishment, I did not win a Nebula last night.

I had a wonderful time in southwestern Turkey, at a small resort town named Icmeler (ISH-meller) that was just getting ready for the opening of tourism season (which was why I could afford to go there for two weeks). The scenery was quietly beautiful, the Mediterranean Sea an amazing aquamarine. The weather was warm but not yet hot, the air was clean and full of the scent of orange trees and spices that grow wild, and the people were warm and welcoming. I would happily live there. And I got to walk through the ancient city of Ephesus.

April 11, 2008

We're still between housesits and it turns out to be not much more expensive to spend two weeks at a resort in Turkey than to camp out in Yorkshire, so we're off to the south. I'm leaving my laptop behind so there probably will be no updates here until I'm back in England on April 26.

The 2007 Locus Award is based on votes from anyone who cares to participate (i.e., you don't have to be a Locus Magazine subscriber to vote), and you can do it online. The poll and voting form are here and the deadline for voting is April 15.

April 10, 2008

The WordStar conversion problem (see post below) has been solved, thanks to the ingenuity and perseverance of Marty Halpern, editor and hero, who has copyedited all three of my Night Shade books and will do the same for Hespira. He came up with the brilliant solution of converting the WordStar into HTML, then converting the HTML into a Word-compatible file.

April 8, 2008

I've finished the second draft of Hespira and find myself with a problem. I still write in the old DOS-based (actually, it was CPM-based when I started) WordStar word processing program. I've got a converter that converts the files to rtf format so I can transmit them to people who live in the twenty-first century. But for some reason, the converter is turning out rtf versions of the book that my Open Office word processor can't open. And Open Office can't convert WordStar files on its own -- it used to be able to but somebody removed the converter from its filter pack. I'll have to solve this before I can send the ms to Night Shade.

April 1, 2008

I'm about halfway through the revisions on Hespira, and it's coming along fine. These days, my memory seems to be all short-term; I have only a vague sense of what I wrote two or three months ago, so I keep coming across little bits of business in the ms that I've forgotten about. Keeps the work interesting.

Yesterday, I picked up the mail that had been accumulating at my mailing address in Harrogate and found that it included my Nebula Awards ballot. I was of two minds about whether or not it was ethical to vote for myself. But today I sat down and looked at the voting rules and discovered that yesterday was the last day. So I was spared a moral dilemma, which is how I generally prefer it.

I'd forgotten that I'd written the first draft of "Enemy of the Good," a 12,000-word Luff Imbry novelette back in December. I've polished it up and will send it off to F&SF in the near future.

March 27, 2008

The first draft of Hespira, the third Hapthorn novel, has topped out at better than 93,500 words. But people are always saying my books are too short. Now to polish it up and send it in to Night Shade.

March 20, 2008

Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, tells me that my Henghis Hapthorn story, "Fullbrim's Finding," will run in the July edition of the magazine. It has previously appeared as the "extra" in the limited edition of The Spiral Labyrinth.

I'm at 81,000 words in the first draft of Hespira, and will have it finished by Monday at the latest. Then I'll tidy it up and send it off to Night Shade so that it can be out in September.

After that, I'm going to write a 10,000-word story for Songs of the Dying Earth, the Jack Vance tribute anthology being put together by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin.

March 16, 2008

So Ted Chiang knocked me out of the second round (see below). Fair enough. He is a worthy opponent.

March 12, 2008

Further to yesterday's post, I have survived the first round of the Fantasy Book Spot "best of 2007" tournament. But now, in the second round, I'm up against Ted Chiang's The Alchemist and the Merchant's Gate, and Ted is no slouch at the storymaking. I've met him a couple of times and read his collection Stories of Your Life, which is very good, so a novel by him will be hard to beat. Oh, well, it's a tough biz, this taleslinging.

March 11, 2008

Over at Fantasy Book Spot, they're holding a "best of 2007" tournament. In the first round, The Spiral Labyrinth is paired against The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Far be it from me to seek to influence the voting...

I'm past 70,000 words on Hespira, the third Hapthorn novel, and starting to think seriously about the ending. I may leave it up to the reader to decide what Hapthorn did in the end.

February 29, 2008

Sometimes, when I check my web stats, I see that some people have been googling "Bearing Up," a non-sf story I wrote a dozen years or so ago for a Thistledown Press anthology. It was later picked up by an Ontario textbook publisher for inclusion in a Grade 10 English course. And whenever I see someone has been googling it, I know that a teacher has assigned a class to read it and write something up -- and the googler is trying to dodge the work. So let me say to anyone who has arrived at this paragraph by that route: I put in the time and effort to write the damn thing, so you put in the t and e to read it and think about it. It's not such a hard story to figure out.

But if you really can't be bothered to do your own work, I'll tell you this: it's about a kid who loves his stuffed Pooh bear so much that when his dad throws the ratty old thing out, he runs off and joins a circus where they have real dancing bears. And one of them eats him, which makes his folks really sorry, but it's too late.

February 19, 2008

After three very pleasant months, the housesit I've been doing in historic Knaresborough, Yorkshire, has suddenly wound up, the new owners wanting to take possession of the place tomorrow instead of at the end of the month. So it's off to a bed and breakfast while we see what else crops up.

Mr. Google tells me that noted Jack Vance scholar David Mead (author of The Jack Vance Encyclopedia), has reviewed The Spiral Labyrinth for the March issue of David G. Hartwell's New York Review of Science Fiction. Prof. Mead kindly sent me a copy of the review, in which he says the book is a "a witty, clever and pleasant fantasy adventure...fun to read," and likely to appeal to readers of Vance and Gene Wolfe.

February 16, 2008

Back when I started with Night Shade Books, Jeremy Lassen kindly opened up a page for me on their discussion board, for people who might want to discuss my work or post a note for me to respond to. The site has been down for a couple of months while NS rebuilt its boards, but now it's back up and I thought I'd direct people that way. I think I'm getting to the point where there may be enough people who've read me to make a discussion page work. I'll try to respond to any questions or comments in a reasonable time. Here's a link.

February 13, 2008

Speaking of awards, we're now in the nominating period (ends March 17), for the Aurora Awards, Canada's answer to the Hugos. I have works that are eligible in the Best Long Form (English) and Best Short Form (English) categories -- though somehow The Spiral Labyrinth has missed the cut.

Any Canadian can nominate a work for inclusion on the final ballot and the nominations can be made online or by snail-mailing in a form. For more information, look here. And that's all I'm going to say about it. In other words, no campaigning.

February 6, 2008

I've checked the nomination tallies on the members-only portion of the SFWA site, and the latest tally shows my Guth Bandar novella, "The Helper and His Hero," has received twelve nominations from fellow SFWAns. That means it has qualified for the preliminary ballot for the Nebula awards. When the ballot was first compiled, the novella had only six noms, and was included in the prelim because no work had actually met the requirement of ten nominations.

The other names on the ballot are stellar: Gene Wolfe, Nancy Kress, Bruce Sterling and Lucius Shepard, so I'm not preparing an acceptance speech. But I guess I can now call myself a "Nebula-nominated" author.

Last week, J.P. Frantz of SF Signal sent me a note asking me to respond to a question they were putting to a bunch of sf authors: "Science fiction has been called "the literature of ideas." Focusing on the 'ideas' part, what science fictional idea do you wish you had written first?" Kage Baker, Paolo Bacigalupi and Mike Resnick were among the responders. Our answers are here.

February 4, 2008

The Commons gets a nuanced review from Ron Bierman on the Rambles site.

February 3, 2008

The Spiral Labyrinth has made the Locus 2007 recommended reading list. If you'd like to read the first chapter, click on the link above.

And over at SFRevu, short fiction reviewer Sam Tomaino thinks that "The Helper and His Hero" and "Sweet Trap" ought to be thought of for Hugo nominations in the novella and short story categories.

February 2, 2008

An outfit called StarShipSofa is doing podcasts of classic and modern sf stories as well as interviews with authors. They've asked me for a couple of stories and I've sent them two Luff Imbry tales, which ought to be available for listening in a month or so. When they're up, I'll post a note.

February 1, 2008

Further to yesterday's post, I have had a gracious e-mail from Roland C. Wagner, apologizing for the over-enthusiasm of some of his fans. I can only wish I had readers that dedicated, though perhaps not quite so ready to bare the teeth at hapless bystanders.

January 31, 2008

I see that I have unknowingly abraded the sensitive pride of French science fiction aficionados by the release of Le Brillion Noir (Black Brillion in a French translation). Actually, it's not the book they're upset about but the fact that an early reader had the temerity to post a review on Amazon.fr calling my notion of an "applied science" of the collective unconscious an original idea in science fiction. It turns out that a great French sf author, Roland C. Wagner, has been working with much the same idea for the past twenty-five years. The result has been a storm of one-star reviews on the Amazon.fr listing of the book.

While I can sympathize with the debaters, I think it's a little unfair for people to assign single stars to Le Brillion Noir when they haven't read the book. But what irks me is that one of the posters has described me as an American author. Really, one doesn't say that about a Canadian, eh?

January 29, 2008

The Spiral Labyrinth gets a nod from Jeff VanderMeer in his round up of the best of the year for Locus.

January 28, 2008

After all these years, I've just seen a new review of Black Brillion by fellow sf writer Jerry Oltion. Like a number of people who've read the book, he finds that the ending feels "tacked on." That's probably because it was: I was going to end the book with Baro, having saved the collective unconscious, about to be swallowed by the Worm, sinking down into the darkness and saying to himself, "Now what?" But my editor convinced me that readers would throw the book across the room unless I tidied things up.

I'm more than 40,000 words into Hespira, the third Hapthorn novel, and enjoying the work. Readers who come across the Night Shade Books catalogue blurb, however, should not put too much reliance on it. I had to provide copy for the catalogue before I'd actually begun to think about what would happen in the book, and my novels tend to evolve as I'm writing them -- so any connection between the book and blurb will be only tangential. But it is turning into a rattling good read.

January 25, 2008

There are days in this writing business... I was checking Amazon.com to see how my books are selling (every striving author does it), and I came across this: if you didn't follow the link, it's a book by that UFC fighter who happens to have the same name as me (written with the help of a ghostwriter). It's been out since New Year's Day and, when I looked, it was ranked in the mid-5,000s of Amazon's sales stats. Meanwhile, my latest is bouncing around between 70,000 on a good day, and the mid-300,000s most of the time. Ah well, on the good side of the ledger, nobody's trying to rearrange the inside of my head for me.

And then there are other days... Le Brillion Noir, the French version of Black Brillion translated by the inestimable traducteur of Jack Vance into French, Patrick Dusoulier, is out from Editions L'Atalante, and Patrick tells me it looks just fine.

January 18, 2008

Now that I have a reliable internet connection, here's a brief report on what I've been doing since World Fantasy Convention in early November.

I went to England to be a housesitter while I write Hespira, the third Hapthorn novel which is due out this fall. The service I'm working for has put me into a cottage (formerly a stable) at the rear of an eighteenth-century manor house in Knaresborough, a medieval market town in Yorkshire. Knaresborough's claims to fame include:

* Oliver Cromwell slept here after the Civil War, apparently while he was arranging for the castle to be pulled down (it had been a royalist stronghold) ;

*the castle once belonged to a knight named Hugh de Morville who was the ringleader of the four stout fellows who overheard Henry II wishing someone would rid him of "this turbulent priest" and promptly went down to Canterbury and murdered the archbishop, Thomas Beckett;

*King John used to come up and visit for the hunting and the wine-drinking, and passed through here while he was excommunicated;

*the original ninety-foot-high railway viaduct over the river fell down during construction, which was better than if it had survived long wnough for the opening-day train full of dignitaries to give it a try;

*there's an eighteenth-century apothecary's shop that was once the oldest such establishment in continuous operation, but which is now a candy store.

There's plenty of local color, interesting accents, a wide selection of excellent ales and a good fish and chip shop. Pizza, however, is unrecognizable and inedible: they put corn on it, which doesn't help.

Here's a link for a look-see.

Looks as if I'll be in the same location until March, which is an unusually long sit. But, all in all, it seems that housesitting is not a bad gig for a writer. At least so far. Of course, if it doesn't work out, I'm homeless.

My first two weeks in Yorkshire, I stayed at a very nice little bed-and-breakfast in Harrogate, a lovely little Victoria town built around some ancient sulphur springs. The B&B is called Dragon House and the owner, Marie Monaghan, could not have been kinder. I promised her I would recommend her establishment and I hereby do so unreservedly. Click here for a web visit.

January 15, 2008

I've finally got a decent wireless broadband connection and my son has worked out certain issues regarding the mail server that hosts my permanent e-mail address, himself ((at)) archonate.com, so I'm back in contact with the world. Anyone who's tried to reach me since early November, when I fell through a hole and out of the internet, is invited to try again.

I've come across a review of The Commons in the Canadian book publishing trade mag Quill & Quire. Reviewer Alex Good calls it "a rollicking fun ride."

January 7, 2008

Of course, I'm up against Gene Wolfe, Nancy Kress, Bruce Sterling and Lucius Shepard, so I'm not rushing to book a flight to Austin for the Nebs. Still, it's nice to be on the ballot.

My stand-alone Archonate novel, Template, from Pete Crowther's PS Publishing, will now not be out until May. The book's designer, Chris Erkmann, has been recovering from injuries sustained in a bad car accident a couple of months back.

January 6, 2008

I've had a note from Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, to let me know that my Guth Bandar novella, "The Helper and His Hero," has made the preliminary ballot for the Nebula Awards. Gordon is going to post the novella on-line for anyone who'd like to read it. The 40,000-word novella ran in two parts in the February and March 2007 issues of F&SF, and is the last half of the fix-up novel, The Commons, which collects all the Bandar stories in one narrative.

Over on the SF Revu site, Terry Weyna has filed a review of The Spiral Labyrinth in which he finds she likes the story, but wishes it weren't told in Hapthorn's voice. Which goes to show that you can't please everyone.

December 28, 2007

Patrick Dusoulier, translator of Black Brillion into French has posted the cover art for the Editions l'Atalante edition, due out soon. I like it.

December 18, 2007

Still no e-mail or browser access where I'm housesitting, but I get out to the public library and check on my googlemail account. If anyone wants to reach me, and doesn't mind waiting for an answer, the account name is "archonate" plus the googlemail.com server.

John Denardo of the SF Signal site has taken a strong liking to my work. He has now reviewed The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, revealing himself to be a Hapthorn enthusiast.

December 11, 2007

The saga of my non-connection to the internet continues, the laptop my wife having brought me being unaccompanied by an AC adapter -- which can't be bought in the little place where I'm housesitting, and costs about $100 to order in. And so we struggle on.

On the positive side, I've written the first chapter of Hespira, the third Henghis Hapthorn novel. Having few distractions makes it easier to work, as I'd hoped would be the case. I've also written a 12,000-word Luff Imbry novelette, "Enemy of the Good," which I had intended to send to Polyphony. But today, on one of my infrequent public-library-based forays into the internet, I discover that the antho's upper limit is 10,000 words. I'll have to see what I can do.

November 28, 2007

Still out of touch, so I'm updating my page from the library in Knaresborough, Yorkshire. But the problem should be solved when my wife arrives from Canada on December 7, with a new laptop that will reconnect me to the world again. Meanwhile, I see that The Commons has engendered some comment on SF Signal and from John Clute in his "Excessive Candour" column at SciFi.com.

November 23, 2007

I've been off-line this past week, housesitting in a place that has no internet access. My apologies to anyone who's been trying to reach me. I hope to be more available soon.

While I was at World Fantasy Convention, Polyphony editor Deborah Layne asked me to try her with a story for the next edition of the justly well regarded antho. So I'm working up a new Luff Imbry story.

November 16, 2007

Sherwood Smith has given The Spiral Labyrinth a positive review on The Sf Site. She says, "Hughes writes with wit and panache, his imagination is delightfully vivid as well as weird, and his stories never predictable. This one goes on the reread shelf."

November 9, 2007

The Spiral Labyrinth has received a good review from Fred Cleaver of The Denver Post (scroll down). He says, "Hughes's delightful language and humorous details echo fantasy and detective traditions while becoming wholly his own."

November 8, 2007

I'm in Britain now, getting the housesitting career organized. My first sit will be in a cottage (read, three-bedroom house), on an estate in Yorkshire. The eighteenth-century manor house apparently comes complete with a ghost.

I may be out of touch for a while. The laptop my eldest son put together for me just before I left seems to lack some firmware that would let me find and connect to ambient wireless networks. So my new e-mail doesn't work and my old one has now lapsed. My apologies to anyone who's been trying to reach me, but it should get sorted out soon.

World Fantasy Convention was great fun, and my book launch was well attended. I had the pleasure (courtesy of Gordon Van Gelder), of sitting next to fellow F&SF regular Mary Rickert at the World Fantasy Awards banquet just in time to see her win two of them. Besides reconnecting with a lot of people I know and like -- including Jay Lake, GVG, Robert J. Sawyer, Jeremy Lassen and Lou Anders -- I got to make several new friends, like Chris Roberson and Charlie Finlay, as well as putting faces to names that hitherto I have only known as internet denizens: F&SF's John Joseph Adams, Asimov's book reviewer Peter Heck, SFWA's Jane Jewell, Locus founder Charles Brown, short story wonderment Ted Chiang, editor Ellen Datlow and Asimov's Sheila Williams. And I had the great honor of meeting Gene Wolfe.

Tom Kidd's cover painting for all three of the Hapthorn novels won a special judge's award at the convention art show.

My thanks to Derryl Murphy and Bill Shunn for putting me up on a cot in their hotel room. The town was otherwise full.

October 31, 2007

The give-away contest is over and I've ended up with twenty-seven champions (Bob from Medford MA, got in just under -- well, over -- the wire). Thank you to everyone who helped, and your books are in the mail. That's surface mail, so it may take a while.

I'm leaving in the morning for World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, New York. I'll be there Saturday and most of Sunday, then it's off to England to take up housesitting and write another Hapthorn novel for Night Shade. I may not post any news here for a while, at least not until I get my feet under me. I hope it's going to be a grand adventure, but I am not unacquainted with disaster and am prepared for whatever eventualities present themselves (see, I'm already slipping into the Hapthorn character).

October 29, 2007

I'm going to wind up the contest tomorrow so I'll have time to mail off all the books before I leave for England on Thursday (via World Fantasy Convention), to start housesitting. The old e-mail address on my bio page will cease to work then, but I've posted the new one that will reach me once I'm settled.

Robert J. Sawyer is hosting a book launch for The Commons Saturday night at WFC, but I don't know what room of the convention hotel it's in. If you're attending and want to come, there will probably be notices up in the hotel. Or you just could stop me or Rob and ask us.

October 27, 2007

Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, tells me that my non-Archonate story, "Petri Parousia," is scheduled for the February, 2008 edition. Speaking of F&SF, in a recent interview on US public radio, Stephen King called F&SF the "gold standard" of American short story writing these days. Notwithstanding the fact that I've now sold seventeen stories to that venerable periodical, I agree with King and wish more people would drop in and give the mag a looking over and maybe a subscription.

October 26, 2007

The grand 53-book giveaway contest will be winding up in the next few days, since I will be busy getting ready to move to Britain. I have not yet reached the total of fifty-three champions, so there are still books to be given away. Act now.

Roger Redmond has given The Spiral Labyrinth a good review on the Alternative Realities Web Zine. He makes an interesting comment: "There seems little room for doubt that Hughes would consider the logic-driven era of rationality to be superior to the will-driven era of magic." I don't know if that's true. It would certainly be Henghis Hapthorn's view, but characters and their creators don't always share the same standards. I wouldn't mind a little magic in my life from time to time. Still, the important thing is that the reviewer enjoyed the book.

October 23, 2007

The things you learn while googling yourself. John Scalzi, one of the deservedly rising stars of the odd corner of the literary firmament that we call speculative fiction, recently declared himself, on his "Whatever" blog, a fan of my work. I'm honored.

I've now booked myself a flight to World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, New York. Derryl Murphy, Canadian SFWA rep, is kindly allowing me to share a room. And when the fun's over at Saratoga, I fly to England to begin the housesitting phase of my career. These are interesting times.

October 22, 2007

I had a fine time as Canvention Guest of Honour (Canadian spelling) at VCon 32. With his customary panache, Rob Sawyer emceed my launch of The Commons, published under his imprint (Robert J. Sawyer Books), at Fitzhenry & Whiteside. To mark the occasion I read the naughty bits from the chapter of the book excerpted on this site, which contains several different circumlocutions for "giant, vibrating phallus," to the apparent approval of the assembled crowd. My speech at the Prix Aurora Awards banquet, though lacking in phallic references, was also kindly received.

I was delighted to meet, and to sit on a panel with, the justly renowned fantasy author and convention GoH, Peter S. Beagle, whose work I devoured decades ago. With us was the excellent illustrator and cover artist, Martin Springett (the convention's artist GoH), who has produced a wonderful kids' alphabet book: Jousting with Jesters.

And a personal note. I have just had a long telephone conversation with a woman who was the baby I unknowingly fathered almost forty years ago and about whose life I have always wondered. She is bright, strong, funny, musical and doing all right in the world. How wonderful to have met her at last.

October 19, 2007

I'm off to Richmond this evening to do VCon, which includes Canvention, at which the Auroras are presented and at which I'm giving the guest of honor speech.

I still have plenty of books to give away -- copies of The Commons should arrive next week -- so if you thought it was too late to enter the 53 Champions contest, you've still got time. See the main page for the rules. BTW, traffic to this site has more than doubled since I started the contest, so I think it's doing some good. My thanks to everyone who has participated so far.

Two weeks from now I'll be at World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Gordon Van Gelder has kindly offered me a seat at the F&SF table for the awards banquet. From there it's off to England to take up housesitting.

October 16, 2007

I had an e-mail late last night from the Speculative Literature Foundation to let me know that I've been awarded their annual Gulliver Travel grant. This will allow me to travel to research a historical novel I intend to start writing as soon as I've finished the third Hapthorn novel, Hespira. I am grateful to the Foundation for their help.

October 15, 2007

Been laid up lately with a flu virus that does a perfect imitation of a heavy cold, but I managed to get down to the post office and bring back a box full of The Spiral Labyrinth hardcovers, including some of the limited edition, and another box of Majestrum trade paperbacks. So the prizes for my 53 champions are now in hand.

I stil don't have a full complement of fifty-three, so if you've been thinking you might like to have a free signed copy of one of my books, the game is still the same: blog or post something about my work, then send me an e-mail with the URL of the posting and a North American mailing address. And I'll send you a signed book. For examples of how some folks have already won, see here.

October 9, 2007

In News From The Agony Column, Rick Kleffel says pretty nice things about "The Farouche Assemblage" chapbook. He says, "Hughes is a fascinating writer who seems to have found a bottomless vein from which he mines stories that combine science fiction settings, the feel of fantasy epics and the silly sort of shenanigans one might encounter on an average evening with Jeeves and Bertie Wooster."

John Joseph Adams has given The Spiral Labyrinth a write-up on SCIFI Wire.

October 8, 2007

A blogger named Chris McLaren is very pleased with his recently received copy of "The Farouche Assemblage" chapbook. And that's before he's even read it.

October 7, 2007

Andy Wheeler, former editor of the Science Fiction Book Club, has penned a few encouraging thoughts about The Spiral Labyrinth and my career in general on his always insightful and entertaining blog. He says, "Hughes rightly should be rich and famous for writing books as entertaining as these." From Andy's lips to ten thousand readers' ears.

For those who require visual cues, I've put a recent photo of myself on my bio page.

October 2, 2007

As an unexpected side effect of my grand give-away of signed books, I've had an e-mail from a US-based associate of China's Science Fiction World, a publication with some 300,000 circulation, asking me to send them a story. I've sent them "Mastermindless," the first Henghis Hapthorn tale that was my first submission to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Who knows? Maybe lightning will strike twice.

Sometime in the next few days, I have to sit down and write a Guest of Honor speech for Canvention, the annual gathering of the Canadian sf community which coincides with VCon and the Prix Aurora Awards ceremony. I've just checked the VCon page and found that they have me listed as an "author and raconteur." I guess that means I have to write a good one.

September 29, 2007

The great 53-book give-away contest is on! See the default opening page of this website for details.

September 27, 2007

I've received my author's copies of the Payseur & Schmidt chapbook of my Luff Imbry novelette "The Farouche Assemblage," with artwork by Jason Van Hollander. It's my first chapbook and I'm quite impressed. There were only 125 copies printed, at $15 each. I'm going to give away a dozen of them as part of my contest -- rules announced on Saturday, at 6 p.m. Eastern time.

September 26, 2007

Booklist, the review publication of the American Library Association, has given The Spiral Labyrinth a strong review, reproduced on the Amazon listing. Reviewer Carl Hays says, "Hughes's masterfully eloquent style and clever plot twisting provide Hapthorn with an investigative panache rivaling those of the leading sleuths of mainstream detective fiction."

September 24, 2007

Paul Di Filippo gives The Spiral Labyrinth a very warm (A-minus) review in SciFi Weekly. He says: "Hughes's ripe, flexible, rococo prose is as seductively easy on the mind as ever, capable of conveying events vividly and tickling the mental palate. Anyone who enjoys not only Vance's language and humor but also that of S.J. Perelman and P.G. Wodehouse will find Hughes a fit companion. Hapthorn's dire but lighthearted scrapes and dangers go down easy."

September 23, 2007

I've just come across a review of Majestrum in the blog of Fantasy Magazine. The reviewer says, "Hughes's Vance-derived prose is always enjoyable -- he is not quite Jack Vance, but he does well enough as a substitute. Hapthorn and his sidekicks are good company. A fine entertainment." I don't know who actually wrote the review, although an editor's note says, "Fantasy Magazine book reviewers include Stefan Dziemianowicz, Paula Guran, Rich Horton, Stuart Jaffee, and Victoria Strauss."

A few weeks ago, I was interviewed on CBC radio. Here's the audio file. It's about 6 megs and it starts with an inexplicable five seconds of silence, but then I blather on for about twelve minutes. They had me do it at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning, when I'm usually unconscious, so I ended up saying a few things I probably shouldn't have.

September 22, 2007

In case you came directly to this news page without going through the site's default opening, here's what you missed: in the next couple of weeks, I'm going to receive dozens of copies of The Spiral Labyrinth hardcover, the Majestrum trade paperback, and a Payseur & Schmidt limited edition chapbook of my Luff Imbry novelette, "The Farouche Assemblage."

And I'm going to give away fifty of them, in a contest.

Three lucky people will also receive one of the limited editions of my three Night Shade books, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, Majestrum or The Spiral Labyrinth.

How do you win? I will post the rules of the contest -- don't worry, it will be easy -- On the default opening page (that's www.archonate.com) at 6 p.m., Eastern Time, Saturday, September 29.

One thing I can tell you now: you'll need a North American mailing address. I can't afford to ship books overseas. Shipping fifty-three books on the same continent will be costly enough.

See you on the 29th.

September 21, 2007

My publisher tells me that the hardcover of Majestrum has sold out and that there are probably not more than a handful of the 125-copy signed limited edition available. But the trade paperbacks are in stores now, just as the hardcover edition of The Spiral Labyrinth is shipping from the printers.

September 19, 2007

Gordon Van Gelder has bought another Henghis Hapthorn novellete from me for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. "Fullbrim's Finding" was written to be the bonus story in the limited edition of The Spiral Labyrinth. But it is not the start of the next Hapthorn novel, Hespira, which I propose to start writing as soon as I've made the transition to housesitting in England.

I've just gone and counted, and "Fullbrim's Finding" is the seventeenth story I've sold to F&SF. I'm very grateful to GVG for giving me all this exposure over the past three years. In fact, if he hadn't bought my first submission, "Mastermindless," there might well have been no subsequent series of Henghis Hapthorn stories, leading to a three-novel deal with Night Shade Books.

September 14, 2007

PS Publishing, the UK small press renowned for its high-quality limited editions that is bringing out my stand-alone Archonate novel, Template, in the next few months, is having a sale on pre-orders. Order and pay by September 31st (apparently September has an extra day in Britain -- probably something to do with the strengthening pound), and PS will absorb the postage costs -- which, for a slipcased hardcover crossing the Atlantic can be not inconsequential.

September 13, 2007

Some more information on SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH:

The project is now definitely a go. There will be several editions, with Tor doing the North American trades, HarperCollins Voyager handling the UK, and Subterranean Press bringing out two deluxe, illustrated, limited editions of 500 copies each, one of them signed by all the contributors, including Jack.

Here's the list of contributors:

Glen Cook, Michael Shea, Terry Dowling, Robert Silverberg, Phyllis Eisenstein, Dan Simmons, Ray Feist, Jeff Vandermeer, Neil Gaiman, Paula Volsky, Elizabeth Hand, Howard Waldrop, Liz Williams, Tanith Lee, Tad Williams, George R.R. Martin, Walter Jon Williams, Michael Moorcock, John C. Wright, Mike Resnick.

George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois are asking for stories in the 10,000-word length, so they will all be substantial works, and the book itself will be hefty.

The contributors are authorized to use not only Vance's settings, but his characters, so there will surely be some Cugel stories.

And they will be stories in the spirit of Jack Vance's work, and inspired by it. As George R.R. Martin's e-mail says: "We're interested in celebrating the Dying Earth, not deconstructing it, so please, no postmodernism, no satire, no metafiction." Amen to that.

Each contributor will be asked to contribute a brief personal afterword about Jack Vance, the Dying Earth, and their influence on your own work, on fantasy in general, etc.

Deadline for getting the stories in to the editors is the middle of next July, so given Tor's production lead-time, my guess is that we'll be seeing at a late 2009 release.

I am so looking forward to being part of this. In the vernacular of my youth, I'm dead chuffed.

September 9, 2007

The folks at Payseur & Schmidt tell me that the pre-orders for my Luff Imbry novelette, "The Farouche Assemblage," will finally ship this week. This is a limited edition (125 copies), signed chapbook with fabulous production values and artwork by World Fantasy Award-winner Jason Van Hollander. To all of you who have been waiting for it to come through the production process, my gratitude for your patience. But I think you'll like what you see. I'm looking forward to seeing it myself.

September 6, 2007

My friend Patrick Dusoulier, who is translating Black Brillion into French, tells me that the publisher, Editions-L'Atalante, has moved up publication of the book to January, 2008.

September 2, 2007

My review of Graham Joyce's YA novel TWOC is up on the SF Site.

August 27, 2007

The news seems to be leaking out now that Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin are putting together a tribute anthology to SF grandmaster Jack Vance. Called Songs of the Dying Earth, it will consist of stories by a stellar array of sf writers, all set in Vance's Dying Earth milieu. A UK publisher has already bought into the concept and now the editors are looking to place it with a US house.

When Gardner emailed me a few months ago to ask if I would like to send him a story for the antho, my response was, "Try and stop me!" This will be one of the sf publishing events of the year. Any US publisher that has a chance to land this project should jump at it.

August 16, 2007

Violet Kane has posted a review of Majestrum on the Alternate Reality Web Zine, where I'm doing a Q&A until Saturday. She says, "Hughes is one of those new and innovative SFF writers who is simply not getting the attention he deserves, and it quite frankly surprises me. His deftness in combining genres into a truly integrated and fun story should be attracting audiences of science fiction, fantasy, humor and mystery. Well, certainly he is attracting these audiences, but I would expect he should be doing so in greater numbers." Let's hope her expectations are soon rewarded.

August 13, 2007

All this week, I'll be doing a Q&A on a forum that's part of the Alternate Reality Web Zine. Feel free to stop by and ask a question. To post on ARWZ requires you to register, but it's quick and painless.

August 9, 2007

The cover art for The Spiral Labyrinth,by WFA-winning artist Tom Kidd, is now up on the page that has the novel's first chapter. I'm told that the illos for this book, Majestrum, and the as-yet-unstarted third volume in the series are all part of one rather wide painting. It will be interesting to see the final, complete image.

I've sold a new Luff Imbry story, "The Eye of Vann," to the British sf magazine, Postscripts. It won't appear until sometime next year at the earliest.

August 8, 2007

Another day, another good review. Editor and critic Nick Gevers has sent me an advance copy of his review of The Spiral Labyrinth that will run in the September Locus magazine. He says: "[the] climactic battle of wizards and monsters [is] possibly the best, and funniest, set-piece Hughes has written so far. Deliriously bizarre exoticism, in colourful, elegant language: the textures of *The Spiral Labyrinth* are something to savor."

It appears that people are finding The Spiral Labyrinth a better book than Majestrum, which is good to hear. I was concerned about the publishing industry rule-of-thumb that holds that the second of a three-book series tends to be a trough between two peaks. Of course, now I have to make the third book, Hespira, due out a year from now, a tour de force. I'd better start thinking up a serious villain and the outlines of a plot. Fortunately, if you can come up with the former, the latter usually comes right behind.

August 6, 2007

Here's what Publishers Weekly has to say about The Spiral Labyrinth:

"The superior melding of fantasy, humor and detection seen in Majestrum (2006) is displayed to even better advantage in Hughes's second chronicle of Henghis Hapthorn, a "discriminator" (or consulting detective) on an alternate Earth. Aided by his "intuitive inner self," Osk Rievor, and his faithful grinnet, an AI housed in an ape-cat body, Hapthorn accepts a request from wealthy socialite Effrayne Choweri to find her legendarily devoted and romantic husband, Chup, who vanished after looking into the purchase of a small spaceship. When the sleuth finds that several others who had considered buying the vessel also disappeared, he poses as a prospective buyer, only to be captured by a super-intelligent fungus seeking to expand its experience of reality by leeching the thoughts and knowledge of others. Hapthorn's wry first-person narration recalls Bertie Wooster, and Hughes effortlessly renders fantastic worlds and beings believable. News that a third adventure is in the works will surely please fans of many genres."

July 23, 2007

A Romanian newspaper editor who will be heading up a bi-weekly, and as yet nameless, science fiction magazine that his employer is about to launch has acquired "Mastermindless," the first story I ever sold to F&SF. That makes the fifth foreign language I've been translated into so far. It's an odd experience to see your own words rendered unreadable.

July 20, 2007

PS Publishing, the highly regarded British small press that is bring out my stand-alone Archonate novel Template in February, has launched a new weblog to showcase news of current and upcoming releases, and items of interest concerning PS authors. Worth a visit.

And now I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think Template is my best book so far. I'm going to be very interested to see what kind of review reception it gets.

July 17, 2007

I've wound up the auction and will e-mail the high bidders. The results were quite satisfactory, so watch for another one soon. My thanks to all who participated, including the many friends who spread the word.

Night Shade Books is holding a half-price sale (on a four-book minimum purchase) on all in-stock or forthcoming titles, from now until midnight on July 29. If you've been thinking of getting one of my limited editions, now would be a good time (although I'm told the limited of The Gist Hunter and Other Stories is sold out and that the Majestrum limited is almost gone).

July 13, 2007

I'm going to keep my little auction going until Monday, but if there are no more bids by then, I'll wrap it up and start a new one.

July 12, 2007

I don't get Locus Magazine any more, so I didn't see the full results of the annual readers' poll that determines who gets the Locus Awards. But my official First Fan, Mike Berro, reports that "Majestrum came in 20th for the best fantasy novel of 2006. Ten people rated it #1." My sincere thanks to those ten stout-hearted fans. And may we soon have ten thousand more.

July 9, 2007

I'll put up the first chapter of The Spiral Labyrinth in the next few days -- i.e., as soon as I can get my webmaster/eldest son to make me a page for it.

July 5, 2007

The Payseur & Schmidt chapbook of my Luff Imbry novelette, "The Farouche Assemblage," is all printed and bound -- and that's a problem, because all 125 copies of the little book are on one side of the US-Canada border, and I'm on the other. Sending them to me so that I can sign the cover pages (usually the pages are signed before the books are bound), would require me to pay some $300 in sales taxes, which may or may not be refunded. So P&S are whiffling up some snazzy bookplates that I can sign. That means further delay for a book that was expected out months ago. If it's any consolation, some of that time has been spent in making it an even more beautiful work of the bookwright's art.

Rick Kleffel is the first to weigh in with a word about The Spiral Labyrinth, the second Henghis Hapthorn novel due out in a couple of months. On his Agony Column blog he says, "...if you like say, Philip K. Dick, or wish that P. G. Wodehouse were still alive and writing surreal science fiction, then you need to hitch a ride with the gorgeous prose in The Spiral Labyrinth."

Rick's also got a pic of the Tom Kidd cover art, lifted from the ARC, which I haven't seen from Night Shade yet. When I get it, I'll put it up on the front page, and link to the first chapter of the book.

July 4, 2007

For the early risers in British Columbia: I will be interviewed on CBC radio's North by Northwest program, this Sunday, between 7 and 7:30 a.m.

If you haven't checked the main page before checking this news section, I'm offering to auction off various signed copies of my works, to raise money to get myself over to Britain so I can start housesitting.

June 21, 2007

Happy Solstice to all those who mark such events

Black Brillion is now being translated into French by the esteemed Patrick Dusoulier, who has also translated several of Jack Vance's works for French publishers. Over on the excellent Jack Vance bbs, he recently discussed a problem he had with the name of the key character, Guth Bandar:

"In The Black Brillion... 'Bandar' will never do. The verb 'bander' means to have a hard-on, and 'bandar' evokes "bandard" (the final 'd' is not pronounced) a guy having more or less a permanent erection."

We have settled on "Guth Bendor" as a substitute. Although, considering what happens to Guth in the story "A Little Learning," to be found elsewhere on this site, the French connotation is eerily coincidental.

June 20, 2007

Rob Sawyer tells me that the Barnes & Noble pre-order for the trade paperback edition of The Commons, my Guth Bandar novel, is the largest B&N has yet made for a title from the Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. I'm taking that as a hopeful sign.

I've sold a non-Archonate story to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. "Petri Parousia" is a little tongue-in-cheek meditation on where genetic engineering may someday take us. F&SF, by the way, just won the Locus readers poll award for best magazine.

If you've been looking at the hardcover of Majestrum and thinking, "I can't afford that," the trade paperback will be out in less than two months. You can pre-order it on Amazon.

June 3, 2007

I've accepted an invitation to be the Guest of Honour at Canvention 27, the annual, and moveable, gathering of Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy's great and good. The core of the event is a banquet at which the Prix Aurora Awards are tendered. As always, Canvention will be embedded into one of Canadian sf's regional gatherings, in this case V-Con 32 in Richmond, B, October 19 through 21.

I'm expected to give a speech, which the Canvention page is already describing as "enchanting." I shall endeavour to live up to the advance billing.

By the way, any of my works published in 2006, such as Majestrum, are eligible to be nominated for the Auroras The full list includes "Shadow Man," F&SF, January 2006; "A Herd of Opportunity," F&SF, May 2006; "The Farouche Assemblage," Postscripts #6; "The Meaning of Luff," FSF, July 2006; "Nature Tale," Postscripts #8; and "Bye the Rules," F&SF, December, 2006. Any Canadian can nominate a work (nominations close June 15), and any Canadian can vote by mail once the works on the ballot have been announced. Follow the link above to the Aurora site for more info.

May 30, 2007

My hardboiled story, "One More Kill," is now available as a podcast on the Well Told Tales website.

May 25, 2007

Shades of my hardboiled crime-writing days: I've licensed my first podcast, a reading of my award-winning story, "One More Kill" (it won the Canadian equivalent of an Edgar), to a website run by Well Told Tales, which features free podcasts of sf and crime stories. I don't know when it will run, but the site is worth a visit anytime to sample the wares. I may try to interest them in some of my sf, but most of my stuff goes past their 5,000-word limit.

May 23, 2007

Robert J. Sawyer, who is publishing my Guth Bandar novel, The Commons, later this year, has blogged some interesting comments on the problem of insularity in latter-day sf. He also provides a case study in how to go about getting Publishers Weekly's attention. Check it out here.

May 22, 2007

I've been busy doing free-lance work and writing a Hapthorn short story, "Fullbrim's Finding," to be the bonus item for the limited edition of The Spiral Labyrinth, due out in September. I'll also try to sell the story to F&SF for later publication.

Also, I've tidied up my bibliography to reflect changes in publication dates of my upcoming releases.

May 1, 2007

My review of Gene Wolfe's Soldier of Sidon is up on the SF Site.

April 30, 2007

I've had a nice little write-up in the May edition of Quill & Quire, the Canadian publishing industry's trade magazine. The piece was part of a round-up of Canadian sf writers like Cory Doctorow, Karl Schroeder and Peter Watts who are names to conjure with in the US publishing community, but virtually unheard-of north of the border, where only the deeply "literary" writers can expect to be reviewed.

Danny Adams says nice things about my Henghis Hapthorn story, "Sweet Trap," in his Tangent Online review of the June F&SF.

That story was the last of mine in F&SF's inventory, or anybody else's for that matter. Since turning in The Spiral Labyrinth, I've been thinking I ought to write some more shorts, but when I sit down at the keyboard I find I'm somewhat lacking in verve. The fact is, I've written eight books (plus one rewritten for someone else) in less than five years, along with several short stories, and I'm finding that I'm rather tired. So I believe, if I may be forgiven the mixing of metaphors, that I'll lie fallow for a while, until the reservoir refills.

April 20, 2007

I've just been correcting the page proofs of "The Farouche Assmblage," a Luff Imbry story that is being brought out as a limited edition (125 copies) chapbook by the Seattle small press, Payseur & Schmidt. Artwork is by World Fantasy Award-winning artist Jason Van Hollander, who did the cover and interior art for The Gist Hunter and Other Stories. The chapbook is about three months late, but I gather there has been some experimentation with production methods that has led to a very attractive final product.

I've turned in a polished draft of The Spiral Labyrinth, the second Henghis Hapthorn novel. Meanwhile, the trade paperback of Majestrum is in the production pipe and will be in stores by mid-August.

April 4, 2007

Siobhan Carroll gives Majestrum a generally good review in Strange Horizons. She says, "Hughes's characterization of the detective duo/trio is charming, and his dialogue and ironic turns of phrase skillful; exactly what you want in a series of this kind."

April 2, 2007

I've had word from Robert J. Sawyer that The Commons, the novel that brings together all the Guth Bandar episodes, will be released, simultaneously in hardcover and trade paperback editions, in October.

Sam Tomaino gives a good review to my latest Henghis Hapthorn story, "Sweet Trap," in the upcoming June edition of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Again, I urge all lovers of short sf to pony up for a subscription to F&SF, Asimov's, or Analog. For decades, these mags have been the mainstay of sf, nurturing scores of authors who went on to become giants of the field. The gradual corporate consolidation of North America's magazine distribution sector has steadily forced these odd-sized magazines off the newstand shelves, so they must rely more and more on subscriptions while they go on providing the sf community with the newest and the best. They are worthy of your support.

March 20, 2007

I'm scheduled to teach a half-day workshop on story mechanics and the "show, don't tell" of scene writing in Penticton, BC, on April 14. Brian Hades, the publisher at Edge, Canada's only "sf-only" publishing house, is the other half of the bill. There's more info here.

March 14, 2007

The first 1,000 words of Wolverine:Lifeblood are up on the Amazon listing.

March 13, 2007

I am delighted to know that Patrick DuSoulier, the premier translator into French of Jack Vance's works, will translate Black Brillion for Editions-L'Atalante. I know he will do a superb job.

I am just finishing the draft of The Spiral Labyrinth, the second Henghis Hapthorn tale, and will have it in to Night Shade this week so that it can be out in September.

Wolverine:Lifeblood is on the bookstands now. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's read it.

February 24, 2007

Amazing but true, Wolverine:Lifeblood was number two on the Amazon "Movers & Shakers" list a few days ago. The list tracks books that show a large jump in relative sales rankings. My X-Man title went from 182,028th to 284th in overall sales ranking, a 63,994 per cent increase. Of course, given Amazon's odd algorithmic methodology of establishing relative rankings, it probably just means that somebody ordered twenty copies all at once. Still, it was a pleasant shock.

For Hapthorn fans, I'm now 75,000 words into the draft of The Spiral Labyrinth, with another five to ten thousand to go. I seem to be wrestling with some low-grade virus, so the work is not coming as quickly as I would like, but I expect to have it in Night Shade's hands by the March 15 deadline. Thus it should be out in hardcover in September.

February 13, 2007

I'm interviewed by Violet Kane on the Alternate Reality Web Zine.

February 11, 2007

Publishing is a mutable business. Originally, my novel Template was scheduled to be published by the UK house, PS Publishing, in June/July 2007. But schedules change, and this past week I learned that the release date had been set back to October/November. That was too close to the release of The Commons and The Spiral Labyrinth, which both look to be coming out in the fall. So Template's release has now been pushed back to February, 2008.

I'm now 57,000 words into The Spiral Labyrinth, the second Henghis Hapthorn novel, and the ending is shaping up to be interesting. By the way, because I contracted with Night Shade for three Hapthorn books, it is assumed by some that this is a trilogy -- i.e., three volumes telling one story. In fact, the books are simply three novels about the same central character, as he adapts to a changing situation. If the three sell well, there will probably be more to come, each one a complete story in itself, within the evolving framework.

And now for something completely different: Wolverine:Lifeblood, a media tie-in novel from Pocket Books, will be out this month. I wrote it under the pesudonym Hugh Matthews, but there's an "about the author" note in the back pages that identifies me. It will be interesting to see if I get any cross-over readers.

February 2, 2007

A few paras down it used to say that my Guth Bandar novel, The Commons, would be out in June. But I heard from Rob Sawyer today that it's now looking more like September. So I've edited my previous post (authors enjoying the same past-altering privileges as Orwell's Winston Smith).

Rob let me in on one of the realities of Canadian publishing by telling me that the decision on the size of the hardcover print-run will be determined by the size of the pre-order from the market-dominating Chapters bookstore chain. And the size of the pre-order will be determined by how my past titles do at Chapters. So, if you're Canadian and have been thinking of ordering Majestrum, now would be a really good time to visit its Chapters listing.

No pressure, of course. But it is 34 per cent off.

February 1, 2007

Now it can be told. A small but highly regarded French publisher, Editions-L'Atalante, has bought the French language rights to Black Brillion. If the book does well in la belle langue, Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice may follow. L'Atalante is a prodigious publisher of sf in translation. Among the authors on its list are Terry Pratchett, Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock.

Majestrum has made the Locus recommended reading list. So did my novelette "Passion Ploy" in the anthology Forbidden Planets, edited by Pete Crowther.

January 31, 2007

Reviewer Danny Adams, whom I haven't encountered before, gives my F&SF novella, "The Helper and His Hero," a glowing review in Tangent Online. He says, "Hughes's writing strikes me as what we might have expected if Joseph Campbell had been a modern science fiction writer." That's a comparison I take to heart, since Campbell pretty much introduced me to the idea of the collective unconscious.

The review also contains a wonderful, no doubt spellchecker-induced typo: it renders "the Noönaut Guth Bandar" into "the Nonfat Guth Bandar." It will probably get corrected -- John Joseph Adams has sent them an e-mail -- but it was there when I checked the site.

Each of the Guth Bandar stories that have appeared in F&SF is an episode of a complete novel, The Commons, that will be published by Robert J. Sawyer Books in September. You can read an excerpt from the book here.

January 20, 2007

Booklist reviewer Carl Hays likes Majestrum. He says, "Hughes artfully blends wit, colorful characterizations, and intriguing plot twists in a compelling yarn that detective-novel readers may like, too." The complete review is available on the Amazon.com listing.

January 17, 2007

Paul Di Filippo gives Majestrum an "A-" review on SciFi.com. He says, "...if droll dialogue, curious customs, exotic scenery, clever plotting and a wry cosmopolitanism are your bag, then Matthew Hughes is your man."

January 4, 2007

"The Helper and His Hero," the two-part Guth Bandar serial running in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction this month and next, gets an "excellent" from Sam Tomaino in the current SF Revu.

I'm thirty thousand words into The Spiral Labyrinth, the next Henghis Hapthorn novel, due out in September.

January 1, 2007

My review of The Jack Vance Treasury, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan, is the lead item on the SF Site's January edition.

December 30, 2006

Reviewer Nisi Shawl says nice things about Majestrum in the Seattle Times: "A bit Arthur Conan Doyle, a bit Jack Vance, this account of Henghis' escapades has the lasting appeal of one of P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster books."

December 23, 2006

Locus Magazine has included Majestrum on its latest list of "notable books." Also, Night Shade tells me they're very happy with sales.

December 12, 2006

Andy Wheeler, editor of the Science Fiction Book Club and a man of discerning taste, has given Majestrum a healthy plug on his blog.

December 10, 2006

I've just posted the spectacular cover art for The Commons, my Guth Bandar novel coming from Robert J. Sawyer Books in June/July 2007. It's from a larger painting that will be split to form the covers of the February and March issues of F&SF, which will feature a two-part Guth Bandar novella that will include the scene represented by the artists, Cory and Catska Ench.

December 5, 2006

My interview with John Joseph Adams is now up on Science Fiction Weekly. I may have said more than I should have. Oh, well.

December 2, 2006

Jeff Vandermeer has given Majestrum a moderately good review in his Dispatches From Smaragdine column on the SF Site. He says, "there are many pleasures in this slim volume, foremost from the interplay between Hapthorn and his familiar, and in detailed set pieces that contain a coiled tension."

November 22, 2006

Making Majestrum available as a free Creative Commons download is still the plan. But it's tied in with creating a new site for Night Shade Books, and the web design process is apparently proceeding at a snail's pace.

The full Publishers Weekly review of Majestrum is now on Amazon.

Like most of my generation, I remember exactly what I was doing forty-three years ago today.

November 19, 2006

I have sold "Sweet Trap," a new Henghis Hapthorn novelette, to Gordon Van Gelder at F&SF. And I'm 12,000 words into The Spiral Labyrinth, the second Hapthorn novel due out in September, 2007.

Majestrum is now reaching bookstores, just in time for Christmas shopping. Night Shade tells me that pre-orders have been strong.

November 17, 2006

Majestrum gets a good review in Publishers Weekly: "Hughes's successful blend of magic, the supernatural and high-tech with Sherlockian deductions (and cryptic observations straight out of Doyle's canon), suggests a long life for Hapthorn."

November 16, 2006

My review of Jay Lake's second novel, Trial of Flowers, is up at the SF Site. In the same edition, Paul Kincaid beats up my novelette, "The Gist Hunter," in his review of Jonathan Strahan's Best Short Novels 2006. But, hey, no hard feelings.

November 14, 2006

My first Luff Imbry story, "The Farouche Assemblage," which ran in Postscripts #6 earlier this year, will shortly appear as a limited edition (125 copies) chapbook from the ineffable Payseur & Schmidt of Seattle. The novelette will be illustrated by World Fantasy Award-winning artist Jason Van Hollander, who illustrated The Gist Hunter and Other Stories. The package will also include a wire figurine inspired by the artworks described in the story, as well as a certificate from a sub-curator of the Archonate's Grand Connaissarium attesting to its authenticity. Payseur & Schmidt are now taking pre-orders.

November 13, 2006

I've just discovered that F&SF editor Gordon Van Gelder has offered a copy of the signed, limited edition of Majestrum as the first prize in one of the magazine's fun contests. See here for details on Contest # 173 (scroll down to the bottom of the page). Unfortunately, the deadline for entries is November 15, only two days from now, but at least that's better than the erroneous "May 15, 2006" that's posted on the mag's website.

November 10, 2006

Rick Kleffel has given Majestrum a very strong review in his Agony Column (scroll halfway down the page). He says, "...for this reader the comparison that night sell a few more books to utterly satisfied customers is Philip K. Dick. Hughes has a manner of undermining reality that operates from a similarly surreal center. He likes to layer his world and perceptions."

October 31, 2006

It's a Happy Hallowe'en as the month ends with two very nice online reviews of "Bye The Rules," my Guth Bandar novellete in the December F&SF. They're at Tangent Online and at SF Revu.

October 18, 2006

For the past several years I've been part of an informal co-op of BC-based sf writers that puts out a twice-yearly newsletter called The Lonely Cry . This month's SF Revu has an interview with our volunteer editor, the award-winning fantasy author Eileen Kernaghan, as well as a few words from me.

In 1951, an editor considering buying J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings worried that it might lose the publisher a thousand pounds. His boss told him, "If you think it's a work of genius, then you may lose a thousand."

If you're looking for new SF authors -- or for a second book by one of last year's little turtles -- why not take a look at what the small presses are doing? Among these publishers who are willing to lose a thousand, future Tolkiens may be found.

October 10, 2006

Today our local bookstore finally got in Gardner Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction and I trundled down to pick up a copy. I was pleased to see that not only did Gardner dub The Gist Hunter & Other Stories one of the year's best collections, but he named seven of my stories in his list of "Honorable Mentions" which, considering that I only had seven stories published in 2005, is not too shabby a showing.

Sadly, though, Gardner again chronicles the slide in circulation of the venerable pulp magazines, although The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction was at least holding its own in 2005 after years of declining numbers. I join him in saying, to anyone who likes short sf: please go immediately and get a subscription to at least one of the grand old mags: Analog; Asimov's; F&SF. It's great value for the money.

October 9, 2006

A nice surprise! John Joseph Adams has reviewed Majestrum for Orson Scott Card's webzine Intergalactic Medicine Show, calling it "an immensely entertaining reading experience. [Hughes's] prose is ornate but very readable, always clever, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. While it's his dialogue that's the best tool in his repertoire, his narrative abilities are finely honed as well, and there are few fantasists writing today who can spin a yarn as well as he."

I spent the weekend at VCon in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond. The drunk driver who rear-ended me thirty-four years ago put in another one of his periodic visits in the form of a very sore lower back. I counter-attacked with migraine-strength Advil and muscle relaxants, then proceeded to reveal to an overflow crowd gathered for a master class the mysteries of scene writing, all the while floating several feet above the assembled participants. Midway through my ninety-minute segment I stopped to ask the emerging writers if I was making any sense at all, and upon being assured that I was being both pithy and hugely entertaining, I trundled on to the end of it. I am confident no real harm was done, and perhaps even some good may have come out of it. I also met, as always, many pleasant sf fans and fellow authors.

October 5, 2006

So I'm off to V-Con in Vancouver for the weekend, teaching a master's class in how to write scenes (show, don't tell), and a panel or three. If anybody wants to talk to me there, I'm approachable.

October 3, 2006

John Joseph Adams, the "Slushgod" (i.e., slush pile reader extraordinaire), of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, also doubles as an interviewer of sf authors for various on-line venues. He's done a write-up about me and Majestrum for SCI FI Wire, the on-line news service of the SCIFI cable channel.

September 23, 2006

I got it slightly wrong on the September 6 post below. "The Helper and His Hero" two-part novella will be the cover story in both the January and February issues of F&SF. I've just seen the art for the first cover and it's wonderful -- Archetypes on Parade.

September 22, 2006

The free Creative Commons download of the entire text of Majestrum is still in the works, but details on how to get it must await a rebuild of the Night Shade Books website. In the meantime, the Tom Kidd cover and the first 15,000 words are here.

September 6, 2006

I'll have my third cover story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction's March edition, which will be out in late January 2007. The illo will be from the second half of the Guth Bandar novella, "The Helper and His Hero" that will run in the February and March issues.

September 3, 2006

I have given my permission to Night Shade Books to make the entire text of Majestrum available for download under a Creative Commons licence. It should be available in time for the October release of the hardcover and limited editions. Experience, notable Cory Doctorow's, indicates that offering novels for free download in this manner actually increases sales of the trade editions. We'll see.

In the meantime, I have posted the first 15,000 words here.

August 26, 2006

Congratulations to fantasy illustrator Tom Kidd, who did the cover art for Majestrum and Black Brillion. He has just won a Chesley Award for best paperback cover for The Enchanter Completed, an anthology of adventure stories written in homage to L. Sprague de Camp. De Camp was one of my favorite authors when I was a teenager. I heartily recommend his historical novels, especially An Elephant for Aristotle and The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate, to anyone who loves a rattling good read.

August 16, 2006

The cover art and a publisher's blurb for Wolverine: Lifeblood is on a fan site for the cover artist, David Mack. I like the art; it powerfully conveys the feel of the story.

My review of Lord Dunsany's The Hashish Man and Other Stories is up on the SF Site.

August 3, 2006

Wolverine: Lifeblood is scheduled for release at the end of February. Here's the listing on Amazon.

July 31, 2006

I expect to have some pretty big news about the release of Majestrum in the next little while. I'm just waiting to finalize the details with Night Shade.

I've just received my author's copies of Rich Horton's Fantasy: the Best of the Year 2006, which has my "The Gist Hunter" in the same table of contents as stories by Gene Wolfe, Peter S. Beagle and Neil Gaiman, among many others. I still have a hard time believing I'm sitting at the same table as authors I read all those years ago.

I'm writing a new Henghis Hapthorn story. It will be the "extra" in the limited edition of Majestrum. I'll also offer it to Gordon Van Gelder at of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. No guarantee he'll buy it, however.

Speaking of F&SF, the magazine will run "Bye the Rules," the next episode of Guth Bandar's adventures in the collective unconscious, in the December edition, which comes out in October. Then the concluding episodes, a two-part novella enetitled, "The Helper and his Hero," will run in the January and February issues.

July 4, 2006

The Commons, the Guth Bandar novel that has been appearing in episodes in F&SF, will be published in June 2007 by Robert J. Sawyer's imprint at Fitzhenry and Whiteside. It had been pencilled in for Christmas, 2006, but the publisher wants to let some time extend between the appearance of the last two episodes in the magazine (likely to be in December/January), and the novel's arrival in bookstores.

July 2, 2006

I've finished Wolverine: Lifeblood and will turn it in to Pocket Books on Wednesday, once everybody gets back from the four-day holiday. It came in a little longer than I expected, just under 90,000 words, but my editor said anything under 100k was not a problem.

I'm going to pull out a trunk book (that's writer-talk for a book you weren't able to sell) and work on it. I wrote a thriller some years ago that became a hard sell after 9/11. Now I'm going to update it and see what happens.

June 22, 2006

My time has been pretty well consumed lately by finishing Wolverine: Lifeblood, which I expect to turn in by the end of the month, but today I received the page proofs for "Passion Ploy," a Luff Imbry story that will appear in Forbidden Planets, an anthology edited by Pete Crowther for DAW. It's due out in November, in time to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the classic film, Forbidden Planet, starring a very serious Leslie Nielsen long before his second career in comedy.

According to the anthology's table of contents, I have the honour of being the lead-off story. In other words, my story comes right after the introduction by Ray Bradbury. When I saw that fact looking up at me from the proofs sitting on my kitchen table, for a moment I remembered just what it was like to be a fourteen year old boy, picking through the juvenile shelves at the Burnaby Public Library for Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

The past doesn't really go away. We merely lose track of it somehow. But every now and then, it whispers to remind us that it's still close by, just out of sight.

May 25, 2006

A reader suggested that it would be useful to be able to tell from my bibliography which stories and novels are set in the Archonate universe. So I've marked them all with an asterisk.

May 18, 2006

I'm grateful to Gordon Van Gelder, editor and publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for buying "Help 'n Out," a 39,000-word novella that caps off the adventures of Guth Bandar and Baro Harkless in the Commons. It covers much of the action from Black Brillion, but from Guth's point of view

It's an awfully long piece for the magazine, and will actually have to run in two parts. Besides which, it will appear at just about the time that my novel, The Commons (which contains the novella), is reaching bookstore shelves. I had already decided to dedicate the novel to Gordon, because I wouldn't have written the Bandar novel if he hadn't been buying them as episodes for F&SF. Now I think that dedication is doubly deserved.

May 8, 2006

I've sold a new Archonate novel, The Commons, to Rob Sawyer for his Robert J. Sawyer Books, an imprint of the large Canadian publisher Fitzhenry and Whiteside. It should be out in a small hardcover edition and a larger trade paperback run late this year. I wrote the novel over the past couple of years in episodes that have, mostly, appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

The novelette "A Little Learning," elsewhere on this site, is a self-contained episode from The Commons. Click on the link above to read it.

The Commons is my third novel sale so far this year; the other two are Template, another Archonate novel sold to PS Publishing in the UK, and Wolverine:Lifeblood, based on the adventures of the Canadian X-Man, that I'm doing as a for-hire project for Pocket Books. I expect to turn it in by the end of next month. Both it and Template will be out in 2007.

May 4, 2006

Rich Horton gives "A Herd of Opportunity" a warm mention in the May Locus, calling it "a Guth Bandar story, enjoyable as ever."

And I'm 30,000 words into the Wolverine novel for Pocket Books, killing off Nazis and generally having a pretty good time.

April 25, 2006

"A Herd of Opportunity" got a nice review from Lois Tilton on the Internet Review of Science Fiction site, saying "The Jungian landscape of Bandar's universe is a unique and fascinating SFnal setting."

Looks as if Night Shade Books has sent Amazon the Tom Kidd cover for Majestrum, the first Henghis Hapthorn novel. As usual with Kidd's art, it looks good.

I've written the first 20 per cent of Wolverine: Lifeblood, the for-hire (i.e., no royalties), X-Men novel I'm writing for Pocket Books. But I've been advised by knowledgeable folks, including David Hartwell and Rob Sawyer, that it's best to use a pseudonym for such projects, so I'm leaning toward doing it under the name Hugh Matthews -- I know, very few points there for originality.

April 4, 2006

Nick Gevers has given "A Herd of Opportunity" (F&SF, May) a stellar review in the April Locus: "The... hybrid of Jungian speculation and Vancean farce is thoroughly absorbing and very funny, Hughes in spectacular form."

I'm going to be at Norwescon for Saturday and Sunday, April 15 and 16.

April 1, 2006

I've delivered Majestrum, the first Henghis Hapthorn novel, to Night Shade Books. It's due out as a hardcover (and probably also as a limited, signed edition), in September/October.

March 24, 2006

I've made the deal with Pocketbooks to write a novel based on the adventures of the Canadian X-Man, Wolverine. It won't be written in the style of my Archonate tales, but in an appropriate hardboiled voice. Should be out in 2007.

March 15, 2006

Nothing to do with sf, but today I received a copy of the memoir I ghosted for an old speec