The Nebula Awards

Matthew Hughes Interview

Interviewed by Charles Tan on August 19 2008

Matt Hughes writes fantasy under the name Matthew Hughes and suspense fiction under the name Matt Hughes.
After living in Canada for fifty-three years, Matthew Hughes relocated to Britain where he has taken up the occupation of housesitter, so that he can afford to keep on writing fiction yet still eat every day.
Mr. Hughes received a nomination in the Best Novella Category for his story The Helper and His Hero, published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

First off, for unfamiliar readers, can you tell us about your Archonate universe? How did you come up with this milieu?

It’s an entirely improbable far, far future, the Aeon just before Jack Vance’s Dying Earth. Old Earth is still partially inhabited, but most of humanity went up and down The Spray ages ago, creating the Ten Thousand Worlds. The oldest of the settled planets are known as Foundational Domains; the worlds that were settled from the Foundationals are known as Secondaries. Old Earth is an unfashionable, fusty little place, not thought much of. It has about as much importance to civilized humanity as Uruk does to our present world, even though it was one of the founts of Mesopotamian civilization.

Everything that can be done has been done—then redone, forgotten, rediscovered, and done all over again in every possible combination and permutation. There is nothing new under the aging orange sun of Old Earth. People there devote themselves to pursuing odd fancies and fixations. Forms tend to be more important than their contents. To render the mood of the times, I write my Archonate tales in a light Victorian/Edwardian style, which I think expresses the antithesis of enthusiasm, It’s also handy for conveying dry humor and irony.

I came up with it entirely on the spur of the moment. In 1982, I heard about a novel-in-a-weekend contest run in Vancouver over the Labor Day weekend. I had just got myself a brand new IBM Selectric correctable and I thought, “What the hell, I’ll write a novel.” With not much forethought (I only heard about the contest on the Thursday afternooon before the weekend), I set out to write a text that was something like a collaboration between Jack Vance and P.G. Wodehouse producing an update of Gulliver’s Travels. I did not want to trespass too boldly on Vance’s Dying Earth milieu, so I set the story one age before. The result was called Fools Errant.

I didn’t win the contest, but I later expanded the original 27,000 words that I banged out that weekend and eventually sold it to Jaime Levine at (then) Warner Aspect, who commissioned a sequel, Fool Me Twice. Both came out in 2001 and did no better than break even (2001 was a bad year for irony). But they led Davd G. Hartwell to take a chance on me with Tor (Black Brillion) and for Gordon Van Gelkder to buy a gaggle of short stories for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, plus sales to Night Shade, PS Publishing and Robert J. Sawyer Books.

The funny thing is, I set out to be a crime writer. The flukey sale to Jaime Levine has set me on a course that has led to my becoming a midlist science-fantasy author. But I’m not complaining.

Your Nebula-nominated novella, The Helper and His Hero, takes place in your setting. What made you decide to tackle the themes you did in the novella and why Guth Bandar?

Guth Bandar appeared as a minor character as I was writing the draft of Black Brillion; for the first time in my writing career, I found myself with a character who was steadily taking over the book. He’s a noönaut, an explorer of the collective unconscious, having been trained at the Institute for Historical Inquiry, which has spent tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands of years) mapping the Commons, as the collective unconscious is known to Institute aficionados. Every archetypal Personage, Situation, Event and Landscape in the noösphere has been mapped and studied in detail (remember, nothing is new on Old Earth).

The Commons struck me as a useful idea, something that later generations of Earthlings might have made out of an exploration of Robert Holdstock’s brilliant Mythago Wood. I would have liked to have done more with it and with Guth in Black Brillion, but Tor’s P&L figures said it was to be a short novel or nothing. Still, once the novel was in the pipe, I began writing short stories about Guth and his situation, and from that I developed the idea of a companion novel to Black Brillion, which would tell the story from his point of view. I wrote the book in episodes that Gordon Van Gelder bought for F&SF, for which I am deeply grateful. The Helper and His Hero is the conclusion of the novel, now published as The Commons by Robert J. Sawyer Books.

For me, The Helper and His Hero blends science fiction, fantasy, and metafiction together. Do you make a distinction between what is fantasy and what is science fiction?

Only if I am forced to. I like to think of myself as occupying the gray area where the two genres bleed into each other. I’m by no means a hard scientist, but I know enough rule-of-thumb sociology, and enough Jungian psychology as interpreted by Joseph Campbell, to be dangerous when unsupervised.

One of your stories has recently been accepted into the Jack Vance tribute anthology by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin. Were you a big Jack Vance fan?

Still am. Huge. Vance is the only author I knowingly reread (I’m at that age when I can pick up a book and not realize I’ve already read it until I’m two or three chapters in). I get just as much enjoyment and sense of wonder from his work today as I did when I first encountered him as a thirteen-year-old more than four decades ago. I think it is a testament to his singular talent that he is the only author whose aging fans have made a mass effort, through the Vance Integral Edition, to ensure that his works endure past the fans’ own lifetimes.

Who are some of the other authors or your favorite books that have influenced you?

Wodehouse and Holdstock, as mentioned above. Gene Wolfe inspires me, though I don’t aspire to do what he does. In my younger years I read Zelazny and Dick and Vonnegut, and the latter may be to blame for my inability to take the phenomenal world all that seriously. A special mention goes to Cecelia Holland, before she got into fantasy, because I think she is the most accomplished historical novelist writing today.

Based from your bio on your web page, you seem to have had an interesting life before becoming a writer. What made you decide to pursue fiction writing?

It was what I always wanted to do. I started my first novel the summer I turned sixteen, a historical novel set in the waning days of Alexander the Great. I may yet write it. I fell into speechwriting from journalism and found myself a confidant of political leaders and CEOs of billion-dollar corporations (which, given that I am from a working-poor background and lacked any noticeable ambition) was a curious turn of events. I found, though, that while I was writing PR bumpf for a living I couldn’t do fiction; it was as if the factory had to shut down and retool. Once my kids were grown and it didn’t matter if I plunged into midlist poverty, I set to and began churning out crime fiction and then made the segue into science-fantasy.

How has your previous careers helped shaped your fiction? Is there a huge gap between journalism, speech writing, and fiction?

I’ve had the useful experience of being behind closed doors when powerful persons are doing what they do. I’ve been involved in major political decisions (gun control and ending capital punishment in Canada), corporate takeovers, fending off disastrous economic circumstances involving writing down hundreds of millions of dollars in failed investments, political leadership campaigns in which the convention speech was crucial to success. So I don’t have to imagine what happens in the boardroom or the smoke-filled back rooms. I’ve also been dirt poor and stranded on some lonely highway five hundred miles from home, so I don’t have to imagine what that feels like either.

Speechwriting is writing for the voice, and also in the particular voice of the person who will give the speech. A good speechwriter absorbs the worldview of the speaker, which is analogous to writing from within the character in fiction.

What’s the appeal of science fiction for you? How about suspense fiction?

I like to have room to breathe, and sf gives you much more of that than any post-modern “realist” fiction about people trapped in ordinary little lives. I like writing suspense fiction—that’s what I set out to do—and have now managed to blend the two together by writing about my Sherlock Holmesean character, Henghis Hapthorn, the “foremost freelance discriminator of Old Earth,” and about Luff Imbry, master criminal and forger who inhabits the same milieu. Someday I must bring these two together.

What’s it like writing for two different genres/markets? Do they have any similarities? What’s the biggest difference between the two?

The similarity is that the work is based on story, with a beginning, middle and end, an arc of character development, the kind of stuff that’s been top of the market since Gilgamesh. The difference is in setting. In sf, you have to create, from imagination coupled to logical extrapolation, a reasonably cohesive environment that does not (yet) exist. For crime fiction, you don’t have to stretch quite so far.

What for you was the greatest challenge in becoming a professional author?

Overcoming my innate shyness and learning how to schmooze editors and agents at cons, since I’ve sold all of my books without having an agent pitch them. The writing came naturally.

Night Shade Books has published your short story collection and some of your novels. How did they end up as your publisher?

Jeremy Lassen met me at World Fantasy Convention in Phoenix. He asked me if I had enough stories for a collection. I did, and we made a deal. Later, when my numbers were not strong enough for larger publishers to be interested in me, Jason Williams thought Henghis Hapthorn would be the perfect point of view character for bringing the Archonate milieu to a wider world.

Do you have any anecdotes you’d like to share regarding your name and how you share it with other prominent personalities?

I know I get visits to my web page from fans of Matt Hughes, the mixed-martial-arts fighter whose ghosted autobiog made the New York Times bestseller list in January, days after it was released. Sometimes they send me e-mails deriding or praising my pugilistic prowess. There’s also a Matthew Hughes who writes military history; Amazon conflates our books, which must make me seem a hell of a prolific author.

What are the other projects you’re currently working on?

I’m just reviewing Marty Halpern’s copyedit of Hespira, the third Hapthorn novel, coming out from Night Shade in the fall. I’m also researching a historical novel.  And I’m writing stories about Luff Imbry, when he was still a master criminal (before he was conscripted into the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny in Black Brillion). I have about 50,000 words worth of stories so far. When I have written a few more, I’ll see if anyone wants to bring them out in a collection.

Matthew Hughes writes science-fantasy and crime fiction.

His novels are Downshift (Doubleday Canada, 1997), Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice (Warner Aspect, 2001), Black Brillion (Tor, 2004), Majestrum (Night Shade Books, 2006), The Commons (Robert J. Sawyer Books, 2007), The Spiral Labyrinth (Night Shade Books, 2007), Template (PS Publishing, 2008), and Hespira (Night Shade Books, 2008).

His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s, Asimov’s, Blue Murder, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Postscripts, Storyteller, Interzone and a number of “Year’s Best” anthologies. Night Shade Books published his short story collection, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, in 2005.

He has won the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada, and has been short-listed for the Aurora, Nebula and Derringer Awards. His novels and stories regularly make Locus Magazine’s annual recommended reading list.

Formerly a journalist, he became staff speechwriter to the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment in the Pierre Trudeau government of 1974-79, then spent more than twenty-five years as a freelance speechwriter for Canadian corporate executives and political leaders. At present, he is augmenting a fiction writer’s uncertain income by housesitting.

For more information, see his webpage.

Click here, for his complete bibliography.

CHARLES TAN is a speculative fiction fan from the Philippines. He has lots of online doppelgangers, including a Singaporean politician and a Filipino basketball player, but people should be warned that the “real” Charles Tan is a bibliophile who stalks his favorite authors. His blog, Bibliophile Stalker is updated with daily content including book reviews, interviews, and essays. He is also a contributor for SFF Audio.

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