Matt Hughes (writer)


Matthew Hughes is a Canadian author who writes science fiction under the name Matthew Hughes, crime fiction as Matt Hughes and media tie-ins as Hugh Matthews. Prior to his work in fiction, he was a freelance speechwriter. Hughes has written over twenty novels and he is also a prolific author of short fiction whose work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Lightspeed, Postscripts, Interzone and original anthologies edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. In 2020 he was inducted into the Canadian SF and Fantasy Association Hall of Fame.

Biography

Matthew Hughes was born in Liverpool in May 1949. His family moved to Canada when he was five. As a teenager, he was a member of the Company of Young Canadians and worked a variety of jobs before becoming a journalist. He then moved into speechwriting, first on the staff of the Minister of Justice and the Minister of the Environment and subsequently as a freelance writer for corporate executives and politicians in British Columbia. While working as a speechwriter in 1982, he wrote a 27,000 word novella for a competition which he saw advertised in the Vancouver Sun. Although he did not win the contest, he returned to the story years later and expanded it into his first published novel, Fools Errant, which was released in 1994. Since 2007 he has worked across the world as a housesitter to support his fiction career. He has been married since the late 1960s and has three sons. One of his sons has high-functioning autism, which led Hughes to write the "To Hell and Back" books from the perspective of a high-functioning autistic character.

Influences

Hughes's Archonate stories and novels have been compared to the works of Jack Vance: Booklist called him Vance's "heir apparent" in their August 2005 review of The Gist Hunter and Other Stories. Hughes has written an authorised Dying Earth story for the 2009 Vance tribute anthology Songs of the Dying Earth and in February 2020 is working on an authorised sequel to Vance's Demon Princes books. However, Hughes has cited his 2008 novel Template as being "the only time I’ve consciously tried to write a “Jack Vance novel,” although the themes and concerns embodied in the story are my own."
Other significant early influences include P. G. Wodehouse, Thorne Smith, L. Sprague de Camp, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Philip K. Dick. Hughes still rereads Jack Vance, P. G. Wodehouse and Gene Wolfe but has not followed the science fiction and fantasy field since the mid-1980s and instead reads mostly crime fiction by authors such as Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Robert B. Parker and James Lee Burke, whom Hughes considers to be "the finest American crime novelist of them all."

Awards and nominations

Hughes's work has been shortlisted for numerous major science fiction awards, included the Nebula Award, Philip K. Dick Award, Locus Award, Aurora Award and Endeavour Award. In 2000, his story "One More Kill" won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Short Story presented by the Crime Writers of Canada. In 2020 his contributions to science fiction and fantasy were recognised with the CSFFA Hall of Fame Trophy. What the Wind Brings, a slipstream historical magical realism novel was nominated for the 2020 Neffy Award.

Archonate series

In the far-future setting of Hughes's Archonate stories, the operating principle of the universe changes at intervals of several thousand years between science and magic with catastrophic effects. Science is dominant in stories set in the Penultimate Age of Old Earth and almost all of the characters are initially unaware of or disbelieve in magic: these stories tend towards space opera and planetary romance influenced by Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe. More recently, Hughes has also written stories set during or after the change in the mode of Dying Earth genre. The stories and characters of the Archonate reflect Hughes's interest in crime fiction: he has described himself as "a hard-boiled crime writer working in a science-fictional mode."

Filidor Vesh

The two Filidor Vesh books follow the picaresque adventures of the title character, nephew and apprentice to the ruling Archon of Old Earth.
The stories concerned with the Commons were originally intended to form one long novel. As this book did not meet the word limits imposed by Tor Books, Hughes published the shortened novel as Black Brillion and turned the excised material into a series of six short stories about Guth Bandar, a scholar dedicated to exploring humanity's collective unconscious. Hughes sold these stories to Gordon Van Gelder at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; the first three were collected in 2005 as part of The Gist Hunter and Other Stories and Robert J. Sawyer assembled all six as a fixup novel in 2007. In 2014, Hughes self published the stories as they first appeared in F&SF as The Compleat Guth Bandar: differences between this volume and The Commons are slight. Black Brillion was nominated for the Aurora Award while "The Helper and His Hero" was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novella.
Henghis Hapthorn is the foremost freelance discriminator of Old Earth in its penultimate age. Hapthorn first appeared in a sequence of six stories sold to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, where the arch-rationalist and sceptic discovers to his horror that his rational world is about to come to an abrupt end with the dawn of an age of magic. Hapthorn's story continued in three novels published by Night Shade Books: more recent Hapthorn stories have been set before his first encounter with magic or after Hespira.
Template follows Conn Labro, the star duellist at a gaming house on the planet Thrais, who travels the worlds of the Spray with Old Earth dancer Jenore Mordene to investigate the murder of his only friend on the planet and the mystery of his own origins. Hughes began writing a sequel as a series of short stories but after the sale of the first episode to Amazing Stories decided to release the entire story as a novel provisionally titled Passengers and Perils, which will also feature many of Hughes's other recurring characters such as Henghis Hapthorn and Ern Kaslo in supporting roles.
Luff Imbry is a con man, forger and thief inspired by a pair of Sydney Greenstreet characters, Kaspar Gutman and Signor Ferrari. Luff was originally intended only as a supporting character in Black Brillion and was killed off towards the end of the novel in the first draft. Luff was spared in the final book by the intervention of Hughes's editor at Tor, David G. Hartwell and first appeared in a lead role in "The Farouche Assemblage", beginning the character's long association with Postscripts and PS Publishing. The 2011 Luff Imbry novel The Other was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. Hughes has called Luff his favourite of his own Archonate characters and has expressed interest in completing the story begun in The Other.
In the Lightspeed serial "The Kaslo Chronicles", Hughes for the first time showed the apocalyptic moment of transition from the age of rationality to that of magic through the eyes of Erm Kaslo, a confidential operative in the Ten Thousand Worlds whose client, the aristocratic dilettante Diomedo Obron, intends to become a powerful thaumaturge in the new era. Kaslo, by contrast, is a poor fit for the dawning age as his practical competence does not translate to a talent for magic but he nonetheless attempts to salvage what he can and fight back against interplanar threats. After this serial was collected as A Wizard's Henchman in 2016, Hughes returned to the character in prequel stories set when Kaslo was still "a hard-boiled, Sam-Spade-type private eye."
The character of Raffalon, a skilled but seldom lucky thief in the Dying Earth, was created when George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois invited Hughes to submit a story to their anthology Rogues. After writing the first Raffalon story, "The Inn of the Seven Blessings", Hughes realised the potential of the character and went on to write eight more stories about Raffalon's earlier adventures, which he collected in 2017.
The creation and subsequent development of the Baldemar series is comparable to that of the earlier Raffalon stories. Hughes was invited by Gardner Dozois to submit a story to The Book of Swords: the resulting story, "The Sword of Destiny" introduces Baldemar at the end of his career serving the ambitious but incompetent thaumaturge Thelerion. Subsequent stories have followed Baldemar's life from his streetwise beginnings through the rest of his time as a wizard's henchman.
Hughes has to date written three standalone short stories and a novel in the same Dying Earth setting as the Raffalon and Baldemar series.
To Hell and Back is a contemporary fantasy trilogy about mild-mannered actuary and superhero fan Chesney Arnstruther, who causes chaos in the spiritual realm when he accidentally summons a demon and refuses to sell his soul. His actions cause Hell to go on strike but also provide Chesney with an opportunity to live out his comic book fantasies.
Stories set in the Archonate are marked with a *: