The Bodhisattva

Another edition of Forgotten Friday where I join a group of bloggers who recommend a book  every week that slips through the cracks. Now that sounds very straight forward but it’s all lies. One, type in Forgotten Fridays in google right now…

…waits

See me there? I’m a headliner baby, and while I do talk about books every week, for some reason am not deemed appropriate  to be noted among the others who do. This is not a pointed for purposes of spite, I have instead evolved to embody the very concept of being ‘forgotten’ to better bring prime examples of such books. This ascension was necessary as some of the other books listed I saw are truly not forgotten at all and border on being classics of multiple genres - I mean if I were to recommend Ishiguro’s Remains of Day or Murakami’s Wind-up Bird Chronicle it would hardly be appropriate and its very hard for me to get my heard around locked rooms, ghost and cities of glass not being quite well known and lauded. This schism was a natural progression and as I sneak into the chamber housing the Shadow Cabinet - while its caretaker is absent excluding a few times a year -  I can also cheat, but this time I turn to my own shelf - unique in its own right -  a cabinet made from sapient pear wood and decorated in vellum and inks and blessed by a FBS Sea goddess. Again, this feature is no proper review, but merely a general summary and a pointer at a book that may have slipped though the cracks. I pull out what looks to be a case file - with the Cornelius Cabinet you never know what form a a read will come out as - the folder is marked Hughes, Matthew and what forms in my hand is a novel of the archonate - Black Brillion. Matthew Hughes has quietly been writing some of the most entertaining fiction in SF/F over the last few years, and specially with his  Henghis Hapthorn work, I think if he tweaked his endings he’d already have some hardware as in my mind  99% of the first two novels in that sequence are as recommendable as anything I have read over the last couple of years and I greatly anticipate the third book Hespira. I’ve interviewed Hughes before (please forgive the brevity as back then FBS interviews were 5 question features - we will have to correct that soon and do a proper one) and have had small amounts of dialogue with him and he by his own words a mystery writer. Influenced by Vance (who also wrote mysteries along with being a legendary SF and Fantasy writer) he has a unique knack of humor that’s pulled off without being overtly comedic, it’s organic and sometimes dark, but always cutting through something more than just the immediate topic - except when it’s not. Hughes is one of those writers who currently uses Science Fiction or the fantastic as a tool to write crime or mystery tales, a group that includes people as esteemed as Chabon, Banville, and Lethem to writers more associated with SF like a Grimwood, Liz Williams, Charlies Huston among others, and consistently Hughes is my favorite. He’s not dabbling, this is what the man does and while sharing a similar setting his books are standalone and none disappoint.

Black Brillion was the first Hughes book I read and while sure the author would admit its an homage to Vance, it would be proper to say that the novel shares a heritage with Vance but there is also something to be said for a generous pulp elements and Vance’s characters never fail to almost instantly find reader affection even when- especially when -  the nature of  scruples are still in the balance. In Black Brillion it is more of the same as we follow Baro Harkless, an Inspector in the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny and are with him when he catches Luff Imbry, a notorious con artist, only to be ordered to be teamed with him in a very 48 hourish way to take down another target. The banter between the two is an example of a strength in comfort zone for Hughes, it’s where he explores, where he find his story as the one you are reading moves along, and you can find examples in every Hughes book I read (including his latest, Template - see our exclusive excerpt here). Now reading this you may be still be stuck on - “What or who exactly is an archonate?”.“  Well, Hughes answers this in the interview:

The Archonate is my shorthand for an entirely improbable far future Old Earth in the “Penultimate Age,” an eon or so before the time of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, when the sun will finally sputter out. Old Earth is a dusty, terribly unfashionable planet where the remaining inhabitants tend to obsess over details of social organization, so that the world is speckled with insular societies pursuing odd philosophical goals, often to uncomfortable extremes, especially for unwary visitors. In the capital, the gawdy, blousy old city of Olkney, there is a stratified social order, which is something like Victoria England if it were secretly run by sufis.

What I really admire about Hughes is that your clearly in an SF environment, fully utilizing and exploring human nature in a SF setting, but there is none of that clunk that makes SF rather unreadable to anybody who doesn’t give a proper shit about the viability of  true technical manuals on everything we might encounter.

“Ben how does the Adegan Crystal focus the power cell ?

“Damn it Luke, shut the fuck up you are boring the shit out of people -  just kill people with it, don’t worry about how a Light Saber works - just throw some batteries in the bitch when it starts to fade - and whatever you do, never, ever mention midi-chlorians”

He is readable in a way a Richard Morgan (a completely different writer in tone) in that he could actually expect to keep cross-over readers if they ventured in. This is not synonymous however with being fluffy and Hughes shows this with his application of ‘The Commons’ where the collective human consciousness resides - and as an examples of Hughes not ignoring the ingenuity of humanity there actual noonauts (you can read a story about this by Hughes entitled A Little Learning here). As I alluded to before, Hughes knows how to kick-off his novels, to spark immediate interest - and while initial struggle at times lead to the best of works (Delany’s Dhalgren, Kafka’s The Castle among several other masterworks to numerous to name) it’s always  a relief to see a work that invites challenge to go along with those that simply challenge. Sometimes, when jumping through hoops, simply being able to smile during and after the ordeal is more of a feat than simply having the exhilaration of finally being done with a book as if we passed some trial. Hughes strikes this balance that Science Fiction as a whole has frankly stumbled on in what seems to be an artificial quest to be the leader in relevant, socially conscious fiction - it is the difference in intelligence and artificial intelligence - the moment you give the feeling of stopping, putting up a sign post and beating your chest - others have passed you buy - still exploring. Hughes is having fun, he walks by that sign, and with the crime writer’s mind he knows the story is always just beginning at that post - it is a new starting point not a destination - science fiction isn’t about destinations, it’s about the constant beyond and our place in or out of it, and Hughes sees that sign and sees murder. Oddly enough, my issues with some of Hughes’s endings, his lack of conclusion may indeed be perfect statement of avoidance of this needless death by boredom.

* You can read the first chapter of Black Brillion at Mr. Hughes’ website here.

Previous Forgotten Fridays:

Pandora, by Holly Hollander by Gene Wolfe

Coelestis by Paul Park

Sarah Canary by  Karen Joy Fowler

Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop