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Science Fiction Weekly Review of Black Brillion

by Doug Fratz

In a far-future Earth, Baro Harkless is a young agent in the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny. On his first assignment, he succeeds in capturing the notorious con man Luff Imbry, and is surprised to find that his reward is to be assigned to work with Imbry to capture an even more notorious con man, Horslan Gebbling, who apparently has hatched a scheme to swindle sufferers of the mysterious and incurable disease called the lassitude, which causes degenerative mental and physical paralysis.

Harkless and Imbry form an uneasy truce and go undercover, with Harkless playing the part of Imbry's lassitude-afflicted protege. They join a group invited by Gebbling to voyage on a chartered land ship into the Swept, an immense abandoned flat area that was created by the ancient use of a gravity-based weapon to exterminate an alien race that had threatened the other peoples of Earth, both human and alien. On the cruise, they meet a scholar named Guth Bandar, who introduces Harkless to the Commons, part of a dreamscape called the noosphere populated by Jungian archetypes and landscapes created by the many millennia of sentient life on Earth. Harkless finds that he has a natural talent for entering and moving through the noosphere.

Harkless and Imbry get to know the other passengers and try to determine the nature of the swindle Gebbling is planning. Gebbling appears only in prerecorded messages promising a cure for the lassitude-afflicted passengers. The con appears to involve black brillion, a legendary rare form of brillion, a mineral formed over geologic time from the detritus of ancient human civilizations. The mystery deepens when one of the passengers is killed falling from the ship and ship security officer Raina Haj believes the man was murdered. Meanwhile, Harkless continues his exploration of the potentially dangerous Commons, several times requiring rescue by Bandar.

Their journey ends in the middle of the deserted grassland wilderness of the Swept, where they uncover a threat far greater than a scheme to con hapless disease victims, and Harkless, Imbry, Bandar and Haj must use all of their skills in a desperate attempt to save themselves and all of mankind.

Black Brillion is the third book in Matthew Hughes' Archonate series, following Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice, all clearly written in the science fantasy tradition most commonly associated with Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories and raised to new levels of depth and verisimilitude more recently by Gene Wolfe in his New Urth novels.

Some of the traditions Hughes is following actually go even further back, to the fantasy stories of Clark Ashton Smith, as well as earlier pulp adventure fiction. (Most of Hughes' characters would feel right at home in British adventure stories set in the early 20th century.) Despite the risks of working in the shadows of accomplished authors like Smith, Vance and Wolfe, Hughes has managed to produce compelling and very readable novels.

Black Brillion starts a bit slowly as the droll sparring between the young, naive Harkless and the jaded, hedonistic Imbry for control of the investigation becomes somewhat tedious, but the story soon picks up pace as Hughes gives reign to his imagination in describing this unusual far-future Earth. The Commons in the noosphere is an especially interesting creation, although Hughes occasionally seems to over-utilize fantasy role-playing game tropes and logic, but the noosphere eventually plays a vital and appropriate role in the conclusion. Hughes mixes his science and fantasy well and manages well in the difficult balancing act required to create believable stories mixing the two genres. The novel's unexpected denouement satisfyingly melds the science fiction and fantasy elements of the story.

It seems likely that Hughes will create more stories in Archonate series, and I look forward to reading more tales set in Old Earth.

Fans of Jack Vance will not be disappointed by this incursion of Matthew Hughes into Vance's science-fantasy territory.

Locus Review of Black Brillion

by Nick Gevers

If you're an admirer of the science fantasies of Jack Vance, it's hard not to feel affection for the Archonate stories of Matthew Hughes in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and now Black Brillion. Hughes is on one level engaging in fairly direct Vance pastiche; indeed, the Archonate is explicitly conceived as a close temporal precursor to Vance's Dying Earth, located in the Twentieth Eon as opposed to the Dying Earth's Twenty First. The Sun is dying in both periods, only less conspicuously in the sky of the (earlier) Archonate; human history is winding down, but in the Archonate science and central government survive, prior to their final decadence and downfall. The style Hughes employs, one of florid exoticism, mannered description, and formally phrased dialogue laden with irony, is closely modeled on that of Vance; and in the benign despotism of the Archon can easily be perceived the similar regime of the Connatic, sovereign of Vance's Alastor Cluster. Still, Hughes has strengths of his own to draw upon: his own considerable wit, and a flair for reified metaphysics surpassing anything conceived by Vance.

These qualities are on commendable display in Black Brillion. The opening sequence relates how Baro Harkless, a young and overly serious trainee operative in the Bureau of Scrutiny, Old Earth's central police agency, tracks down a notorious swindler, one Luff Imbry, and thwarts that individual's most ambitious extortion attempt to date. Very soon, Imbry is mysteriously signed on as a policeman in his turn; Baro's unpredictable and unsympathetic superior, one Ardmander Arboghast, assigns the mismatched pair to an investigation of a criminal racket in a remote region. Why this peculiar choice? The answers are sinister, and deeply hidden. On the surface, the racket is headed by an old partner-in-crime of Imbry's, and involves sufferers from a rare and fatal paralytic disorder being conducted into a lightly populated savannah to be offered a dubious ritualized cure for their condition; the felonies involved are surely unexceptional. But the Swept, the huge expanse of grassland across which a landborne sailing ship conveys the sufferers, their partners, and the incognito "scroots," was the scene of a vicious alien invasion long ago; and Baro, visiting the Collective Unconscious of Humanity (known as "the Commons") consciously and in his dreams, notices signs of psychic activity beyond the human. Something deadly threatens. All through this competently handled plot, Baro and Imbry play off amusingly against one another, a droll incompatibility of philosophy and temperament; their relationship with Guth Bandar, a sort of Jungian historian, adds further comedy; and -- in sharply contrasting mode -- there are those long sequences set in the Commons, where archetypal beings and situations lurk alluringly but dangerously, primordial unconsciousness forms a monstrous ocean beneath, and certain walls wait to be surmounted for the first time. Hughes's touch is light, but his agenda is quite grave.

Black Brillion is, then, a solid addition to the canon of Dying Earth literature. The Archonate is a well-conceived and evoked setting, and should generate many more stylish and ingenious entropic romances in coming years.

Booklist Review of Black Brillion

In the third novel about the Archonate, a galactic civilization featuring a drastically transformed Earth millions of years hence, Hughes pairs Baro Harkless, a conservative young inspector from the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny, and corpulent but ingeniously resourceful con artist Luff Imbry. At first, Imbry is simply another of the inspector's targeted scofflaws, but after Harkless puts him away, presumably for good, the Archonate inexplicably drops the charges and makes Imbry his partner. Flustered but dutiful, Harkless grudgingly agrees that Imbry is the perfect assistant for his next assignment: nabbing the greatest flimflam artist of all, Horselyn Gebbling, master criminal and the former partner who betrayed Imbry. Gebbling, it seems, is trying to fleece the victims of a fatal disease called lassitude by promising its cure in the form of a nonexistent mineral, black brillion. Hughes serves up equal measures of wit, intrigue, and seat-of-the-pants action and even dabbles a little in Jungian psychology when Harkless discovers a talent for plumbing humanity's collective unconscious. Irresistibly good reading.

SF Site Review of Black Brillion

by Donna MacMahon

Discerning readers, desirous of a literary indulgence suitable for savouring in an armchair over a steaming post-prandial cup of punge, will welcome a new installment in the annals of far future Earth, as recounted by Vancouver Island author Matthew Hughes.

"I am often struck by how widely a day can escape from one's expectations," says Luff Imbry, and thus begin the escapades of an ill-matched pair, juxtaposed by fate in the form of the Archonate's Bureau of Scrutiny. Baro Harkless, newly minted Agent of the Bureau is partnered with Luff Imbry, the very same portly confidence trickster he apprehended in commission of an extortion mere hours earlier, and whom he reasonably expects to be in transit to the nearest contemplarium.

Young Harkless is appalled to discover that Imbry has been made an Agent, equal in rank to himself. Imbry, on the other hand, is philosophical.

"I take it that you have long desired to be an agent of the Bureau of Scrutiny."

"It is all I ever wanted to be. It is a calling."

"Some are called, some are driven," the fat man said. "I have never accepted either a whip across the buttocks or a ring through the nose. I prefer to amble through the days, adapting my goals to circumstances as they present themselves, or preferably, adapting circumstances to my comfort."

"Your philosophy is vapid," Baro said.

"Perhaps," said Imbry. "But see how your grim zeal and my carefree insouciance have brought us to the identical point. We are both scroots. It is a distinction I admit I never sought, yet when the question was put the alternatives were even less appealing."

"It is all some sort of horrible mistake."

"Now there is a truly vapid philosophy," said the fat man, "lacking even that leavening of optimism that urges one to rise in the morning and go forth to accomplish. This cup of punge, on the other hand, is not affected by speculation. It is here and now, and very good."

Imbry and Harkless are assigned to pose as passengers on a private landship cruise across the vast Swept, organized by one Father Olwyn, Sacerdotal Eminence of the Society of Tangible Unity (better known to the Bureau as Horslan Gebbling, fraud artist). Although they concur on little, the reluctantly partnered scroots do agree that Gebbling is despicable to prey on victims of the Lassitude by claiming that he has a cure for this mysterious and invariably fatal ailment.

Yet much about this mission is inexplicable. Given their orders in secrecy, and allowed no Bureau support or back-up, it looks, even to the naive Harkless, as if they are intended to fail.

BLACK BRILLION is a novel which is very much a matter of taste. Bibliophiles, eccentrics, Scrabble players, and readers such as myself who were warped in childhood by over-exposure to Dickens, Dumas, and Gilbert & Sullivan seem most likely relish Hughes' whimsically embellished scenery and sardonic persiflage.

My only caveat in an overall accolade is a sense of disappointment that a story which begins as a light comedy turns so much darker in tone, evolving into an eldritch alien monster invasion yarn.

Still, that again is a matter of taste, and Jungians will especially enjoy Baro Harkless's pursuit of alien villains through the landscape of the human Collective Unconscious.

Peter Heck's Review of Fools Errant in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
Jim Sallis's Review of Fools Errant in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Nick Gevers's review of Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice in Interzone
David Mead's review of Fool Me Twice in The New York Review of Science Fiction

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Peter Heck's Review of Fools Errant in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine

Here's a new book so reminiscent of Jack Vance's Dying Earth series that if I had run across it without an author's name attached, I might well have assumed that it was a new book by Vance. This is no light praise; I consider Vance's Dying Earth books,  particularly The Eyes of the Overworld, among the most brilliant in modern fantasy. To strike that note, and sustain it convincingly, marks Matthew Hughes as a new face well worth attention.

The protagonist of Fools Errant is a callow young aristocrat, Filidor Vesh, nephew of the Archon of old Earth-like Vance's Dying Earth, an almost unrecognizably ancient world, where magic often has as much power as science. Filidor is trying to decide among his options for frittering away yet another evening when he receives a summons from the Archon to run an errand-a summons he at first attempts to duck. But Gaskarth, the elderly dwarf who brought the summons from his uncle, intercepts him and takes him to the palace.  There he is given a small wooden box to deliver to the Archon, who is reported to be in a nearby rural district. He also picks up an ancient book that tells of the doings of a sage named Liw Osfeo, and (with Gaskarth as his guide) embarks on his quest.

As the title suggests, the quest almost immediately turns into a series of misadventures.  Hughes sends Filidor through a series of one-dimensional societies, each of which represents the reductio ad absurdum of some social trait-ecological purism, rage for innovation, worship of professional sports. And at every turn, Filidor winds up in unwitting but flagrant violation of the local mores, usually to the point that he flees the country with a bloodthirsty mob howling at his heels.

All this is done with considerable wit, spiced with wildly irreverent episodes from the book of Liw Osfeo (which Filidor reads in between adventures).   A delightful debut performance; it will be very interesting to see how Hughes follows this one up.

Jim Sallis's Review of Fools Errant in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

Fools Errant is... a novel that in many ways returns to fantasy's origins. We find a young man sent out into a largely unknown world on a mysterious errand.  We encounter a multitude of wonders. The book's a marvelous picaresque, bringing to mind in its political aspects Swift, in its voice Twain, in its satirical aspect Stanislaw Lem's Ion Tichy tales, and perhaps most of all, in its gentle humor and humanity, Fritz Leiber.

Matthew Hughes dips his ladle deep into the age-old stuff of folk- and tall tales and brings up a surprising long drink of cool, tasty water. Again and again, as with Westlake and De Vries, I laughed aloud while reading. This is a fine, funny novel, a faultless and amazing debut.

Nick Gevers's review of Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice in Interzone

SF is a genre incessantly in communication with itself: ideas float around, being used and reused, whether repetitiously or innovatively; styles and structures of storytelling are as infectious as memes; imitation is a given. But SF is also an arena of originality; as Samuel R. Delany observed when writing about SF's "theoretical plurality", the field draws and expresses idiosyncratic outlooks and aesthetics, acting in a sense as literature's philosophical safety valve. SF can boast a small army of authentic creative eccentrics, authors of deep-dyed peculiarity: Avram Davidson, Brian Aldiss, R. A. Lafferty, David Bunch, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, J. G. Ballard, Ian McDonald, the list goes on and on. The singularity of these writers' insights and artistic tics will always be ascribable to influences of their own, but their products are prone to inimitability. So what happens when SF's internal conventionality and artistic anarchy clash? More specifically, what happens when one of these inspired mavericks finds an imitator after all?

Parody is one possibility. But what about respectful, serious emulation? Amateurish tributes are simply embarrassing. Even when a major writer makes the attempt, disaster can ensue, as when, a few years ago, Gene Wolfe published his own Lafferty story. The record with Jack Vance is little more encouraging. He exercises a wide general influence (on Wolfe, notably), but more specifically? Vance, who might be termed a Latinate Libertarian, purveys a famously distinctive sort of ironic exoticism, polished wit and picturesque detail within the constraints of adventure plotting and a conservative political agenda; his books are addictive, and quite a few pieces of faux-Vanciana have appeared as American paperback originals, soon vanishing from memory. It is mortally difficult to get the mixture right; Vance is not one of the greatest SF writers for nothing. Even his friend, the fine Australian author Terry Dowling, has tried again and again with only middling success, if that. But the drought may have broken.

There are some blemishes, naturally. In attempting to wield the full Vancean vocabulary, Hughes missteps here and there. An example: calling a theatrical narrator a "disclamator" is odd; declamation, not disclaiming, is involved, surely. Excessive archness is a pitfall of this sort of writing, and occurs, as does a kind of patronising didacticism which can give Hughes's text a juvenile flavour. But his technique is surprisingly sure, and improves. Old Earth is a patchwork of convoluted polities, bizarre social formations out of Vance's top drawer; the spectacle of Filidor blundering his way through communities of narcissists, sports enthusiasts, fetishists of demagoguery, and xenophobic rustics is hilarious, copiously productive of acute satirical notes amid the superficial uproar. In particular, the economics of the pirate Henwaye's island sweat shop are a magnificent deconstruction of labour relations and the mechanics of commercial monopolies. Hughes's dialogue is well-tuned also, epigrammatic and odd, replicating Vance's barbed formality expertly. His embedded tales and anecdotes (the experiences of the sage Osfeo in Fools Errant, the dramatic vignettes of the "Bard Obscure" in Fool Me Twice) are in amusing counterpoint to Filidor's struggles to survive and to comprehend his fate, complementary and subversive, a microcosm of the novels' overall ironic balance. And particularly impressive is the rhetorical opposition between the two volumes, such that Fool Me Twice recapitulates its predecessor entirely and not at all; there is a lot of craft here, a lot of keen worldly observation transmuted into fascinating far-future topiary.

Swift the satirist is surely in play here alongside Vance; the parallel with Gulliver has led to the Book Club omnibus of the Filidor series being titled Gullible's Travels, and fair enough. Fantastic voyages clothed in congenial archaism, rites-of-passage baroquely hypertrophied: Matthew Hughes's tales of Old Earth have begun superbly, and promise to continue.

David Mead's review of Fool Me Twice in The New York Review of Science Fiction

Matt Hughes's boldness is admirable. With Fool Me Twice, and its predecessor Fools Errant, Hughes has risked the writerly equivalent of a small-college hockey team challenging the Detroit Red Wings on their own ice. It's one thing for a writer to attempt a grand sweeping space opera or sword-and-sorcery fantasy in multiple volumes, and boldly go where many have gone before. After all, even mediocre, formulaic adventure fiction can succeed by feeding the insatiable appetite of its market. But it's quite another thing to go up against Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe on their own turf-The Dying Earth in the Twenty-First Aeon, The Urth of the New Sun-and at least hold your own. Although Hughes's Old Earth doesn't evoke the decadent richness of Wolfe's Earth at the end of time, or the dim, brooding, quirky exoticism of Vance's, Fool Me Twice provides a pleasant adventure in an interesting scene with a main character who grows on one quite nicely.

Filidor Vesh is the Archon's apprentice, having proved his worth (more potential than actual) by saving his uncle and Earth from a creeping interdimensional horror in Fools Errant. Unfortunately, Filidor doesn't seem to take his new position very seriously, except to the extent that it provides him the best of food, drink, and fast company in Olkney, the capital of the Earth's government-the Archonate. The tedium of government service and Filidor's general fecklessness create the opportunity for him to blunder so badly that the Archon sends him off on a mission to put things right again. And so he does.

In The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), Jack Vance revisited the last age of Earth, which he had first explored in 1950 in The Dying Earth. The Eyes of the Overworld featured a not-so-likeable rogue named Cugel the Clever, who found himself engaged in a series of picaresque encounters in the course of a long journey. Matthew Hughes uses the  Cugelesque progress to good effect in his story of Filidor's quest to find the beautiful thief Emmlyn Podarke and put things right with The Ancient and Excellent Company of Assemblors and Sundry Merchandisers. Readers acquainted with the wanderings of Gene Wolfe's Severian the Torturer or of Vance's Cugel will feel right at home with Filidor as he overcomes human peculation in a variety of forms, performs with an itinerant troupe of actors, and counters the machinations of bureaucratic functionaries bent on self-aggrandizement.

After reading the first few pages of Fool Me Twice (not having read Fools Errant), I didn't really expect to like the book, because it struck me as being a little too derivative of Vance's Dying Earth, with Filidor a little too much like a Cugel the Clever who had secured a fortune. But quite quickly I changed my mind, and found myself enjoying Hughes's new Old Earth -- which is sunnier and less oppressive than Vance's or Wolfe's -- and enjoying Filidor's struggles to overcome his sybaritic self-indulgence and do something worthy for a change. So, the bottom line is: I am looking back for a copy of Fools Errant to see how it all started for Filidor and Archon Dezendah VII, and I am looking forward to Filidor's further adventures.