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TEMPLATE

Normally, I've put up the first chapter of each of my novels here on my webpage. But, with Template, I had a request from Jay Tomio, who runs Fantasy Book Spot to let him have an exclusive for his site. So the first chapter is available here at FBS.

But I thought readers might also be interested in the introduction, by the prolific and terrifically talented Jay Lake, who has graciously given me permission to reproduce his words below.

Introduction

by Jay Lake

Matt Hughes has built a career in part out of writing Archonate books. Over the past decade he's had a number of novels published, as well as varied shorter works. Template, the book which you now hold in your hands, is the latest and probably the best of the works so far.

Hughes is a funny, thoughtful man. He is gentle and unassuming in person -- the Canadian ideal, perhaps -- with a sweeping view of the Universe as broad as anything ever created by our field's grandmasters. I'm not talking about elaborated rhapsodies in astrophysics a la Greg Benford, nor Greg Bear's tightly-realized convolutions of biology and destiny. Rather, Hughes's canvas is the human experience itself. His years as a speech writer and political aide have given him a wealth of perspective on which to draw when elaborating both characters and the cultures in which they find themselves embedded.

For all that familiarity with the hearts and minds of his characters, Hughes chooses to work in a future as distant and disconnected as any Vancean saga from the workaday world in which we live. Our own present times barely poke up in Template in any discernible fashion. This is a brave eschewing of a narrative technique quite often employed to anchor a contemporary audience in a tale set a far distance across time or space. It also deprives readers of the clue-spotting which is a favored game of so many fans of far-future science fiction. There is no "Statue of Liberty in the sand" moment in these books, no point at which the light dawns and we can draw the line from today to tomorrow and beyond.

This distancing in Hughes's approach to his work creates a sense of difference which must be taken in and adapted to immediately on the first encounter, much as a new cuisine might be. It requires both investment and trust from the reader. Such commitments are easily given to the smooth, confident style that characterizes Hughes's writing. Still, this is one of the things which places the Archonate books firmly inside the canon of science fiction for good and all -- a dependency on the reading protocols which are virtually unique to our field. That he does this with very little of either science or technology, while remaining firmly science fictional, is testament to the larger qualities of Hughes's auctorial art and craft.

Envision this dyad: a canvas too broad for the spread of a large man's arms; and a paintbox of colors which do not exist in the street outside your front door. Taking these together, you have a sense of the style and substance of Hughes's work, the man's sheer range of imagination. From this dioscuric pair he fashions a brightly-tinted matrioshka array of plots, places and passage of arms, turning through exotic locales and accessible emotional pathways, always with people at the center.

The realization of Hughes's universe is a delight as well, filled with incidental conceits and pleasances that ornament the setting while providing substance to both plot and character. His manifold lapidarian fantasies serve to capture the mind's eye as the reader passes them. The Mordene family foranq, for example, dances lightly with the reader's imagination. It is a great barge built and expanded across the generations of a sailing clan, a towering confection of naval architecture and folk art featuring "carved towers and minarets, painted arches and domes, most in white and gold, like a city from a children's tale but shrunk down to manageable dimensions and set upon a floating hull." Within are kitchens and dance halls and reliquaries and portraits of Mordenes down the generations. Yet this jewel, the lovingly described symbol of a family's victory over the ravages of time, is present on perhaps half a dozen pages within the book. Hughes lavishes the same frenzied level of detail on passing political systems, cultures and technology at every step in the narrative.

As rococo as the novel may be, ultimately Template owes more to Hari Seldon than Gully Foyle. The plot is advanced by machinations of men long dead yet still reaching out from within the graves of time. The will and deeds of these offstage protagonists are carried forward by proxies who themselves are often unconscious of their roles in the progress of events. Even with this very classic "invisible hand" plot in play, the novel's underpinnings are also profoundly modern. Identity paranoia and the price of progress lie at the core of the tale like twinned worms coiled round the heart of a dying prince. In at least one meaningful sense, the central question of the novel is quite literally that of who shall wear the coronet.

Hughes's first Archonate work was the novel Fools Errant, published in 1994. He has produced fifteen short stories and seven novels in this setting, not as a series per se, but as ventures into the world of his mind. I cannot say for certain if there is an overarching plot bridging the body of his work, but there certainly is a set of overarching themes. This is a Canadian sort of universe, bereft of the assumptive exceptionalism so embedded in American culture and literature, instead replaced with a constellation of norms which overlap and intertwine. People are in and of the world, and find their way through it. Like all good fiction, Hughes's work succeeds not for its strangeness, but for its familiarity. The hero's journey is our own journey, after all.

Template will be far from his last Archonate work, I should hope, with this voyage into the future extending into the decades to come for the profit of us all. Come sail his literary foranq and be amazed.