Hi Matthew, Thanks for giving us some time here at SFFWorld.
Let’s start with your Archonate Universe in which you’ve written stories for almost fifteen years now. For those not familiar with it can you tell us a bit about it?
It has kind of grown in the telling. It started out as just Old Earth, one age before Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, when the parts of the planet still inhabited by human beings are ruled by a vaguely all-powerful Archon, who is somewhat like Vance’s Connatic, though far less grim. Gradually, the scope widened until it became The Ten Thousand Worlds: that are the human-settled worlds of our local galactic arm, which is called The Spray.
We’re a very long way down the timeline. The originally settled worlds, now known as the Grand Foundational Domains, have long since become rich, well populated, thoroughly civilized places that have spawned “secondaries” – worlds peopled by escapees from the Domains: folks whose philosophies of life put them at odds with the more easy-going ways of the long-inhabited worlds they left behind. Then there are obscure little worlds that are neither Domains nor secondaries, where incomers take their chances.
There is no grand galactic empire. Each world governs itself and there is a kind of cooperative anarchy amongst them. On some of the secondaries and smaller worlds, of course, cults of various kinds and rigorous political systems have been established, which can sometimes create unpleasant surprises for the unwary traveler. It’s a good idea to consult Hobey’s Guide to Lesser and Disregarded Worlds before touching down.
Old Earth, by the way, is an unfashionable place, as forgotten among the Ten Thousand Worlds as the city of Uruk is forgotten by most of us. A number of planets describe themselves as the original home of humankind. Nobody much cares.
What was your inspiration? Some say you’ve been inspired by both Jack Vance and Jonathan Swift when you created this universe.
It began on the Labour Day weekend of 1982 – so it’s been a lot more than fifteen years – when I saw a story in the Vancouver Sun about a “novel in a long weekend” contest. I’d just moved into a house in South Vancouver, meaning to work from home (I was a freelance speechwriter then). I had a new IBM Selectric correctable typewriter and I thought, “I’ll write something and send it in.” I made a few notes, thinking I’d do a picaresque fantasy about a fop who goes from one place to another, each of those societies being built around a particular fetish – sports, politics, industry, eco-fanaticism – a kind of Gulliver’s Travels motif. The style was my primitive attempt to mimic Jack Vance, whom I revered and still do, with overtones of P.G. Wodehouse (whom Vance venerated, by the way).
I got started and bashed out 27,000 words in the 72 hours allotted. I called it Fools Errant.
It did not win the contest, didn’t make the short list. Turned out the contest was run by a literary press and my little Vancean novella never had a hope in hell. But, years later, when I got my first word processor, I put it on a floppy and added to it, bit by bit, until I had a short novel. In 1987, I sent it to New York agents, bagged a big one, but eventually found, as he did, that no one wanted the kind of fantasy novel I’d written.
In 1994, I sold it to a Canadian press that was taken over and dissolved the week the book came out. In 2000, I sold it for real to Betsy Mitchell, who commissioned a sequel, Fool Me Twice, that came out just in time for 9/11 to turn the American mood sharply away from ironic farce. Never having been one to learn much from experience, I continued writing in the same universe. I was a stubborn child and grew up to be a stubborn man.
You also have an Urban Fantasy series called To Hell and Back, which in many ways are a bit different from what people normally think of as Urban Fantasy. Why this different take on Urban Fantasy?
Mainly because I had no idea what urban fantasy was, and I’m not sure I do now, except that it often involves werewolves and vampire (zombies, too?) and teenage heroines. I wanted to write something in a modernized vein that recalled another of the favorite authors of my youth: the now lamentably forgotten Thorne Smith, who wrote Prohibition-era fantasies about ghosts and witches and statues of Greek gods coming to life, all of which happen to mild-mannered fellows who find themselves swept up in a tide of flappers and alcohol-fueled hilarity.
I also wanted to write about the world as it was seen by a high-functioning autistic, since one of my sons is like that. And, philosophically, I wanted to address the issue of why the universe is so obviously only a rough draft of what it ought to be.
Penguin Random House have now prepared a teacher’s guide to Costume Not Included. Was this totally out of the blue and what are your expectations from this?
Yes, totally out of the blue and I have no expectations. I don’t understand their motivation and think the listing must be a mistake by someone in the cataloguing department. I would, however, be delighted to see the book go into American high schools, because I believe the religious content, especially my depiction of the historical Jesus, stranded in a left-over timeline, would bring out the torches-and-pitchforks crowd. And thus I would sell a lot more copies.
You’ve also recently released Devil or Angel and Other Stories, a collection of your non-Archonate short sf and fantasy stories. Do you have any personal favourites among these stories?
I rather like the title story. It was originally a treatment for a feature film, back when I was writing screenplays and treatments and had an agent who was trying to get me a deal. Someone has pointed out that it breaks all the supposed rules of short-story writing and yet it works quite well.
You shorter fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s, Asimov’s and a number of “Year’s Best” anthologies. How different do you find writing short stories and shorter fiction rather than novels? Do you have a preference?
Novels take more time and give me more room for self-indulgence. That’s about the only real difference, since I’m a show-don’t-tell minimalist in terms of description and character development. I recently serialized a novel in episodes in Lightspeed Magazine at so-many cents a word. The payment added up to more than I could expect as an advance from a commercial publisher, and it left me free to sell it to PS Publishing, which will bring it out next year in limited editions and an ebook.
I’m happy writing either long or short pieces, because when I’m writing is when I feel most completely myself. I have something of a fragmented psyche, and writing temporarily binds the pieces together.
Fantasy, Science Fiction, Mystery and Thrillers. Your writing spans many genres, which do you enjoy the most to write?
I am essentially a crime writer trapped in a science0fiction and fantasy writer’s career. A lot of my sff stories are crime stories about criminals, cops, or private detectives, with spaceships and magic. Having spanned so many genres, though, I don’t think I could be happy confining myself to only one. I suppose my purity has been spoiled by all the odd roads I’ve wandered down.
You write media tie-ins under the name Hugh Matthews and crime fiction as Matt Hughes. Why did you choose to separate your work like this?
I had advice early on. Marketing people are apparently simple-minded folk, and easily confused. They can only think in categories. Best not to tax them too hard.
Thinking back, how did you start writing? Was there a particular book or moment in your life that spurred you on?
Just after I turned sixteen, I started a historical novel based on a snippet of information about Alexander the Great sending out an expedition to circumnavigate Africa. As I now vaguely remember, I planned to tie it in with something I’d read in The Kon-Tiki Expedition, though I no longer recall exactly what. My inspiration was Lionel Sprague de Camp, whom some of your readers may know from his fantasy novels, but who was also a dab hand at the adventurous historical novel. I strongly recommend his An Elephant for Aristotle.
Generally, do you tend to work from one key idea that you then refine, or do you spend a long time maturing ideas and mixing them together until you find something that works?
I’m an intuitive, seat-of-the-pants writer. I start off with a character in a normal situation then make something happen that creates a conflict. Then I take it from there and see where it goes. I’ve got a fantasy story in the current F&SF, “Curse of the Myrmelon,” where a man shows up on a detective’s doorstep and says he needs to have a curse removed. That was the original image in my head and when I wrote the first page I had no idea what would happen next. It turned out to be a story about commercial espionage.
Once I get started, ideas pop up along the way and I work them in, figuring that the guy in the back of my head who does the real creating knows where it’s all leading to. I usually end up with a first draft that’s ninety per cent of the finished product, then I polish it up and send it out.
What has been most surprising to you in your writing and publishing career?
That I’ve made a couple of dozen novel sales, including reprints and foreign rights, but have yet to have an agent pitch a book for me and receive an offer. I’ve had agents pitch and be unable to place books that I’ve later sold myself. And I’ve pitched and got offers then had an agent improve the deal. And I’ve pitched books and made deals myself. But the supposedly normal way to get a book sold has never worked for me. I think maybe, back down the road, I offended some minor god of publishing, and this is the punishment.
What books inspired your career as an author, and what authors do you enjoy now?
I’ve mentioned Vance and Wodehouse, Smith and Sprague de Camp. I also read Bradbury and Heinlein and Asimov and all the usual suspects when I was a young teen. Vonnegut and Heller and Dick and anyone who did black humor and satire as I got older.
Today, I read Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake (including his Richard Stark novels), Robert B. Parker (especially the Jesse Stone books), and James Lee Burke who is my nominee for the finest American crime novelist of them all. Plus, I re-read Jack Vance and P.G. Wodehouse, because (a) their work never gets old and (b) with the devolving state of my memory, I can be well into a book before I realize I read it twenty years ago or, sometimes, just last year.
I haven’t read sf or fantasy for twenty years and have no idea where the field is going. I just write what I want to write, which makes me a niche author, but the people who like what I do seem to like it a lot.
How are you personally finding the e-book revolution?
Getting paid for republishing old short stories as ebooks and PODs is the modern definition of “money for old rope.” And I’m all for it.
I’m selling my backlist as ebooks (and as POD paperbacks via CreateSpace). It brings me in a few hundred a month, which is welcome. I’m very pleased to be able to sell collections of my short stories because, unless you get invited into a reprint antho, there is virtually no other market for pre-published shorts. Even if only a few thousand people read them when they first appeared in print, and there are tens of thousands more who might enjoy them, there simply aren’t any commercial publishing channels to connect with those potential readers. The publishers would make money doing it, but they make more money publishing new stuff. And making more money is what corporate publishing is all about.
Most writers have some other thing they’re passionate about, what’s yours?
Travel, I suppose. Over the past eight years, I’ve been wandering the world as an itinerant housesitter. I’ve lived in twelve countries, can speak rudimentary French and pochissimo Italiano, and have just generally had an interesting time. I’m in Italy now, Ireland in the new year.
We also have to talk about the future. What plans do you have, any upcoming projects?
I’m writing a historical novel that I’ve been thinking about for more than forty years. If I sell it when I’m done, there’s another one I’d like to write. And as long as I’m able, I’ll probably keep on writing Archonate books and stories.
Once again, thank you very much for your time, Matthew.
You’re welcome.
Cheers,
Matt
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Interview by Dag Rambraut – SFFWorld.com © 2015
