Latest posts filed under 'News'
Barbarians of the Beyond in The Ottawa Review of Books
The eminent Canadian SFF editor and critic, Dr. Robert Runté, has reviewed Barbarians of the Beyond for The Ottawa Review of Books. He says, “As a fan of both Hughes and [Jack] Vance, I found it an eerie read. It is not just that the novel is set in Vance’s universe, or that the action takes up where Vance’s series left off, it’s that Hughes is writing as Vance, channelling him as only a true disciple could. And yet…it was unmistakably a Matthew Hughes novel too. As collaborations go, I cannot imagine a more cohesive blending of two masters, Hughes building onto—but also staying true to—Vance’s original vision.”
https://www.ottawareviewofbooks.com/single-post/barbarians-of-the-beyond-by-matt-hughes
The last Baldemar story
This is for anyone who reads me, but especially for the Baldemar fans.
Earlier this year, I wrote a short story, “The Cat and the Merrythought,” that is kind of a coda to the Baldemar series. I wrote it for my friend Ed Willett’s forthcoming anthology, Worldshapers, Volume II, which brings together SFF authors he has interviewed for his award-winning Shapers of Worlds podcast.
Ed ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the antho and now it’s in the production phase. Once the copies have gone out to those who funded the campaign, the title will be available on Amazon.
If you’d like to know what happened to Baldemar and Oldo after “The Glooms,” you might want to get in a pre-order now.
You’ll also get to read stories by a pantheon of good authors.
First Cascor story in F&SF
The September/October issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is out, with my novelette “The Forlorn,” the first of a new series about Cascor, a discriminator in the Dying Earth who used to appear in the Raffalon series. F&SF has two more in inventory and I’ll soon start another one.
I strongly recommend F&SF as the world’s premier venue for speculative fiction. It’s no wonder it has been around for 72 years.
Subscriptions are available for the paper and electronic editions, arriving bimonthly in your mailbox or via your reading device.
New review of Barbarians of the Beyond
Chris Morton reviews Barbarians in Mythaxis Magazine, saying, “you do not have to be familiar with Jack Vance to enjoy it – if you are a fan of Vance however, and have finished the Demon Princes series, then look no further for a highly respectable sequel.”
Read the full review https://mythaxis.com/2021/08/29/barbarians-of-the-beyond-by-matthew-hughes/
New Dying Earth novel in the can
I’ve finished a new 82,000-word Dying Earthesque novel, The Ghost Wrangler. It’s set in some of the same locations I used in the Baldemar stories and my 2019 novel, A God in Chains, and recycles some of the minor characters from those tales.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. I can probably sell it to a small press, and may do so. Or I may self-publish it as a POD paperback and ebook in the usual venues.
But I’m also looking into the idea of trying a Kickstarter campaign that would produce a trade paperback and maybe even a signed hardcover edition. There would have to be a learning curve, but I’m sure I can manage it.
In the meantime, I’ll take a few days off then think up another adventure for Cascor the discriminator and his oddball team of helpers. The first Cascor novelette, “The Forlorn,” will run in the September/October issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, coming out next week.
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