Matthew Hughes's Blog: barbarians of the beyond - Posts Tagged "collective-unconscious"

 

Here’s a review of my Guth Bandar novel, The Commons, which was published by Robert J. Sawyer’s imprint with Fitzhenry & Whiteside back in 2007. The reviewer is Gareth D. Jones and he is writing in the most recent edition of SF Crowsnest, which is a nice place to be seen if you’re selling sf in the UK.

He says: Matthew Hughes’ writing is highly enjoyable, full of wonderfully-described characters who use rarefied vocabulary that had me turning to the dictionary on a regular basis. The dialogue between characters is always entertaining, as is the selection of facial expressions and extravagant gestures that they like to use.

The Commons was a “fix-up novel,” the industry term for a book-length work of fiction stitched together out of short stories, usually after the stories have appeared in mass-market magazines. It’s a way of getting paid twice for the same writing, which authors appreciate, since the pennies-per-word rates and book advances offered these days are pretty skimpy.

All of its component stories originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which has been very good to me over the past dozen years. The last two chapters of The Commons comprise “The Helper and His Hero,” a two-parter novella that was shortlisted for a Nebula Award. The entire sequence of stories follows the travails of Guth Bandar, a would be-scholar at the Institute for Historical Inquiry on a far-future Old Earth. The Institute has long since mapped and studied humanity’s collective unconscious – the Commons – and nothing new has been learned about it for millennia.

Until Guth comes along and begins to suspect that the collective unconscious, our species’s dreamtime, is becoming conscious. And it has a job for him to do.

I wrote the Bandar stories to fill in the gaps in Black Brillion, my 2004 Tor novel in which Guth was a key character. I had expected BB to run about 95,000 words or more, but Tor told me to hold it to under 80k and said 75k would be even better. So I was left with a lot of the background on the waking of the collective unconscious that never made it into the story and decided to write the stories as companion pieces to Black Brillion. I am grateful to Rob Sawyer for bringing them out as a fix-up.

Copies of The Commons might be hard to find these days. You can read the whole Bandar saga in The Compleat Guth Bandar , the original stories as they appeared in F&SF before I “fixed” them “up.”

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I'm moving ahead with the Patreon project, building a landing page and coming up with interesting rewards for patrons who are kind enough to pledge me a dollar or two a month. This week I'm going to shoot a pitch video and send it to a friend in Holland with whom I worked on putting together YouTube videos promoting Jack Vance's Spatterlight Press. He'll give it some production-value pizzazz.