It’s been a crappy few weeks. My wife went to Italy and brought back a coughing flu for my Christmas present. It keeps on giving because I’m still trying to shake it. Getting from our UK December housesit to our Brittany gig meant standing around British train stations on New Year’s Day listening to announcements about how the railway’s signal system had collapsed. Luckily we made our flight. Once we got to Bordeaux we had to collect the car we’d left there and drive six hours to Brittany.

But wait, there’s more. The flu and the traveling triggered a bout of pneumonia and the coughing got so bad I pulled three rib heads out of my spine and had to have them put back in by a chiropractor. Twice. All of which is really not as much fun as it sounds.

So I was very pleased yesterday to discover that the New York Review of Science Fiction has run a lengthy survey of my work by the British fantasy critic and aficionado, Mike Barrett. He connects a lot of the dots that I’ve laid down in my scattered oeuvre while focusing on the role of Luff Imbry, my corpulent master criminal of Old Earth in the penultimate age before Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth.

He sums up by saying: “Matthew Hughes has consistently produced well-written fiction that diverts and pleases. His creation, the world of the Archonate, is a well-crafted and evocative background for storylines that are consistently readable and which display much originality.”

If you’re interested in reading the whole piece, you can buy a PDF of the edition here for $2.99.