Matthew Hughes's Blog: barbarians of the beyond - Posts Tagged "guth-bandar"

As part of my new venture into self-publishing my backlist, I'm taking advantage of the CreateSpace/Amazon connection to turn some of my ebooks into Print-On-Demand paperbacks. Amazing to me, these POD titles will not only be available from online bookstores, but can be ordered by actual brick-and-mortar bookstores in North America and Europe.

The first titles out will be the short story collections 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn and The Meaning of Luff and Other Stories, which have been selling pretty well as ebooks. They should be through the production process before the end of May.

Doing the paperbacks has slowed down bringing out the Guth Bandar story collection and one of my trunk books. But I'll probably get to that after I've relocated to Athens at the end of the month.

I've gone through all the Guth Bandar stories that appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction between 2004 and 2007, assembling them into a collection: The Compleat Guth Bandar. I've turned the text over to my excellent ebook designer, Bradley Schenck; I've arranged an ISBN; and I've asked the inestimable artist Ben Baldwin for a cover. If all goes well, by March, we should have an ebook. Like the others, it will sell for $2.99.

Guth Bandar was a key character in Black Brillion (Tor, 2004), but I didn't have enough room in that book to tell the full story of his career as a noönaut (an explorer of the collective unconscious). So I wrote a series of stories that told how he came to be an unwilling helper to the somewhat tragic hero of Black Brillion, Baro Harkless.

The stories were later stitched together to make the novel The Commons, but The Compleat Guth Bandar comprises the magazine stories in in their original form. The collection includes "The Helper and His Hero," which was shortlisted for a Nebula Award in the novella category.

One of the stories, "A Little Learning," is available for a free read in my excerpts.

I've self-published all of the Guth Bandar stories that ran in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction a few years ago, including the Nebula-nominated novella, "The Helper and his Hero."

The stories were later assembled into a fix-up novel, The Commons, but these are the original texts that appeared in F&SF.

The Compleat Guth Bandar is available as a $2.99 ebook from Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, and the Archonate bookstore.

Here's the blurb:
In Old Earth’s penultimate age, humanity’s collective unconscious has long since been fully explored and mapped by the noönaut scholars of the Institute for Historical Inquiry. But something is threatening the integrity – perhaps even the very existence – of the noösphere, and aspiring academic Guth Bandar finds his career plans diverted by a collective unconscious that appears to be waking up.

And here's a link to one of the stories for a free read.

John DeNardo has interviewed me for SF Signal.

Hardware malfunctions have kept me from updating here since late September, but now I'm back. I have a number of things to post about but 'll do them one at a time over the next few days so as not to be constantly tugging on your sleeve.

My gifted book designer and webmaster, Bradley W. Schenck, has sent me new and improved versions of my self-published ebooks, Fools Errant, Fool Me Twice, Template, The Meaning of Luff, The Complete Guth Bandar, 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn, and Paroxysm.

If you've bought them on Amazon, the updated content will automatically come through. If you haven't bought them, now would be a good time.

Science fiction aficionado and fellow Canadian James D. Nicoll has done something no one else has done: he’s reviewed the novel Black Brillion and the Guth Bandar collection as one story in two volumes. He puts the story and the characters in their proper perspective.

I owe a debt to James. Back when Black Brillion was in the publishing pipeline, he was screening books for the Science Fiction Book Club. He read the novel and recommended it to SFBC editor Andy Wheeler, which started the process that led to its being picked up as one of the club’s featured alternate selections.

Nice to start the year off with a good review. At SF Revu, Sam Tomaino reviews "Telltale," the new Raffalon story in the January February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction: ". . . another delightful tale from Hughes."

And never too late, here's a blogger's review of "Bye the Rules," a Guth Bandar tale that ran in the December 2006 edition of F&SF. It gets an "excellent/vg" rating, which allows me to remind people that all the Guth Bandar stories are collected in The Compleat Guth Bandar available wherever ebooks and POD paperbacks are sold, including my own website.

 

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.