Matthew Hughes's Blog: barbarians of the beyond - Posts Tagged "old-mars"

George R.R. Martin has released the table of contents for Old Mars, an anthology of stories set in the Mars of Bradbury, Burroughs, and other great writers of the science fiction of my youth. The anthology will be out in October, and I will have a story -- The Ugly Duckling -- in it.

I wasn't supposed to be in Old Mars. I hadn't originally been invited, but when someone dropped out just before deadline, Gardner asked me if I could fill in. I reread The Martian Chronicles for the first time in nigh on fifty years and wrote a story I thought fitted Bradbury's elegiac mood. Gardner and George liked it and bought it.

Coincidentally, yesterday when George was putting out the ToC, I got an email from Gardner to let me know that when the text came back from the proofreader, there was a note at the bottom of "The Ugly Duckling": "Beautiful, beautiful story. Brava!"

I'll take my reviews wherever I can get them.

A couple of months before its scheduled October release, here's the first early-bird review of Old Mars, the theme anthology edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois beringing together fifteen stories about the red planet that could have appeared in the old pulp mags.

About my story in he antho, reviewer Mel Odom says, “The Ugly Duckling” by Matthew Hughes reminded me a lot of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles with all its psychological trappings and intrigues".

Which is exactly the effect I was aiming for.

With the retro anthology Old Mars scheduled for release in three days time, the publisher has posted the first fifty pages here.

Since my story, "The Ugly Duckling," starts on page 35, its first half is included in the free-read excerpt.

I'm pleased by the story, for two reasons. First, I was not supposed to be included in the invitation-only antho, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. But one of the initial invitees apparently dropped out, and I was asked shortly before turn-in date, if I could fill in. I was delighted to do so.

The second reason: I wanted to write a Mars story that had some of that wondrous sense of mood and tone that I remembered from my reading of Ray Bradbury's stories back in my teens and early twenties. I wanted it to be an homage to one of the favorite authors of my youth, and would have been delighted if he'd read the story and approved of it. But I had just gotten started on the first draft when word came that Bradbury had died.

So now it wasn't an homage; it was a tribute.

At Tor.com, Robert H. Bedford has reviewed Old Mars, the George R.R. Martin/Gardner Dozois-edited retro-antho of stories set in the Mars sf authors used to imagine before robot probes and explorers revealed the hard, cold facts. Of my story, he says:

“The Ugly Duckling” by Matthew Hughes finds an archaeologist exploring the ruins of the Martian past in a place from which few have returned. Hughes plays with identity, past, and personality in this tale of obsession driving a man to discover what might be best left unexplored. Hughes conjured up a deep past for Mars in this story, and in some ways, a civilization that isn’t too dissimilar to our own.

Actually, Ray Bradbury did the conjuring. I borrowed the background from The Martian Chronicles.

And over at Tangent Online, Collen Chen reviews "Stones and Glass," my story in the November/December issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, now just out. She says the story is "engaging and tension-filled, with a solid fantasy world behind three-dimensional characters."

Lois Tilton reviews a couple of my short stories for Locus online. About "The Ugly Duckling," a Bradburyesque tale in Old Mars , the retro-anthology edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, she says,"The descriptions of the Martian ruins and the recordings of Martian life they hold are truly wondrous neat."

And then she looks at "Sleeper," the second episode in The Kaslo Chronicles, the science-fantasy novel I'm serializing in Lightspeed Magazine . She says, "The combination of character, setting, narrative voice and twisty plot make for the sort of entertaining tale that readers familiar with the author will expect . . ."

As an author of unabashedly old-fashioned science fantasy, I like Paul DiFilippo's take on Old Mars, the retro-anthology of stories set in the "Mars of the mind" that existed before the Mariner probe began the cold, hard factual exploration of the red planet.

He poses a good question: What is the relationship of the genre’s past to the present, actual and ideal? Should certain old-school tropes and themes be abandoned as false and inutile? Can we ever step in the same stream twice, and recapture glories and pleasures of old? Can postmodern approaches somehow lend a fresh aspect to the antique? Are attitudes toward such SF strictly determinable and predictable by membership in a given generation? Is the medium stagnating or advancing by continuing to create such stories?

Advancing, I'd say. The mileage of others may, however, vary.

Old Mars , the retro-sf themed anthology edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, has won the Locus Award for best anthology of 2013.

The fifteen stories in the book are each set in one of the "Mars of the minds" that used to exist in science fiction before real-life probes and rovers revealed the true state of our nearest planetary neighbor. There are tales drawn from the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the warlike source of H.G. Wells's tripod-riding invaders of Earth, and Ray Bradbury's moody The Martian Chronicles.

My own contribution, "The Ugly Duckling," was conceived as a "discarded chapter" of Bradbury's work, set during the early years of humanity's occupation of the red planet and the destruction of the remnants of the Martian civilization.

I can't say I'm a big name in the sff business -- known, certainly, but not a name to conjure with -- but every now and then I get a little validation, like being written up in The New York Review of Science Fiction or being shortlisted for a juried award.

Over the weekend, I received another one of those affirmations: super-editor Gardner Dozois invited me to send him a story for an upcoming theme anthology to be called The Book of Swords. Assuming Gardner likes what I'll send him, I'll be joining K.J. Parker, Scott Lynch, Robin Hobb, Garth Nix, C.J. Cherryh, Elizabeth Bear, Ellen Kushner, Ken Liu, Danial Abraham, Cecelia Holland, and Peter S. Beagle in the table of contents. And probably more big names who have yet to commit.

Over the past several years, I've been in several invitation-only anthos, including the megaseller and World Fantasy Ward-shortlisted Rogues, for which I've actually received royalty payments over and above the generous advance. I've also been in Old Mars and Old Venus and Songs of the Dying Earth.

And while those appearances haven't made me a household name in fandom, they've brought me new readers, many of whom have stuck around. As I often say to fans who email me with kind words, I appreciate the encouragement.