kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, crime fiction
At last! An author capable of writing a book with an engaging style, compelling plot, interesting characters, and exciting new ideas, who doesn't bother cluttering up the story with oversexed or wantonly vicious characters or scenes.
Matthew Hughes is relatively new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy scene, but is an established writer and journalist and speechwriter. He writes crime/suspense fiction as Matt Hughes. His new book Black Brillion combines both. I am glad he refers to this work as Fantasy, for it is set in a time so far future—the Sun is close to going Red Giant—that one could not hope to imagine the technology.
This is a story of transformation, on many levels. The protagonist, one Baro Harkness, a policeman or "scroot" (the police enterprise is named "The Bureau of Scrutiny"), forced to work alongside a criminal he recently arrested, learns a few things about himself, humanity, and existence. A most welcome lesson: any unique tool or skill can be used as a weapon.
The plot revolves about a particularly dreadful alien species, apparently extinguished millennia earlier. Yet the viewpoint is not unitary, and one comes to realize that the common practices of one culture may seem irredemably evil to another...and vice versa. Hughes does not give us much from the Dree viewpoint, just enough to elicit the tiniest twinge of pity that they had to be expunged, though the book ends with a bit of doubt, whether they really are extinct.
The concept of "the commons," an ancient, corporate store of archetypical memories, drags one along, hoping for more. We'd all like to gain control of our dreams (as someone who begins dreaming whenever my eyes close, even when awake, I've been trying to learn such control for decades). The vivid descriptions of the waking dreamscape doubled my desire.
The title material, a type of Philosopher's Stone, along with its blue, red, and other-colored siblings, is supposedly a distillation of ancient industrial waste from our time. This I find the least plausible of the ideas...I am too much the Geologist and Chemist!
I'll be looking for more of this author's titles, scouring out existing ones, and awaiting future offerings.
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