Template

I've recently had the privilege and joy of advance-reading Matthew Hughes' novel Template (May 2008), written a few years ago but only now being released in both hardcover and a fancier slipcased edition by independent UK publisher PS Publishing.  With only 700 copies total coming into print between the two editions, I recommend ordering promptly to assure yourself a copy!  How can you miss a book wherein the author casually tosses off bits like:

"We came to a point," said the pastoralist, "at which he compared my appearance to the south end of a northbound squajja.  There was then no recourse but to the hassenge."

Well, of course there wasn't.  Without the slightest idea of what a pastoralist, a squajja, or a hassenge was, I was entirely confident of that.  Hughes romps verbally through his worldbuilding, alternately explaining his coinages (hassenge) and leaving them to squirm happily through your imagination (squajja).

And to call it worldbuilding is an understatement; Hughes has created a whole series of worlds, each uniquely bizarre of custom, starting with the transactualist world of Thrais, where the free market is taken to extremes by human and machine alike:

"Remain until I return," he told the aircar.

"If it is in my interest," the vehicle replied.

Who needs a New York cabdriver when the taxi itself drives a hard bargain?

Any of the planets visited or mentioned would make a fascinating setting for a story all by itself, and the novel ranges across several of them, including Old Earth herself, where aristocrats wallow in the sexual decadence of the Immersion, wearing full-head life masks of their dead ancestors, while artistic quasicommunists live currency-free lives on an archipelago.  While my instinct is to be skeptical of all-too-common science fictional universes in which all planets (except Earth) are settled by people of one character/interest/sect and somehow manage to retain an unlikely planetwide uniformity for generations, I was having so much fun with Hughes' work that I voluntarily shut down that part of my brain so I could enjoy the ride and the trips to the dictionary to find out if crunchy words like "nuncupative" were real or not. 

Oh, and there's a plot, too.  Conn Labro, indentured professional duelist and Thraisian transactualist, has his life upended when an elderly customer of his is found tortured to death, leaving him enough money to buy himself free and the mysterious encrypted bearer deed to something, somewhere, which immediately makes Labro himself a target for assassination.  Accompanied by stranded dancer Jenore Mordene, he sets off to find the assassins, trace the suddenly-mysterious customer's history, and claim the property represented by the deed.  In the process, he confronts the culture shock of realizing that the entire galaxy does not run on his principles ("How could there be a place where property rights are not central to the organization of society?") and discovers that some interpersonal interactions do not lend themselves to accounting models.  The more he discovers, the more he realizes that his own history and very self are not what he thought them to be; the final revelations and resolution are nicely developed and satisfying. 

There are still weak points here and there, as when a planet morphs suddenly from "mystery world" to "planet of my birth" without benefit of any solid chain of reasoning and the willful blindness of the bartering islanders to the transactualist nature of their conversations.  Female characters are few and mostly lean towards the stereotypical.  But even Hughes' initial infodump goes down smoothly by virtue of the fascination quotient of the information (I was almost sorry when it ended), and what I first took for stilted language quickly shows itself to be deliberately formal speech patterns.

And did I mention the worldbuilding?  Deliberately obstructive bureaucrats (never open for business because no one ever has any business).  Scroots.  The Micturation upon the Remnants.  Divorgian seminarians.  The skunk-like ultraterrene Stig.  The cooperative game of paduay.  The Blue Green Exemplar and the Sky Blue Epitome.  Hughes ought to meet Catherynne Valente, whose books of tales are similarly packed with casually brilliant details, and he really should write his in-universe reference work, Hobey's Compleat Guide to the Settled Planets.  I'd snap it up in a minute for more of this stuff.

The final special pleasure, personal to me, was that Hughes, unlike so many authors, gets his dancing exactly right.  From brief performances ("Dancers without music can be indistinguishable from persons afflicted by nervous disorders") to a barn dance-equivalent social evening, he manages to convey the sense of dance without adding enough details to trip himself up.

I'm generally a "wait for the paperback" person, and rarely buy limited editions of any kind, but I'm placing my order for a Template hardcover and plan to seek out Hughes' other books and stories in the Archonate universe as well.  I hope this book gets picked up by larger publishers in the U.S. and U.K. - it deserves a bigger audience.

Special thanks to James Nicoll for pointing out the advance-e-copies-for-blogging deal on Hughes' website and organizing a collective reviewathon of this book!

Comments

[Marilee J. Layman]

So far, nobody is making me want to buy it. I hope the reviews have a better affect on other people!

Oh, and in the quotation, I think you mean "my" instead of "by."

[Serge]

Hmmm... Would you describe the story as one where the true aim is to be satirical of our own contemporary society of Earth? One thinks of Gulliver. The story sounds like the kind of novels that Jack Vance - rather that I think Jack Vance writes because I have never read any of them, but reviews, I have read.

That being said, I'd better go to their site as soon as my corporate obligations are fulfilled.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Marilee:
Different strokes, I guess. Thanks for catching my typo!

Serge:
I think Thrais is to some degree a poke at the libertarian anarchists who think a free market is the solution to all evils. The rest of it, not so much.

The one thing reading everyone else's reviews has convinced me of is that I really ought to read some Vance. I think I tried one novel of his many years ago and didn't care for it, but it seems reasonable to give him a try every couple of decades to see if I like him better with more life behind me.

[Serge]

Susan... I've been thinking about doing that too. That's why a few months ago I bought Tales of the Dying Earth, which contains Vance's four novels of that Far Future Earth. I may find myself falling in love with his stories, or I may decide that they just aren't my cup of tea. We probably all have come across an author that everybody else thinks is one of the best, and we can see why they think that, but we can't feel it.

[King Rat]

There was just too much of the clunky writing to make it really appeal to me. The story was decent, but stuff like what you noted about the "mystery world" suddenly becoming the "world of my birth" was just too prevalent for me to really like the book. In my review, I provide another example where "rif" is introduced, becomes all-important, and is then dismissed as secondary, all in the space of a couple of pages. If it was a mass-market paperback, I'd be fine with it all, but at $40 I expect a lot more.

[Susan de Guardiola]

King Rat -
I was more delighted by the worldbuilding than the story, but I really liked the worldbuilding and the quantity of tossed-off background material with no detailed explanations. It added a richness to the universe that I really liked and let my imagination play without the boundaries and storytelling awkwardness imposed by infodumps.