Put simply, this is the kind of book I’d like to read more of. A lot more of.
It’s got swordfights and spaceships and sea-dwelling clan cultures. It’s got murder and bureaucracy and philosophical arguments and ruined castles and robots and masked aristocrats and dancers and secrets and feuds and more.
Template is one of Matthew Hughes’s Archonate novels, set in a far, far future highly-reminiscent of and clearly inspired by Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories, but not quite that “dying” yet. Call it the Fading Earth, perhaps. A world where humanity is scattered to the stars, but where things are decaying and have been for so long that no one remembers a time when they weren’t. Across The Spray, the sweep of human civilization, mankind is splintered into thousands of arcane and obsessive cultures, locked into rigid social, political and philosophical codes, often in stark disagreement with one another. The rich are sumptuously wealthy, the poor are desperately abject and the many worlds of humanity are places where idle play and the grueling fight for survival go hand in hand, all observed with an arch sense of wit and satire, an eye for detail and a deft and confident way with narrative.
Template concerns Conn Labro, an indentured-for-life “player” in a culture built around gambling. He’s an expert duelist, combatant and strategist who plays games for the man who owns his contract, against anyone who can afford the game. But now he’s adrift—his boss has been killed and so has an longtime gaming client, but the client has left him a fortune, enough money to buy himself free of indentured servitude. And enough hints have been scattered to make him realize that he’s now a target himself and that there’s something about who he is and where he comes from that puts him in danger, from unknown powerful and deadly forces.
What follows is a novel of adventure, as Conn Labro plays a no-rules game against unseen opponents, across multiple worlds. And a novel of ideas as well, as Labro seeks answers about who he is and how the universe works. And a novel of style, as Matthew Hughes plays with worlds and cultures and concepts in a lushly textured way, creating a rococo universe full of clever conceits, maddening difficulties, rich satire and more, all in clean, elegant prose that catches the reader’s interest and carries you smoothly through a story that’s by turns intriguing, exciting, amusing and in the end, very satisfying.
The way I’m describing it, it sounds messy and tangled, and that’s definitely and deliberately true of the setting, but the story itself presents you with engaging characters and sends you through that world so easily that the messy and complex setting becomes simply the context for a story that establishes momentum and interest and never flags. And has a great battle at the end, to boot, with compelling action, worthy goals and excellent villains. In some ways it feels like Alexandre Dumas (the elder) writing swashbuckling far-future science fantasy with lots of comedy-of-manners to it.
All of the Archonate novels have this sense of a richly-textured, decadent setting with engaging human stories, but I think Template is, so far, the strongest of them, the one where the story carries the reader best and most smoothly through a fascinating world.
It’s not out in the US yet—I got the British-published limited hardcover—but it’s due to come out next year in trade paperback from Paizo Publishing. And there are more Archonate novels coming, for which I’m grateful. And I’d encourage anyone who’s interested to check out Hughes’s earlier Archonate novels, particularly the stories about Henghis Hapthorn, Old Earth’s “foremost freelance discriminator.” Hapthorn’s adventures begin in the short-story collection The Gist Hunter and continue in the novels Majestrum, The Spiral Labyrinth and the upcoming Hespira.
[And the comics geek in me has to note: All the while I was reading it, I kept finding myself wishing DC's Legion of Superheroes series could be written like this, with such a smorgasbord of varied and textured cultures, that feel credibly like different settings, worlds that diverged from a common source but went down wildly different roads. I suspect superhero fans would begrudge the space it would take to show off the various worlds as distinct and unique cultures with their own philosophies, architectures, topographies and more—it's easier to make them all shorthand "hi-tech future" settings, and just get to the action—but I think it would be a treat.
[Ah well. As long as I get more Archonate novels, I'll be happy.]
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Kurt Busiek is the writer of numerous graphic novels and comics series, including Astro City, Marvels, Arrowsmith, Shotrockets and the upcoming American Gothic. He lives somewhere in the vast Pacific Northwest with his wife and daughters.
This review originally appeared at Busiek.com, and is reproduced here with the author’s permission. All rights remain with him.
