Hughes is the author of the novels Fool's Errant, Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion and Majestrum, all of which take place in his Archonate universe. He is a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and is the author of many other short stories, several of which have been collected in The Gist Hunter and Other Stories. Forthcoming are the novels The Commons, Template and Wolverine: Lifeblood (writing as Hugh Matthews), and a number of short stories. His Web site can be found at www.archonate.com.

SCI FI Weekly interviewed Hughes via e-mail in October. Most of your fiction is set in your Archonate milieu, and takes place in "the penultimate age of Old Earth." Tell us about Old Earth: How is Old Earth different from 21st-century Earth, and just how old is it, anyway?

Hughes: Well, for one thing, Old Earth is entirely imaginary, whereas our world is only partly so. In the penultimate age, the planet is an incredibly ancient place where nothing new ever happens and never ever could, or so everybody believes. It is populated by people who are intensely interested in some narrow philosophy or cultural niche, and who go through their lives in complete disregard of anyone else's concerns. Consider, for example, the Tabernacle of the Morphitic Demiurge, a cult mentioned in Fool Me Twice. Its members believe that the universe and all its inhabitants are the dreams of a slumbering deity, and that it is every sentient creature's obligation to try to wake up the god and bring about the end of all things. So they go about clashing cymbals and shouting, "Awake!" or "Yah! Bahoo!" at unpredictable intervals wherever they happened to be, often to the discomfort of any within earshot—they're banned from theaters and libraries. They've also spawned a radical subsect, the Pinchers, who believe that the god itself must be a character in its own dreams, and, if identified, can be awakened by the shock of direct physical contact. Of course, anyone might be the god's dream avatar, so the Pinchers go about seizing persons at random and beating the hell out of them.Your latest novel, Majestrum, which features "Old Earth's foremost freelance discriminator," Henghis Hapthorn, just came out from Night Shade Books. How did you come to write it?

Hughes: By a combination of happy accident and careful calculation. First, the accident: I keep an "ideas" file on my hard drive. When I decided, back in 2003, that I should try selling short stories to the magazines in order to raise my profile before Black Brillion came out, I looked through the file and came across a snippet that said something like "Suppose you came to suspect that you were living in a world that was the result of someone's three wishes going as wrong as they always do?"

I thought, "That'll do," and began to sketch out a story set in my Archonate milieu. It needed a point-of-view character, and out popped Henghis Hapthorn, a Sherlock Holmesian sleuth. He is hyper-intelligent, hugely successful as a "freelance discriminator" and gloriously vain about his ability to unravel mysteries. Then he suddenly finds himself transformed into an impoverished toad of a fellow whose shining intellect has been turned down to about 15 watts.

He sets out to investigate, aided by his acerbic integrator, an artificial intelligence he designed and built to be his Dr. Watson. Their search leads him to an unlikely answer—the cause of his disabilities, which are shared by every handsome, wealthy and intelligent man in Olkney, is magic. But magic, as Hapthorn well knows, is all a lot of humbunkery.

This causes a cognitive dissonance for Hapthorn, even as he solves the case, which would not have amounted to much except that when Gordon Van Gelder read the story, entitled "Mastermindless," he quite loved it, and I recognized that Hapthorn was too good a character to use once and throw away.

At this point, we enter the realm of calculation. I realized that I could write more Hapthorn tales and sell them, the better to make myself known to readers. It also made sense to create a continuing story arc for him, so that the episodes might someday be fixed up into a novel. I had written a throwaway line that had been in my first Archonate novel, Fools Errant, about how rationalism and magic (or sympathetic association, to use the polite term) alternate with each other in a long cycle, although each time one supersedes the other, all memory of the previous regime rapidly fades. I realized I could use that as the framework for the story arc.

After six appearances in F&SF, Hapthorn was nicely developed and the rationalism/magic storyline was laid out. My agent suggested that it was time for me to pitch a series of novels to the big houses. There was Hapthorn, a known quantity to thousands of F&SF readers, who like him quite a bit, so I sketched out three novel-length episodes, the first of which is Majestrum. Unfortunately, my slowly growing readership had not been reflected in sales of Black Brillion, and I had become one of SF publishing's many baby turtles that hatch out, race for the surf, but fail to make it safely. Some editors at the big houses wanted to buy my books, but above them stood corporate managers with cash registers where their hearts should be, and the editors were overruled.

But by then Jeremy Lassen and Jason Williams at Night Shade Books had brought out my short story collection, which included all six Hapthorn F&SF tales. Jason believed that what the Archonate needed was a damn good point-of-view character, and he was convinced Hapthorn was the very fellow. So I made a deal with NS for the three novels and promptly sat down and started Majestrum.The Hapthorn stories are incredibly detailed and intricate; do you have to do any kind of research to write them, or does it all come from the imagination?

Hughes: Actually, they're not all that detailed. It's a technique I learned from reading Jack Vance: Pick the right detail, the one that tweaks the reader's powers of confabulation, and you evoke the whole environment. So, there's no research. I make it up from a rough and ready grasp of how magic works—from reading Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith in my younger years—and from observing how my own psyche seems to be put together. (I recognize that there is a crowd inside my head, but most of us manage to get along with each other, and those personas who are best suited to a given situation are allowed free rein to deal with it.) Years ago I read Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, and bits of their ideas apparently took root.

I suspect, though, that with these Hapthorn stories, parts of my unconscious are working their way through the general problem of our times. The world to which we were so well adapted has, in the past five years or so, begun to change quite radically. We have war instead of peace, fanatical enemies when we used to have only commercial rivals, and many of the foundational truths of Western society are being challenged from without and from within.

I don't know if this is really what's going on in the back of my mind. Like Hapthorn, I encounter uncomfortable facts and try to make sense of them. Unlike him, I cannot simply ask my unconscious to show me their true shape. So I muddle forward, like most of us.Hapthorn appears to be based on or inspired by Sherlock Holmes. Is he?

Hughes: I confess: I had written three or four Hapthorns before I ever read a Sherlock Holmes story. I hadn't even seen more than a few disconnected scenes of Basil Rathbone's several films (though I had seen the burlesqued versions like the one where Michael Caine played Holmes as a complete bumbler, while Ben Kingsley's Dr. Watson was the real sleuth, or the one with Gene Wilder). I suppose Holmes has become such an archetype of the cerebral detective that I just absorbed him direct from the collective unconscious.

However, when I wanted to write a flashback story showing the incident that led to Hapthorn's becoming a discriminator, I got a one-volume collection of Holmes and looked to see if it included his first case. "Thwarting Jabbi Gloond" was based on that story—"The Adventure of the Gloria Scott."Aside from Hapthorn, one of your other popular characters from your Archonate milieu is Guth Bandar. Bandar is what's known as a "noönaut"—an explorer of the "noösphere." What is the noösphere, and where did that idea come from?

Hughes: The noösphere (I borrowed the term from Teilhard de Chardin, who used it in a different sense) is the collective unconscious of humankind, the great commonality that we all share in the back of our psyches, the realm of Carl Jung's archetypes. It's the part of our minds that contains all the characters that we encounter over and over again in myth, legend and story: the Hero, the Wise Man, the three-in-one goddess (virgin, mother, crone), the Good Beast, the Trickster, the Wayfarer, the Fool, the Boy of Destiny and many more. It's the Central Casting of the psyche, but in my version it extends beyond archetypal personas to cover archetypal Events (from mere moments like the First Kiss to decades-long sequences like the Opening of the Frontier or the Invasion of the Barbarians) and archetypal Landscapes (the Night Forest, the Prairie, the Ice-Age Taiga). I got the idea from reading Jung and from immersing myself 30 years ago in Joseph Campbell's multivolume work on comparative mythology, The Masks of God. I borrowed the archetypal landscapes idea from Robert Holdstock's seminal Mythago Wood.

In Bandar's time, scholars have long since discovered how to project their consciousnesses into the archetypal realms, which are connected to each other in a globular labyrinth. They've explored and mapped every Location, and noted the entry and exit gates to each one. They are able to pass through them unseen because they have discovered and memorized the many different thrans (sequences of musical notes sung in the right order), some of which blind the senses of the archetypal persons they encounter, while others open the connecting gates.Where did the idea for the thrans come from?

Hughes: Well, there had to be a way to get around in the collective unconscious and to avoid being absorbed into an Event or Situation. I remembered how Orpheus was able to descend into Hades and be safe there because he was protected by the beauty of his singing. I built a mechanism out of that—noönauts who sing the right sequences of notes remain invisible to the idiomatic entities that populate the different Locations of the Commons, as well as to the "usual suspects"—the true archetypes (Hero, Fools, Wise Man, and so on) of which the idiomats are variations.

In Bandar's time, the thrans have all long since been discovered and memorized, though it took scores of millennia for the brave explorers of the Commons to discover exactly what combinations of notes worked. And you would have had to be more than ordinarily brave to stand in front of a charging sabertooth, singing different combinations of notes in the hope that you'll hit the right thran before the beast sinks its fangs into you.When do the Bandar stories take place in relation to the Henghis Hapthorn stories?

Hughes: They're roughly contemporaneous, some time in the early years of the reign of the Archon Filidor.But in the Bandar stories, the shift toward magic that Hapthorn is experiencing doesn't seem to be present.

Hughes: Hapthorn has had the bad luck to encounter the earliest forerunners of the coming change. The transformation from rationalism to magic doesn't proceed like a wave front. Instead, it is like a liquid seeping osmotically through a permeable membrane. But there are places where the seepage is slightly greater, forming small "puddles" where magic works better. Hapthorn has stepped into some of these puddles and is thus a little damper than just about everybody else in the universe. Guth Bandar has his own concerns that have not brought him into contact with any of the puddles, so, like the rest of Old Earth and the Ten Thousand Worlds, he is unaware of the impending change.On a similar note, why does the noösphere never come up in Hapthorn's investigations?

Hughes: The noösphere is of little interest to anyone except scholars of the Institute for Historical Inquiry. It was all thoroughly explored, mapped and delineated over hundreds of thousands of years, which is why Bandar got into so much trouble for suggesting that there might be something new for the scholars to concern themselves with.The Guth Bandar stories, which have appeared individually in F&SF over the last couple of years, will now be collected in a fix-up novel, The Commons, for Robert J. Sawyer Books. When you wrote the first story, did you envision the entire arc of The Commons, or did the stories evolve organically?

Hughes: It all began with Guth Bandar in Black Brillion. I had meant him to be a walk-on character who would do some interesting side business about the Commons, then disappear while I got on with the plot. But I found that my hero, Baro Harkless, was fascinated with Bandar—which meant, of course, that Bandar's business was fascinating the guy in the back of my head who does the creative heavy lifting. So I changed the direction of the book to make the noösphere central to the plot.

Then a writer/editor named Nick Aires asked me to do a story for a POD antho that he was putting together, and the guy in the back of my head said, "Why not bring Guth Bandar out again?" So I back-dated him to his student days and did a self-contained story. But after I later sold the piece to F&SF, he kept edging into my mind. You see, when I'd been writing Black Brillion there had been more to the whole Commons than I'd had room to put in; Tor required the book to run less than 80,000 words. I hadn't been able to do more than hint at how unusual Baro Harkless was, and how it came to be that, though he was untaught, he was able to enter the Commons like an adept and do things there that not even an expert like Bandar could do. So I decided to write a companion novel that would come at the story from Bandar's point of view. And, because one doesn't make much money writing niche-market SF these days, I wrote the novel in episodes and sold them, one at a time, to Gordon Van Gelder (may his tribe increase). So the first Bandar story—"A Little Learning," available for a free read on my Web site—was an impulse. But the impulse grew into a novel.The characters in your Archonate stories all have very unusual and distinctive names. How do you come up with them?

Hughes: I borrow some, make others up. Guth Bandar, for example, extends from Guthrie, a Scots name, and Bandar, which is of Saudi origin (Prince Bandar Ibn Sultan Ibn Abdul Aziz was ambassador to the U.S. until recently). Henghis Hapthorn came from a combination of Genghis Khan and a legendary Anglo-Saxon leader named Hengist, plus a made-up name that sounded vaguely like Rathbone. Turgut Therobar, the evil, magic-wielding magnate from "The Gist Hunter," is partly named for former Turkish prime minister Turgut Özal, though I've no idea where Therobar comes from.

I create odd names because I want the reader to sense that we're not in Kansas any more—the era I'm writing about is not our 21st-century Western world—and the people we meet are not like us. In their world, everything that can be done has been done, and done over and over again. There are no more frontiers to conquer, lessons to be learned, hidden corners to be discovered. There's just life, and the problem of making it meaningful while it lasts.Critics have described your work as a cross between Jack Vance and P.G. Wodehouse, and you've cited those two as primary influences. What is it about their writing that inspires you?

Hughes: With Vance, it's his awareness of the vast scope for strangeness and variability in us humans. You'll notice that there are very few aliens in Vance's works—people are more than odd enough. They get an idea in their heads, and they build their whole world around it, a world that can be simultaneously delightful and monstrous, prodigal of wonders but with some gray horror lurking just behind the riot of colors in the landscape. And then there's his way of telling the tale, the precisely chosen detail, the casual aside that reveals vistas that tug at the imagination but which we can only glimpse in passing before we're on to the next mordant twist in the plot. And, of course, there's the dialogue: the carefully mannered indirectness, the irony, the cool words punctuated by sudden exclamations of passion. Vance was just about the first SF author I ever read, some 45 years ago now, and he's the only one I reread.

From Wodehouse, I draw humor and the recognition that a fearsome duel can be fought within the sedate confines of a drawing room, the only weapons razored wit and crushing scorn. But I am also indebted to Plum for showing me how to propel into the world such decidedly un-Vancean heroes as Filidor Vesh and Henghis Hapthorn, who plow on through whatever I throw at them, often complaining bitterly, but all the while blissfully unaware of their own manifold faults and foibles.

My other influence is the lamentably and unjustifiably forgotten Thorne Smith. Everybody should read Thorne Smith, especially in their teens. He makes you laugh.Aside from those three, and any others that have influenced you, which authors do you like to read?

Hughes: This may cause disaffection, but I don't read much SF anymore. I started reading Jay Lake because I met him and liked him. I still read Gene Wolfe because he impresses the hell out of me. But I read much more crime fiction than SF: Elmore Leonard, Michael Connelly, Donald Westlake, Larry Block, Reginald Hill, Tony Hillerman, Walter Mosley.You did some ghostwriting work and now have written a media tie-in novel. Talk about what it's like working on one of those projects as opposed to your own creations.

Hughes: Ghosting has differences and similarities. Writing someone's memoirs in the first person requires me to understand the person as a character, since it's a character that I will be presenting to the reader. That means using some of the same techniques of detail-choosing, scene construction and structural rhythms that make a novel work. On the other hand, I can't just make up stuff.

I've done only one tie-in so far, an X-Men novel entitled Wolverine: Lifeblood for Pocket Books (writing as Hugh Matthews) that's due out in February. Writing that book was not much different from the crime fiction I used to write before I started selling science-fantasy. I used a plain, hard-edged style, and the hero was tough but sympathetic. One difference was that I was constantly aware that I had to stay within the boundaries of a character that was already well known to the readers; Wolvie has fans, and those fans have expectations of him, and I owed it to him and them to meet those expectations.Before turning your hand to writing fiction full-time, you worked as a speechwriter for some time, didn't you?

Hughes: I was a political and corporate speechwriter, mostly freelancing, for about 30 years. I was very good at it, because I had a knack for getting someone else's voice (and worldview) into my head so that I could write a speech that sounded like the person who was giving it. How did your experience as a speechwriter shape your fiction writing?

Hughes: Several ways. For one thing, I developed a productive partnership with my unconscious, so that I could sit down and bash out a full-length speech in a day—and it would be just what the speaker and the situation required. I have produced first drafts for demanding speakers (e.g., a heavyweight professional politician's address to a leadership convention choosing who would head the party) that were accepted and delivered as written.

Speechwriting gave me a hell of a lot of practice at writing for the voice. Even though I often write fairly ornate dialogue in my Archonate stories, the sentences are all sayable. Anyone with a decent command of his lips and tongue ought to be able to read my work aloud.

Most useful of all, the work took me into places I would never have got into otherwise. I am from that underclass that is politely called the working poor. I should have spent my life loading trucks or, at best, driving them. Instead, by a certain amount of flukey luck and a touch of cheerful determination, I ended up as the confidant of cabinet ministers and CEOs of billion-dollar corporations. I have seen great wealth and great power close up. I don't have to imagine how the Archonate's magnates and aristocrats might act; I have observed their real-life counterparts at first hand. I also don't have to imagine what it's like to be broke and desperate and not knowing where your next meal's coming from, because I've been in those places, too.Any other previous careers?

Hughes: I also edited weekly newspapers, drove a delivery truck, worked in a desk factory, was a night janitor in a car dealership and was an orderly in a private mental hospital. As a teenager I was, briefly, a burglar.A burglar?

Hughes: Only on a small scale. I gave it up. You were lucky to get ten cents on the dollar, and besides, it wasn't a nice thing to be doing.That suggests an interesting youth; what was your life like before you became a fiction writer?

Hughes: Most of my childhood was spent in Kitchener, Ontario, but we made a quick flit out to Vancouver when I was 13, my father being anxious to avoid some creditors after his renovations contracting business suddenly collapsed. I spent some months in northern Alberta as a teenaged volunteer in the Company of Young Canadians (similar to VISTA in the States), living in a log cabin with a family of Metis [a Canadian aboriginal people], no electricity or running water, eating a lot of moose meat and bannock bread, and being conscripted to fight a major forest fire. Seven years after that I was staff speechwriter to the Canadian Minister of Justice in Ottawa.

I am from the working poor, the Canadian equivalent of what Americans call trailer trash. People think I'm extensively educated, because I speak and write well, but I dropped out of university because I couldn't afford it and became a weekly newspaper journalist. By sheer fluke, I ended up as a speechwriter for political leaders and CEOs of billion-dollar corporations, although I never became "one of the boys." I was always the outsider, an aspect that recurs in many of my characters.

I've had an unusual life. Went to 16 different schools (and I skipped a grade). I once accidentally killed a man and saved the life of another with my bare hands within less than 24 hours. I was 17 years old at the time. I've dealt with chronic pain of one kind or another pretty much since I was 12, at first courtesy of a well-placed kick in an elementary school soccer game and later because a drunk rear-ended my car when I was 23. I used to belong to Mensa.You killed a man and saved someone's life in the course of a day? How'd that happen?

Hughes: I was 17 and broke, and the only job I could get was in a private hospital full of long-incarcerated, senile mental patients. It was grossly understaffed. Rushed off my feet, I omitted to secure a patient thoroughly. He tipped himself over in a chair, breaking his hip, but was unable to tell anyone about it because he had lost the power of coherent speech. Later on, I gave him his weekly sitz bath [a hip bath], undoubtedly exacerbating his condition. After I went off shift, he succumbed to shock and died. The next morning, while the administrator was grilling me as to what had happened, we heard a noise on the concrete fire steps outside his office. A nearly blind octogenarian ax murderer had got into the stairwell—the security was laughable, the place having been built as a cushy nursing home for the elderly, but had managed to attract only one floor of "paying guests"—and as the boss and I came out of his office, we saw the old guy at the top of the first flight. He had gotten turned around and was just tipping over to fall backwards down the steps. I rushed and caught his head in my hands just before it would have hit the edge of a step. I'm sure the impact would have split his skull. It certainly hurt the backs of my fingers. The administrator told me to take him back up to the second floor, tie him to a chair, then go take a coffee break. Nothing more was said about the dead man.

A funny coincidental coda: 20 years later and 3,000 miles west, I was writing speeches for one of the two brothers who had owned the chain of nursing homes of which that place was such a poorly performing link. As I say, an unusual life.