Archonate

Old Earth turns through its penultimate age, the sun gone the colour of a bruised plum, and its inhabitants — being far too civilized to take alarm — occupy themselves with etiquette, connoisseurship, and elaborate fraud. This is the Archonate: Matthew Hughes's far-future Earth, governed with studied indifference from the city of Olkney and raised, quite deliberately, in the manner of Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Its central conceit is a cosmological joke. Reality runs on one of two irreconcilable principles — sympathetic reason or sympathetic magic — and the age is poised at the very hinge where the first is quietly ceding to the second, to the considerable inconvenience of everyone who had arranged their affairs on the assumption that logic would go on working. The world is walked by a recurring troupe of rogues, scholars, and reluctant heroes, each with a strand of his own. Henghis Hapthorn, Old Earth's foremost freelance discriminator, pursues crimes even as his rational methods — and his sardonic machine-familiar — begin, alarmingly, to sprout intuition (Majestrum, The Spiral Labyrinth, Hespira). Luff Imbry, a fat and fastidious master forger, connives through The Other and a run of shorter capers. The Kaslo Chronicles drop the hard-headed operative Erm Kaslo into the moment the great change actually arrives. Around them orbit Filidor Vesh, idle heir to the Archon; Guth Bandar, cartographer of the Commons, humanity's shared dream of archetypes; and the picaresque thief Raffalon and hapless henchman Baldemar, who furnish the lighter, sword-and-sorcery-flavoured tales. The pleasure is tonal: courtly, fussily precise prose, and characters who narrate their own petty vanities with impeccable gravity while world-ending metaphysics politely defers to good manners. Nothing insists on a fixed order — the strands stand apart, and any door admits you to the whole. Newcomers are best served beginning with the Hapthorn trilogy from Majestrum, its fullest expression; those who prefer a rogue's-eye view may enter through Luff Imbry instead.