excerpts:
…] (Hughes’s) writing grates, indeed, chafes at the spirit of modern speculative fiction. Steeped in the post-Delany aesthetic, the author’s latest (and presumably last) offering is a confusing, dissatisfying and ultimately offensive collection of “transgression.”
If we are to assume that P.E. Hughs (sic, henceforth) is in fact dead, then the literary world should rejoice that we will no longer be subjected to such self-indulgent rubbish. It is painfully obvious to even the casual reader that what Delany handled with such skill in The Mad Man (1994) and Savage Bent (2007), Hughs maims. Is Broken truly the gift he had intended for his sf idol? Doubtful. Delany, were he dead, would be screaming invective from his grave.
Essentially a string of space-suited dykeouts intermixed with the post-post-modernist ramblings of a mentally-ill young man from upstate New York, Broken is transgressive only in implication…What else would we expect from a self-published author? What he lacks in talent, he makes up for with vivid descriptions of sexual encounters, cannibalism, brutality. In essence, exactly what we don’t need in a novel.
A message to Mr. Hughs, if he is reading this from an island populated by other victims of the age-twenty-seven curse: stay dead. Our slushpiles are already filled with similar pap.
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search results: [[Paul + Hughes] + [criticism + posthumous + negative + response]]: [translate: standard] :
author: SE Colmey. title: a response to “[re][dundant].” publication: NY Times Book Review, 14 February 2010.
[la biblio[“o]mnithèque universelle confirms textual probability to statistical significance +/-14%]
full text:
To Ms. Ruskin:
I guess I’m partly to blame for the book that so upsets you, Paul Hughes’s Broken. I found the manuscript in an old cardboard box he had willed to me should he disappear. Inside the box, there were photographs, letters, cards, things that meant nothing to anyone except him and me. At the bottom, I found a cd-r with the novel on it. Sorry that I disappointed your precious literary world so much. I just thought it was a story that should be told.
What’s your problem with his book? That he wrote things that made people actually feel? That he had a following, people who would read everything he wrote just because of the way he had of drawing us in and making us think we were part of the book or his life? Some of us loved him. I understand it’s your job to read books and write reviews, but your commentary wasn’t a review of the novel, it was an attack on someone dear to many of us, someone who had more love to give than he knew what to do with. He knew how to write the things that most of us could never even begin to put into words, and his words were beautiful, magical things. Some of us regret letting him go.
And yes, I’m the Seattle girl in the books. I’m sure that taints your view of me. I’m too involved in this to see things clearly, right?
It’s now been almost eight years since I saw him, five years since anyone else saw him. I just hope he finally found what he was looking for somewhere out there.
In closing, fuck you, Ms. Ruskin. It was a good book, better than anything you ever could have written. “Pap?” Nice word. Do you feel proud that you have a big vocabulary? Get over yourself.
Sincerely,
Mrs. SE Colmey
Chair, Fine Arts Department Cornish College of the Arts Seattle, WA
p.s. There’s an “e” in his last name. Use it.
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search results: [[an + end] + [forever + dust]]: [translate: standard] :
author: unknown. title: “An End of Us: An Ontological and Epistemological Discourse on The Forever Dust.” publication: Ein Journal des Instituts für die Erforschung des Heiligenscheineffektes.
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[la biblio[“o]mnithèque universelle confirms textual probability to statistical significance +/-33%]
excerpts:
…] post-Judas anthropological teams from Sol-3 (14.7+) found little to suggest that the agent actually arose from “Black Space,” that area of the AC system most affected by the destruction of Proxima Centauri. Intervention posts listening from the edge of the timeline reported no significant evidence of remaining industrial centers, much less the planetary production system that the creation of silver would have necessitated.
Perhaps it should be noted here that the anthro teams did eventually compile a comp/cont report on the status of the AC system pre- and post-war. That report is fundamental to understanding the conditions in that system that most likely were contributing factors to the madness of subject Maire and the Forever Dust she caused.
…] remember that teams arrived mid-war, and even under the cover of […
…] major shipping lanes closed, and some evidence suggests that orbiting war platforms enacted a planetary blockade that forced the starvation of over ninety percent of the population. We can only imagine the desperation that the survivors felt while quite literally under the gun of the blockade platforms. Added to the lasting effects of biowar and engineered climate changes, the […
…] without doubt tortured.
Torture is that most effective of appropriations: the victim in essence becomes the transitional commodity of the process. The information gathered during torture is only secondary in importance to the “owning” of the victim by the perpetrators. The process is one of excision. First, the victim is excised from her normal environment. Second, the victim’s language is excised. Torture enacts a regression within the victim; it takes away the ability to communicate as one always has and instead replaces it with those first forays into verbal communication that we make as infants: cries of pain and fear. Third, the perpetrator restores just enough verbal ability to excise the required information from the victim.
Torture is an insistence. Without the benefit of […
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search results: [[Paul + Hughes] + [criticism + posthumous + negative]]: [translate: standard] :
author: Thara Ruskin. title: a response to SE Colmey. publication: NY Times Book Review, 15 February 2010.
[la biblio[“o]mnithèque universelle confirms textual probability to statistical significance +/-27%]
full text:
My dear Mrs. Colmey,
You are the last person I would have expected to write to defend the late Mr. Hughes. My apologies for misspelling his surname. Truthfully, I couldn’t be bothered to care when I wrote my review; fact-checking is the responsibility of interns. Let us for the moment set aside personal differences (I am familiar with your painting practice and your work at revitalizing Cornish, and for that, I applaud you as an admirer) and analyze your involvement in PEH’s books.
We all know the story of the manuscript at the bottom of the cardboard box; please don’t insult my intelligence. I commend your willingness to seek the publication of the third novel in the silver series, given the unflattering character summary of you young Paul wrote in both an end and his online journals. I commend your willingness, yet lament it at the same time. What you’ve given the literary world is a horrid tangle of self-serving scribble hardly worthy of a hand-written diary entry. Empower yourself, woman! Can’t you see what he was writing about? You. He wrote about you in the most selfish, vain way possible; your side of the story has never been represented. All the readers are left with is but a shadow of whom I assume you truly are. That, in and of itself, is unforgivable. Had I been you, I’d have burned that cardboard box and been rid of that man.