Majestrum: A Tale Of Henghis Hapthorn [Paperback]

Matthew Hughes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 21, 2007

When Hapthorn is hired by Lord Afre to investigate the motives of his daughter's new companion, a young man of indeterminate circumstances, he takes the job expecting it to allow him the opportunity to explore and understand his changing universe. Little does Henghis Hapthorn realize, but the path of discovery will lead to deeper questions, a mysterious assignment from the Archon himself, and the ancient and powerful secret name... Majestrum!

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This start to a promising new far-future series (after 2005's The Gist Hunter) introduces Henghis Hapthorn, a sleuth who combines the confident brilliance of Sherlock Holmes with the amusing voice of P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, in a fantastical mystery reminiscent of Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy novels. Hapthorn is a discriminator—what freelance detectives are called in his baroque world—who's drawn into political intrigue after receiving an apparently simple commission to vet a young man with designs on an aristocrat's daughter. An odd duo aids Hapthorn on his quest: his integrator, an artificial intelligence that has somehow become a furry frugivorous animal that perches on his shoulder, and Hapthorn's alternate personality, which split off during an earlier "transdimensional" voyage and operates according to intuition rather than analysis. Hughes's successful blend of magic, the supernatural and high-tech with Sherlockian deductions (and cryptic observations straight out of Doyle's canon) suggests a long life for Hapthorn. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Until now, Hughes' erudite master detective, Hengis Hapthorn, has appeared only in a handful of tales recently collected in The Gist Hunter and Other Stories (2005). Renowned on Old Earth and throughout the Ten Thousand Worlds as the galaxy's foremost discriminator (i.e., private eye), Hapthorn is the far future's answer to Sherlock Holmes. After a thorny case involving demons and magical forces, Hapthorn finds himself saddled with an extra voice, personifying his intuition, inside his head. This alter ego becomes both boon and annoyance during a pair of cases that interconnect when a routine investigation into the true motives of a wealthy debutante's suitor gives way to a manhunt for an evildoer plotting to overthrow the ruling archon of Old Earth. Somehow intertwined with both pursuits is an indecipherable magical book with which the alter ego is obsessed to the point of threatening to relegate Hapthorn to a backseat in his own mind. Hughes artfully blends wit, colorful characterizations, and intriguing plot twists in a compelling yarn that detective-novel readers may like, too. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 226 pages
• Publisher: Night Shade Books (August 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597800899
• ISBN-13: 978-1597800891
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #127,850 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars May the Canon Continue, December 27, 2006

By 

Gerald Thomas (Centreville, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Majestrum: A Tale Of Henghis Hapthorn (Hardcover)

Consider this more a recommendation than a review. This book deserves to be read by anyone who has ever enjoyed Jack Vance, CA Smith, Thorne Smith, Wodehouse, or M John Harrison's (lighter) Viriconium stories. There is a sufficiently complex and oddball mystery to involve readers, but dialog and setting are the true delights of MAJESTRUM. Hengis Hapthorn is a PI, or discriminator, in a far future earth era based on science and reason, but into which magic (sympathetic association) has begun to assert an influence, as it apparently has in ages past. Hapthorn prides himself on his logic, sometimes justifiably, and is disconcerted that magic's influence has turned his hand-built AI, or integrator, into a living familiar, mostly still able to function in AI mode except when hampered by its newly acquired carnal needs (sleep, food, and a lot of each). In earlier short stories (collected in Nightshade's THE GIST HUNTER), the integrator was Hapthorn's foil, providing most of the humorous dialog. In the novel, this is complicated by the integrator's incarnation and also by a magical incident's separation of Hapthorn's personality into his normal, logical mode, and his intuitive sub-persona. Another delight is seeing Hughes venture offworld and dabble in building truly strange pocket cultures, a la Jack Vance.

Quibble: Without going into detail, Nightshade, please edit more carefully in the future.

I am looking forward to the next two Hapthorn novels, and hoping that there are more in the planning.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Junk Food Speculative Fiction, Please, October 27, 2007

By 

B. Henderson (Georgia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Majestrum: A Tale Of Henghis Hapthorn (Hardcover)

Matt Hughes has offered up yet another richly imagined run of prose with Majestrum. Take a police procedural, dress it in what Victorian prose wanted to be when it grew up, send it into the vastness of colonized space, and there you go. If you like a leisurely plotted story (but not too leisurely, think brisk on an autumn morning), along with characters and dialogue both nuanced, textured, and oh so witty, then I suggest you take your I-don't-want-to-be-spoonfed reading self to the pages of this Henghis Hapthorn offing and any others by Mr. Hughes. As for those any others, refer to his webpage, www.archonate.com, for a thorough bibliography and some sample pages to whet your appetite. He's a deft hand at providing readers with conflict on virtually every page and long on irony and the well-placed twist or three or . . . well, you'll see. Majestrum is a thinking person's dose of science fiction. So, go out, put the napkin in your lap, ready the fork and knife, and dig in.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very well-crafted tale Buy this book!, August 4, 2008

By 

Woofdog (Miami) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Majestrum: A Tale Of Henghis Hapthorn (Paperback)

Another good Night Shade publication. I am reaching the point where I just buy their list without discrimination, everything I have actually read has been very good.

This detective/adventure tale (did I miss a previous one?) takes place in a science-fiction setting (advanced tech, etc) but functionally operates almost as a fantasy - technology is an unelaborated means to an end, fast interstellar travel, etc. This does allow the author to tell a story unencumbered by the need to explain why anything can be done technologically, and it works very well here.

We follow the adventure of a detective/effectuator, initially on an investigation of apparently little import, but then summoned to assist the ruler of Old Earth (the planet amazon readers use now) on a matter of critical importance. This mystery is enhanced by giving the protagonist schizophrenia, as his magically-aspected persona has manifested as a separate entity and is waxing in his own slow rise to dominance over the currently rationality-based persona and world. A few questions do see unanswered at the end of the story, at least as I caught it.

The read familiar with Jack Vance may find echoes of much of his work from the 60s and 70's in this effectuator's tale, and the unsuspecting might be persuaded that this is an unpublished title by the same author. (the resemblance was so strong that at times I thought I saw specific indirect references to vancisms, including the Connactic's (of the Alastor trilogy) habit of going out anonymously amongst his people when the Archon got a knot on the head. Am I wrong? Comment!)

Edit - I have read an interview with the author, and he comes right out and says this is set one eon before the Dying Earth and that " I write the kind of story I like to read, and what I like to read is a Jack Vance story."

He does a great job of it.