Forays of a Fat Man - Weight Loss Journey & Body Positivity Book | Inspirational Fitness Stories for Men | Home Reading & Book Club Discussions

I have found several authors who built on Jack Vance’s work or carried his style and attitude into their own fiction, from Michael Shea, Hayford Peirce, L. Warren Douglas, and Ray Aldridge to many big name authors who openly praised Vance as a source of inspiration. ‘Fools Errant’ began a steady stream of excellent Hughes’ stories in series centered around one character or another, and a few standalones that shared the same addictive atmosphere of awe and roguish adventure. He easily spins off dozens of unique concepts during desperate quests by his unique characters.His future history is set in the aeons of stellar colonization by humanity. Science is often manifested as indistinguishable from magic (or is it the other way around?). Luff Imbry, a master criminal in a far future society where crime has been institutionalized within guilds and bureaucracies, is one of his best characters. Luff, a sort of Sidney Greenstreet eternally searching for the black bird in ‘The Maltese Falcon’, often manages to wind up on the fringes or even outside the bounds of civil crime. His trade is theft and forgery with clandestine middlemen shrouded in a constant veil of secrecy.The four stories in ‘Forays of a Fat Man’ were originally published as separate hardcover novelettes by PS Publishing in the UK and very hard to obtain at a working man’s price. This high-quality paperback omnibus has been well worth the wait.‘Quartet & Triptych’ dominates the collection as the introduction to Luff Imbry, for those new to his adventures. It’s an art heist that starts with the unwilling cooperation of a long dead aristocrat, and almost ends Imbry’s career before the book hits its stride.‘The Yellow Cabochon’ is the tale of a jewel theft that requires murder as a prerequisite for pilfering a gem that turns out to be far more than the caper Luff had imagined.‘Whimsies and Noubles’ finds him imprisoned offworld, after seeking to pass off some counterfeit noubles for a quick profit. A quick upset leads him to the most unusual forced labor camp in fiction. He finds that noubles are far more than jewels, and, oddly, far less.‘Epiphanies’ opens with Imbry’s discovery of family he never suspected. A stranger on the streets of old Olkney calls him “Uncle Luff” and reveals a need for his special skillset to set things right on the far world of Occitania. The many factions of Occitania seek to use or abuse Imbry for abstruse goals.The underlying theme of magic slowly subsuming the universe in a cycle of causation and displacing rationality (with the strengthening of spells, demons, and magicians) is the foundation that glues these stories into a sequence; that, and the emerging interest shown in Luff Imbry by Old Earth’s autocratic, and nearly omniscient ruler, the Archon.I do not care for most fantasy tales out there today, but I anxiously await every one of Matthew Hughes’ stories of the far future’s transition to the supernatural. So much of his writing can sparkle brightly and so grippingly that the reader has to stop and let the words roll around their mind. There is sheer pleasure in savoring the description of appearance, manner, or action that is unmatched by any other modern author.