Fantastic Metropolis

The Smell of Telescopes

By Rhys Hughes
(Tartarus Press, 2000)

That Welsh trickster, Rhys Hughes, makes a mockery of every literary convention under the sun, indulges in garrulous word-play beyond the patience of Gilbert and Sullivan, shows his Welsh roots at every opportunity, and transcends the deliberately self-conscious elements of his postmodern style to entertain the reader at the highest levels, each sentence as gleefully petulant as this one, although more controlled. Perhaps story titles will provide the best synopsis of the varied madness of the contents: “The Purloined Liver,” “The Squonk Laughed,” “A Person Not in the Story,” “The Hush of Falling Houses,” “Depressurized Ghost Story.” Each tale endeavors to make the metaphor flesh and to hardwire into each sentence a complicated series of verbal somersaults and punning pratfalls. Sometimes, as with all activities that include a high degree of difficulty, the acrobats miss the grasp of familiar hands and fall to the circus floor far below—but only rarely. A more playful or exuberant collection could hardly be imagined, as perhaps marginally captured by the following passage from “Depressurized Ghost Story,” in which a Victorian mountain climber visits Tibet:

It may be of interest to record that I was first to the top, though I did not boast of my achievement aloud, contenting myself with a little dance. The consequences of this action were… (yes, an avalanche has swept away the rest of this paragraph. It has taken one of my readers with it. There he goes! Him with the beard!”

Hughes’ prose has the lightness of Calvino’s prose mixed with a hardy Welsh texture that grounds it in the ridiculously practical. Hughes is probably one of the most criminally neglected writers in the world—in that his imagination, inventiveness, linguistic cleverness, and his lack of cliché should have been enough to long ago attract the attention of the same literary mainstream that delights in the aforementioned Calvino, in Borges, in any number of highly respected fabulists of the past 50 years.

This book list originally appeared in altered form in the New York Review of Science Fiction.