Product Description

Bracketing those dead to us, delineating the forms and histories of our desires, in a breath, in tears, in the pattern two opposing collections of striation compose in the catalytic reaction of palm to palm, all physics are bent, and all probabilities, all convenient presuppositions and extrapolations of futures not yet lived are erased: all we have is now, this moment, this beautiful, fragile moment, and

broken, the third and final installment of the silverthought trilogy by Paul Evan Hughes, is the shattered, non-linear depiction of the author's struggle to make amends for the war-torn realities he has written into existence. Equal parts enemy and An End, broken merges the rich, horrifying universes of the previous installments of silverthought into one cohesive transgression.

Readers of enemy (Booksurge Editor's Choice, 2002) and An End (winner, Independent Publisher Book Award for Fantasy/Sci-Fi, 20! 03) will recognize characters and places from those stories thrust into a new war within the author's collapsing mind. Part love letter, part handbook for the apocalypse, and part confession, the lines between good and evil, love and hate, and reality and dream blur to a hesitant gray. There are no easy answers to the recurring questions: Why Seattle? What internal mathematics, what broken calculus, defines the boundaries of our sanity? How can we so easily destroy that which we love the most? broken is an extended meditation on how the way we walk through life brings into existence countless universes of uncertain design and the silver latticework that binds us across pasts and futures. Where does the fiction end and reality begin?

Speculative fiction, metafiction, transgressive fiction... broken is a fragile narrative that defies definition and cuts to the heart.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3912656 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 344 pages

About the Author
Paul Evan Hughes is a critically-acclaimed interdisciplinary artist who lives in Northern New York.

His previous works include Enemy, winner of the Booksurge Editor's Choice award, and An End, which received the Independent Publisher Book Award for Fantasy/Sci-Fi in 2003.

Hughes is the editor of Silverthought Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"Walk with me?"

"Paul..."

"Please?"

Judith Command was being systematically dismantled around them, the billions, trillions of soldats perdus uploaded into a pattern cache that Paul would carry. The bubble around the non-place had developed great cracks on its periphery, and in places, the blackness of the unknown beyond shined down through.

They walked to the edge, the place where they could look down into the Timestream. The Alpha Point sparked an eternity below them. As they walked, his hand was close enough to Alina's so that she could hold it, if she wanted. We know the distances between us; we test the lines and hope someone crosses.

Theirs was a heartbroken silence built of everything that had gone wrong, all the fights over nothing, the context of them, the place and time out of time in which they lived. They were both machines built from life's flickers.

They sat on the edge and still said nothing. Their hands were still close enough to hold.

! Their feet dangled down over the universe.

He said, "It was good."

She said, "I know."

A thousand other lives tried to crawl into that moment, a thousand other faces, but as he sat there dying, Paul looked only at Alina. The angle of her jaw, the patterns of her freckles, the flare of her nose, eyes that smiled, upturned, even when she was crying. A thousand other faces tried but failed to replace her.

We can count down our final moments in the stillness between another's heartbeats.

We can search for a perfect moment and realize that we've already lived it.

We can ravel a ball of silver, wear a filament of it on our wrists. We can hear the music across the water, the stars falling above, and we can dance, reach out for a hand. The world falling apart around us, and none of it matters. Life is a series of moments, of splendor, of misery, the finest line woven between. We can sit on the edge with the love of our lives and not say anything at all.

He reached out,! withdrew. They looked down at existence. He coughed.

She turned back to the bubble's center. "I think they're ready."

He looked. Judith Command was empty, except for them. There was wind, and it was cold.

"Are you?"

"No."

They looked into each other's eyes for the first time in months. Years. Time had no meaning at the edges.

He held out his hand.

She smiled. Her eyes were wet. He was bleeding metal.

There were echoes.

She took his hand and jumped off the edge.

They fell, but in that scale, they were motionless. Judith Command raced away above them, the bubble's edges cracking and releasing, great plates of metallish shattering down toward them, the whole of the last fort erupting and falling. And they flew, hands held, eyes open, as shards of Command danced around them. They wove, hands held, between the pieces.

They pulled toward each other, arms frantic, grasping, bodies shuddering to relearn their symmetries, to reseat the way they fit together perfectly. They tumbled, hands held, down into the past, into the deepest night, the places hidden away for lifetimes.

Paul wrapped his arms around Alina, couldn't hold her close enough. He pulled back, looked into her colorless blue eyes, remembered the taste of her, gone so long now, tumbling, hands held, end over end, a dizzying, frightening descent, picking up speed, whirling, faster, faster, and Command was nothing above them, a cascade of countless fragments running alongside.

He never looked away. Reached out, one hand shimmering, one hand clasping hers, so small and perfect. It was a beautiful hand that he couldn't see, enveloped in his own, but he could feel it, contact, reached out, one hand shimmering, and called the silver to him, the detritus of Judith Command, and it came, an ocean of metal, swarming, singing around them, wrapping and protecting, enveloping, consuming. He would protect her. He would hold her close. And it formed around them, hands held, silver forming and reforming, merging with him, the finest silver web spidering through him. She didn't look away from the horror of him as he shifted, merged, became something else. She was caught in an expanse within him. She was encapsulated inside of him, a ship, a living ship of silver, the last of Command, the machine sea, and an ancient silent song. She looked up and saw the last of the light before he closed around her, the pattern cache falling into place above, sparking to almost-life, his hand changing, snaking, draping. His face a distended mess of metal, and then flat, and then nothing. It was dark inside of him. It was quiet. She was cold. He never looked away.

remember me
remember me on the wind
in the autumn
please remember me
the reflection

The interface webs dug into her.

and I loved you. Know that I loved you.

They fell.

Customer Reviews

The end chapter of a masterpiece
Reading Broken-
First off, it bears mention that someone who would try to read this book as a stand-alone work is likely to find themselves utterly lost. Broken references characters, races, locations, and theoretical knowledge that is explained in detail in the previous two books involving this storyline (Enemy, and An End). Therein lies, as far as I can see, the book's single major flaw: while Enemy and An End could conceivably be read individually, Broken does not stand thematically on its own. That having been said, if you have read Enemy and An End, you do yourself a significant disfavor NOT to read Broken, which answers probably 90% of the lingering questions and mysteries from both books, and finally provides some lasting closure for the tortured characters of both plotlines.

Speaking of torture, it also bears mentioning that this book contains scenes of extreme violence. Surprisingly, I'll be willing to bet that if you read the entire book the ultra-violent scenes of rape, mutilation, and murder will not be what you remember most about it.

Broken was originally first released as a serial publication, as it was written, on Silverthought.com. This format, while entertaining on the short-term, did not lend itself particularly well to the reader understanding the incredibly cohesive continuity of the eventual complete novel. Hence, if you have only read Broken in serial form, I highly recommend that you re-read the novel in its entirety. The effect is completely different than piece-by-piece. Much of the subtle character interaction that makes this novel so terrific is lost and choppy in serial form, not to mention Hughes' propensity for constant revision, which makes the novel (until it finally reached print) a growing organism.

Novel highlights-
Broken begins with the unusual situation of an author's characters confronting him on a beach. They pull him into the story, which has already been established in separate but parallel storylines (Enemy, and An End). The Author, Hughes himself ostensibly, is brought into the story by his own characters in order to stop the destruction and havoc caused by Maire, a tortured and outcast renegade who grows constantly younger and carries a silver plague that will annihilate the Judas/Judith fleets from the Enemy and An End novels. We have met Maire before, along with most of the other major characters, but we have not until now seen evidence or detail of her motivations. Hughes handles this brilliantly with a gripping account of a person put through unimaginable hell who feels as though she must destroy the universe in revenge.

The Author proves not to be the omnipresent figure you expect him to be, and he slips away from the protagonist Judas/Judith, allowing Maire to sweep the timelines of reality and destroy them little by little.

Near the final third, the story appears to fray and literally come apart at the seams. Not just the universe that Hughes has created but the story itself. The framework of storytelling itself is stretched over this fantastical idea, and the idea expands uncomfortably within like a bird within an egg.

Motivations become tangled and inseparable we know that Paul and the author is at one end of a polarized spectrum with the tortured, miserable (yet somehow oddly justified) Maire at the other. Richter and Hope, Alina and Reynald, Whistler and Hank, their motivations become murky and disconnected, perhaps owing to the 92% of reality which has been erased or corrupted. Hope, we discover, has inexplicably become trapped in Café Bellona's back room. This, along with a number of other plot developments we accept, if we do not quite understand them. Along the way, there are dazzling narrative vignettes including a character diving into the Sun, a hard-to-stomach rape scene, the Author meeting and conversing with another version of himself, and a quiet but utterly haunting scene of solitude and loneliness that carves a stark moment of clarity into the emotional maelstrom that is the final third of the book. This last I consider to be possibly the high-point of the entire trilogy in terms of raw storytelling talent.

One major theme of this novel is how storylines, and ultimately the people that populate them, overlap and merge into strange, unpredictable hybrids. I have seen this a number of times in my own writing where I base a character on someone I know and then the character in the novel becomes someone utterly different and unexpected. Hughes plays on a variant of this in Broken whereby characters from his real life have bled into the story, and subsequently in Broken bleed into EACH OTHER, causing the reader to free him or herself from the preconceptions of the characters themselves. Jarring inclusion of characters within characters, the line between fiction and real people becomes not just a blurred line but a fogland where the two are on equally shaky footing.

It's an interesting way to illustrate the life that narrative fictional characters have in the mind of an author, which, oddly enough, pretty much covers the thematic scope and intent of the novel in general.

Another theme that is touched on repeatedly in Broken but never fully explained is that of children. Children are constantly being born, dying, preying on each other, embodying antagonism (in the case of Maire), and carrying out a number of other symbolic duties. I have no reference point with which to draw conclusions about Hughes' intent in including these references, but it is something we haven't seen from him yet, and interesting in and of itself. As I thought about this more, I realized that the Silverthought trilogy might represent a backward life-of-man metaphor. Enemy seemed to be involved heavily with death. The Black, aptly named, becomes an allegorical representation of the oblivion that we try so hard to escape from in our mortal lives. An End, a sly misnomer, is actually not about an end, but more about what happens when idealism crumbles and meets with bitter compromise and disappointment. Or life, as it were. To finish the backward cycle, Broken seems to be about birth. Birth of children, characters, plotlines, ideas, rebirth of self... and so forth. Hughes might, with the childhood metaphors, be hinting slyly at the reverse lifespan triptych allegory. Either that, or I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue.

Honeybear Brown returns, one of the single fun comedy-relief characters that Hughes has worked into the series (see also: the huge planetship Gary from An End), and even gets his licks in. Also, the sleeping God-emperor motif which worked so well for Frank Herbert in his novel Dune works doubly-well here. Paul the author slips into a silver bath, confronting something terrifying and surrendering completely to it. He emerges changed, reborn, and ultimately that much further along on his journey to becoming the omniscient God that all authors wish they could be to their writing.

Strengths-
From reader's point of view, Broken is the payoff of doing the mental work required to understand the first two novels. Enemy and An End are not simple books, and Broken can be downright mind-bending at times. But in the end, Hughes does not cheat us out of the closure that Broken provides.

It is perhaps relevant here to say a few words about the addition of the author himself as a character in Broken. This was a considerable risk for Hughes, who really put the integrity of the entire trilogy in jeopardy by doing so. Many sci-fi readers, myself included, do not easily tolerate this sort of meta-writing. Proving himself to be superior to authors like Stephen King, who utterly ruined The Dark Tower by writing himself into it, Hughes delivers a rather seamless version of himself which not only blends surprisingly well with the rest of the Silverthought trilogy characters, but also affords Broken the setting for some of its best scenes. Café Bellona becomes the touchstone for reality in the novel, a touch which some might find a bit over-cooked, but I personally thought was very natural and likable. There were moments like this in Enemy and An End, but they were not as cohesive as in Broken.

There are a number of epic, flashy set pieces in these novels. The ones that come immediately to mind are the space battles from Enemy and the enormous planetary guns from An End. These more than show Hughes' ability to write convincing, thrilling sci-fi. It is in Broken, however, that we get to see what is under the emotional black armor of his characters. Broken is a book full of jealousy and treachery, revenge and bitterness, hurt and surrender. Happily, even largely lacking the whiz-bang of the first two novels, Broken remains potent and engaging.

Weaknesses-
As I mentioned above, the primary weakness of this novel is that it doesn't stand alone in terms of plot, theme, or characters. Much of what is to be learned about the characters that populate these times and worlds is laid out in Enemy and An End. This is not so grave a weakness as it seems, however, as it is clear that it was never the author's intention to create a stand-alone story from Broken.

Another stylistic element that some readers may grapple with are the highly-unusual content and formatting (the Heiligenschein and Among the Living sections). Initially, in the serialized versions, these were much longer and somewhat more diffuse. Hughes honed them down to the essential in the finished novel and they read very smoothly. The Heiligenschein segment, it bears noting, makes up for its quirky weirdness by being utterly original and unlike anything I've ever read in a novel before.

Final comments-
Broken is thematically the least-accessible book of the trilogy, and cannot really stand alone the way Enemy and An End could. It is however, the best written by far, as well as the most consistently interesting and emotionally-provoking. Smoldering moments of tension between believable characters that the reader is heavily-invested in give the novel an authenticity that is undeniable. Broken represents the end result of a learning and growth arc for author Paul Hughes that spans eleven years. In the end, we are left not scratching or shaking our heads, but nodding distantly as the author himself is known to do. Broken brings the Silverthought trilogy to a worthy, intelligent and surprisingly thoughtful end.

A Triumphant Conclusion.
If one has read enemy and an end, then Broken is like that last leg of a journey to that place you just can't wait to get to.

And Hughes delivers one hell of a ride.

The novel dances around storylines and times and settings and it is probably the most cerebral novel I've ever read, intellectually indulging and also entertaining as the reader is constantly challenged by fear and anguish and loss.

Do not let this be the first book you read by Mr. Hughes, it is the third in a remarkable trilogy. Broken would be very difficult to read if read out of turn.

Hughes is a brilliant writer, and this is speculative fiction not aimed at the casual reader. I can't wait for more.