Captains Stupendous — Rhys Hughes

So you want to know about the Faraway Brothers, do you?

Born somewhere in Gascony, they were, in the 1880s, all three of them birthed at the same time from the same womb of the same mother.

Grew up in the same household, they did too, eating the same food, reading the same books, counting the legs on the same spider because the family couldn't afford a real clock; but later they went their separate ways.

Scipio took to the sea, to ships, islands and women; Distanto took to the air, to balloons, islands and women; Neary, unluckiest of the triplets, remained on land, taking only to locomotives and stations and chastity.

Many adventures they all had and often their paths crossed and sometimes they clashed and the consequences were always totally STUPENDOUS!



“Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet's literature… As well as being drunk on language and wild imagery, he is also sober on the essentials of thought. He has something of Mervyn Peake's glorious invention, something of John Cowper Powys's contemplative, almost disdainful existentialism, a sensuality, a relish, an addiction to the delicious. He's as tricky as his own characters… He toys with convention. He makes the metaphysical political, the personal incredible and the comic hints at subtle pain. Few living fictioneers approach this chef's sardonic confections, certainly not in English.” -- MICHAEL MOORCOCK

“Quirky and fantastic and sometimes quite twisted, Rhys Hughes is a treat for those in the mood for something utterly different.” -- ELLEN DATLOW

“Rhys Hughes is an accomplished player with words, plots, effects, relationships, sensibilities; you name it, Hughes tries to stand it on its head. More often than seems attributable to mere chance, he succeeds.” -- ED BRYANT, LOCUS

“Dazzling prose. Put your feet up and dip in. Life will never seem quite the same again.” -- THE THIRD ALTERNATIVE

“I wore throughout the undisplaceable, unsequelchable rictus of a grin of both delight and amazement.” -- MICHAEL BISHOP

“The incredible richness of language, the inexhaustible array of puns, double entendres, weird metaphors, non-lexical use of words, and original turns of phrase… Rhys Hughes is essentially an absurdist humorist, though often of a peculiarly black, tricky, and sometimes bloody sort. Much of his work is travesty, drawing for substance on other works, which he uses as a basis for destructive humor, for reinterpretation in a different mode, or as a starting point for his own work. This statement is not meant in disparagement, for Hughes's new versions are highly original in conception and often brilliant.” -- SUPERNATURAL FICTION WRITERS (SCRIBNERS)

“Rhys Hughes is one of the most wildly inventive talents we are graced with today.” -- ALL HALLOWS

“Hughes' world is a magical one, and his language is the most magical thing of all.” -- T E D KLEIN

“There are no easy phrases to describe Hughes' fiction; it's so exotic. His writing is incredibly precise and at the same time his imagination is so unfettered.” -- JEFFREY FORD

“Hughes' similarity to Spike Milligan runs deeper than the occasional shared lurch of phrase, for he writes as though he'd been bloodied in the same wars Milligan fought for eight decades: the same up-yours melancholia about the malice of the absurd �" about the absurdness of the world defined not only as an inherent lack of species-friendly grammar in the convulsion of the real, but also a sense that anyone who acts as though he believes what he is told by our Masters will almost necessarily inflict pain on others.” -- JOHN CLUTE