The Commons

Introduction by Robert J. Sawyer.

Includes the story The Helper and His Hero, nominated for a Nebula Award – Best Novella, 2007.

For years now, 40,000 readers of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction have been reveling in the adventures of Matt Hughes's Guth Bandar, the hero of this novel. Hughes is one of the top voices in modern SF, and this book has a huge audience waiting for it.

For 100,000 years, Old Earth's Institute for Historical Inquiry has mapped the collective unconscious of the human race. They have encountered all the archetypal figures – the Wise Man and the Fool, the Destroyer and the Redeemer – the "usual suspects" that populate the myths and legends at the back of the human mind.

And now young Guth Bandar suspects the collective unconscious has become aware of itself. Worse, it has an agenda. And worst of all, it can force Bandar to go deep into the darkest forests of the mind, where the only escape from madness is death.

"A fascinating premise. There is interest for the reader here on several levels: in following Guth Bandar's adventures, in the various archetypical personality types he encounters, in his reflections on the more philosophical questions of the nature of consciousness. In The Commons, Hughes has created a universe with particularly fertile prospects for speculative activity." – Tangent

"Irresistibly good reading." – Booklist on Black Brillion

"Hughes's boldness is admirable." – The New York Review of Science Fiction