Hello, there!
I’m Matthew Cambion. This is a pseudonym; scroll down for details. I’m OK with either male pronouns or the singular they.
Among other things, I am...
- happily married
- a writer by choice
- a programmer by necessity
- a metalhead by the grace of the witch
- a fucking webmaster
- a Generation X New Yorker with a face made for radio and a voice made for print
- a working-class college dropout with delusions of erudition
- of English, Irish, French, German, Polish, Jewish, and Black ancestry
- ACAB: assigned Catholic at birth
- willing to pet every stray cat in the neighborhood
- generally irreligious, antiauthoritarian, and anticapitalist in worldview
- the reason that the Gemini protocol’s companion upload protocol is called “Titan”
- a complexity junkie
- a drama king
- a bastard by birth and temperament alike
- trying to be kinder despite my inclinations
- autistic because God drinks on the job
- unprepossessing in reality, but a manic pixie nightmare catgirl in the metaverse
I am also an incorrigible geek
I have a day job as a software developer. For my sins I work at one of the Big 4 consulting firms. They’ve got me typecast as a .NET, C#, and SQL Server/Oracle developer who’s handy with ASP.NET and JavaScript — and that’s fine with me. I do not seek emotional fulfillment at work. I’m there to do a job and get paid, that’s all. I’m a mercenary, though I try to be an honest and honorable one.
I also occupy several places on the geek hierarchy defined by Brunching Shuttlecocks.
I’m the author of a few novels and short stories, among them Without Bloodshed, “The Milgram Battery”, Silent Clarion, and “Limited Liability”. All of my fiction is out of print because my publisher went belly-up and ghosted all the writers, but the rights have reverted to me and my stuff is available on my website.
However, I am not merely a creator. I have consumed a lot of media over the years, running it though a mental chop shop in the back of my head. I’d strip my favorite albums, movies, series, novels, and games for parts — plots, tropes, archetypes, etc. — and file off the serial numbers for reuse.
In addition to writing fiction and operating this website, I also play the piano, viola, and bass guitar. I was an orchestra/band geek in school, though I used to annoy the instructors by butching Yngwie Malmsteen guitar solos on my viola. I don’t play any of these instruments particularly well nowadays, having gone years without practicing because of my living situation and my focus on writing. I also sing tenor, though I can’t hit the high notes I used to nail as a very young man.
About my pseudonym
Perhaps you’re wondering if somebody took over this website? That is not the case. While I have operated starbreaker.org under the name on my driver’s license before, I choose to do so under a pseudonym now. I am only keeping “Matthew” for my wife’s sake; my parents named me after the wrong apostle, and “Thomas” might have better fitted my temperament, but it would be unfair to my wife to expect her to start calling me by a different name after twenty-five years.
Why “Cambion” as a surname? Blame my mother, as you should for my very existence. When I began to individuate as a young man, she would remonstrate with me as if I were doing something wrong. She would ask what happened to the little boy I had been, as if I were some kind of changeling. Besides, I am French on her side as well as English; some of her grandparents were La Vasseurs, others Lovelace.
In French folklore, a “cambion” is also the son of a demon and a human woman. For most of my life I’ve felt as if I wasn’t quite human, like I was something other. Blame my family for that, too; my parents would constantly tell me to “act like a human being”, as if I hadn’t been. Being professionally evaluated and diagnosed as being on the spectrum explained a lot, but the notion of being a demi-fiend seems more Romantic to me.
Will I make “Matthew Cambion” my legal name instead of merely publishing under it? Most likely not. As any transgender person who makes changing their documentation part of their transition might attest, doing so is a monumental pain in the ass. Besides, if I am in fact a sovereign individual as every human being should be by virtue of their nature, then my name is whatever I damned well say it is, whether it’s Matthew Cambion, Cato the Youngest, or even 🜏.
To ask the state for permission to change my name would be to admit that I am not sovereign, and I have made more such compromises than I care to in my life.