Broderick, Damien Books

Earth Is but a Star: Excursions Through Science Fiction to the Far Future

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Editorial Review:

Deep time: the ultimate frontier, tomorrow's most romantic landscape. Our sun is a vast, sullen wheel hanging at the horizon. Beings walk the dying world in its red light, but few are human. Robots return from the edges of the galaxy to mourn their lost ancestors. Mages weave plots, their science so advanced it is indistinguishable from magic. In the vastness of eternity, Earth is but a star. Only science fiction knows the paths into this wonderous realm. A remarkable blend of myth, science and pure dark imagination, science fantasy is a genre still little known to science fiction critics. Here for the first time, many of its key tales are gathered, together with new essays that illuminate their strange power - and provide a treasury of superb, unusual entertainment.

White Abacus

Damien Broderick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Winner of more than one Ditmar Award (Australia's highest honor for science fiction), Damien Broderick has been doing SF, criticism, and academic research for many years. The White Abacus doubtless introduces him to more people outside of the Commonwealth.

To use the phrase "Hamlet in space" to describe The White Abacus is not a criticism; the book is a Shakespearean tour de force set far in the future. "Hu" (humans) are scientifically sophisticated, but emotionally immature. "Ai" (artificial intelligence) are rational and peace-loving, though more politically developed than most hu know. In most of the universe, hu and ai live together in harmony, but not in the Asteroid Belt of humanity's home solar system. An isolationist movement there left the pioneers extremely religious and dead set against using the "hex gates" that enable instantaneous travel between planets. Life on Psyche in the Belt remains a serious business, for humans only--no ai allowed.

Psyche's young prince Telmah (try reading it backwards) is sent to Earth to study, and there befriends an ai being named Ratio who has been painfully separated from the Gestell, a unified state of the ai. Telmah and his friends spend their days studying, romping, and playing at sophisticated games. Back at home, his uncle Feng allegedly murders Telmah's father, marries the widowed mother, and usurps the Directorship. Determined to avenge his father, Telmah returns home to confront Uncle Feng. The faithful Ratio accompanies him, but unbeknownst to Telmah, Ratio has another motive besides friendship--a secret assignment from the Gestell.

Sound familiar? A fast-moving, updated version of the Hamlet tale, The White Abacus offers comedy, space opera, literary puzzles, and not a few surprises. --Bonnie Bouman

X,Y,Z,T: Dimensions of Science Fiction

Damien Broderick

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Editorial Review:

Broderick draws upon his skills as both critic and novelist to analyze science fiction of the last two decades, and its earlier roots. The book proposes sf as a distinctive form of writing, the extreme narrative of difference, then closely reads authors such as John Barnes, Jamil Nasir, Wil McCarthy, Robert Grossbach and Poul Anderson. While concentrating on exciting work published in the USA and Britain, Broderick does not neglect his own country's contributions, discussing sf by George Turner and other Australians. His critical voice is wry, entertaining and occasionally scathing.

K-Machines (Players in the Contest of Worlds)

Damien Broderick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Enjoyable and intelligent riffs on wild ideas 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Here is the sequel to last year's Godplayers. This continues the story of August Seebeck, an ordinary Australian man who is suddenly brought to realize that he is part of a family, all named after the months. August has been told that he and his family are "Players in the Contest of Worlds" (also the collective title of these two novels), battling foes known as the "Deformers" for -- for what? Indeed, that is one of the questions driving this second novel.

August is also, all along, a very young man, and very much in love with Lune, another Player, though not a Seebeck. Lune is much older than he, and quite astonishingly beautiful. Another question driving this novel is "Does Lune really love August?" or "What does she see in him?"

But in the final analysis, I think, this book is really to a great extent a commentary on SF, and on the love we (the author most certainly included) have for the genre. There are in-jokes sprinkled throughout for the delight of long time fans: a writer in an alternate world named E. Hunter Waldo and nanomachines of a sort called "offogs," to name but two. Moreover the novel is deeply entwined with the Matter of Britain: the Arthurian legends. Aside from this, the book in the end concerns, after all "Players in the Contest of Worlds": alternate worlds that often reflect SFnal dreams, such as a lush wet Venus. One cannot but think that this "Contest of Worlds" is in a way a reference to the many future worlds of SF, and that the "Players" are the writers.

What of the action of this book? August, at the open, is trying to resume a life as a Philosophy student in Australia, as well as trying to enjoy his love for Lune. But almost immediately he finds himself attacked by a dinosaur-like beast: perhaps one of the Deformers' "K-Machines", "K" standing for -- what? "Killer", perhaps? Soon August is again pinballing through the various worlds in pursuit of answers from his varied (and varying) group of brothers and sisters. Also he loses track of Lune, and to his disgust finds others questioning her loyalty.

An alternate thread follows the life of an Australian scientist in what seems to be our world. This man is followed through a long life, a boyhood loving science fiction, followed by an adult career marked by multiple entanglements with women, and by a spotty but interesting academic record, culminating in involvement with an effort to reach the Singularity, perhaps by creating artificial universes. Which may -- or may not -- explain just what is going on in these two books.

These two books, Godplayers and K-Machine, are a very enjoyable and intelligent diptych, riffing on wild contemporary speculative scientific ideas such as Matrioshka brains as well as SF/Fantasy classics like Roger Zelazny's Amber books. At times I felt the books were victimized just a bit by the bane of certain SF and Fantasy both: the notion that just about any old thing can happen at the characters' (or the author's) convenience. But I did enjoy the ride, and I certainly recommend reading them.

Editorial Review:

August Seebeck is a 20-something student from a world not quite the same as ours. In GODPLAYERS, August tumbled into a vastly larger universe, and learned that he wasn't, after all, an orphaned only child. He and his turbulent siblings, and the breathtaking Lune and others still stranger, are Players in the Contest of Worlds. They are mysteriously transformed humans whose ancient task is enigmatic battle with the dread, passionate K-Machines. Now crisis deepens. Empowered with a potent killing device of his own, an eerie gift from legend, August finds himself flung from world to world in a brutal and baffling game, with entire universes at stake and very little idea of the rules. Only two things are clear: his beloved Lune is not who she seems, and August's pivotal role is no chance accident. In this cosmos, survival of the gods themselves depends upon human victory over the K-Machines.

Centaurus: The Best of Australian SF

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The anthology Centaurus: The Best of Australian SF is a banquet of thought-provoking science fiction from Australia. Readers who so far have been unaware of the developing world of Australian SF will be engrossed by this diverse selection of stories chosen by World Fantasy Award-winning editor David G. Hartwell and acclaimed Australian writer Damien Broderick. Yes, Australian star Greg Egan appears, with a story ("Wang's Carpets") that embodies his humanistic approach to hard SF. But Centaurus also presents rising stars whose works deal with landscapes, concerns, and themes Australian. Take, for example, Leanne Frahm's "Borderline." Her story of a widower who has little in common with his ambitious, city-dwelling offspring, yet who wants to protect them even if it means confronting his worst fears, is made richer by its plainspoken Australian dialect. Both "The Mountain Movers" by A. Bertram Chandler and Terry Dowling's "Privateer's Moon" drench readers in the other-worldliness of Australian landscapes. The editors bookend the volume with stunning stories by George Turner ("Flowering Mandrake"), one of Australia's earliest internationally known SF writers, and Peter Carey ("The Chance"), winner of the Booker Prize for his novel Oscar and Lucinda. Every story has its own introduction, and each editor provides an introduction to the volume. Centaurus is full of imaginative fare from writers with a colorful regional perspective. --Blaise Selby

Not the Only Planet: Science Fiction Travel Stories

Damien Broderick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

If our planet seems a little overexplored these days--well, there are always other worlds to survey. Australian science fiction icon Damien Broderick has collected stories from some of the world's best sci-fi writers in Not the Only Planet, a book of sci-fi travel that propels the imagination on an unbridled tour of worlds no travel agent will ever have on file.

The collection probes the vastness of the space-time continuum, as readers join a tour to the Crucifixion in Garry Kilworth's "Let's Go to Golgotha!"; photograph mountains on Mars in Brian W. Aldiss's "The Difficulties Involved in Photographing Nix Olympica"; and glean essential phrases for the space-traveling earthling ("You are not my guide. My guide was bipedal") in Joanna Russ's "Useful Phrases for the Tourist." From humorous to stark and unsettling, like all good sci-fi and travel writing, these stories investigate the many interiors of the human soul. A provocative book that truly takes travel to new dimensions. --Byron Ricks

Godplayers

Damien Broderick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Godbenchwarmers 2 out of 5 stars.
18 of 24 people found this review helpful.

It's hard to figure how an acclaimed veteran author could come up with something as incoherent as this mess of disconnected ideas and directionless contrivances. In the "story" (and I use that term loosely), the young slacker protagonist finds himself mixed up in a violent mess of clashing universes, as he has some vague connection with an annoying group of demigods (who are also somehow his lost interdimensional relatives) who are in a videogame-like grudge match called "The Contest" in which multiple universes are played like chess pieces. This is a fairly serviceable premise, and Broderick gets a few points for ambition and creativity, but his construction of the ensuing "story" is nonsensical to the point of pomposity.

Broderick's unbelievably amateurish method of creating suspense is for the other characters to refuse to explain things to the protagonist until finally doing so, obscurely, near the end of the book. And not only is that amateurish, it doesn't even make sense for this book's plotline, as the other characters need the protagonist's help in their epic battle. If you desperately needed someone's help, but he had trouble figuring out what the problem was, wouldn't you explain everything to him precisely and immediately? You have to wonder if Broderick himself even knew what was happening while he wrote this claptrap. But don't despair because the amateurishness continues unabated. The characters nonchalantly fail to ruminate on all the vast implications of their violent multiversal struggle (which nobody else even notices, by the way), characters understand their own words after they say them, and vague subplots and entirely new concepts keep popping up before the significance of earlier ones are explained - all with diminishing connections to the main storyline.

And regardless of all of the above flaws in logic, this book is a rapidly deteriorating mishmash of disconnected explorations that subsume the already directionless plot. Broderick goes absolutely nowhere with contrived big ideas on cosmology, cyberpunk, alternative philosophies, programming languages, and even Norse mythology - not to mention the lifelike robots, talking animals, conspiracy theories, and mystical ancient tomes. All the while, the characters converse in faux-ironic loquaciousness and frequently interrupt their eternal struggles with over-described gourmet wining and dining. And Broderick didn't even try to wrap up this "story" in one book, as we have to (not) wait for the sequel to get even basic explanations of how all these characters and settings originated. Illogical storyline construction, nonsensical character interactions, disconnected subplots, and a hodgepodge of malnourished philosophical musings do not make a novel. Not even for a veteran. A high school creative writing workshop student would flunk for this. [~doomsdayer520~]

Editorial Review:

August Seebeck is in his twenties, a man of average looks and intellect. Then comes the claim of his great-aunt Tansy that she has been finding corpses each Saturday night in her bath (they vanish by morning). August dismisses this tale as elderly fantasy until he stumbles upon a corpse being shoved into the second-floor bathroom window of his aunt's house. Even that wouldn't faze him, but then someone steps out of the mirror....

August suddenly discovers he is a Player in the multi-universe Contest of Worlds and that his true family is quarrelsome on a mythic scale. His search for understanding follows a classic quest pattern of the Parsifal kind, except that August is nobody's fool.

An epic quest that is funny and engrossing, Godplayers is in the best tradition of Zelazny, Van Vogt, and the Knights of the Round Table, from one of science fiction's hottest up-and-coming writers.

Godplayers

Damien Broderick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Godbenchwarmers 2 out of 5 stars.
18 of 24 people found this review helpful.

It's hard to figure how an acclaimed veteran author could come up with something as incoherent as this mess of disconnected ideas and directionless contrivances. In the "story" (and I use that term loosely), the young slacker protagonist finds himself mixed up in a violent mess of clashing universes, as he has some vague connection with an annoying group of demigods (who are also somehow his lost interdimensional relatives) who are in a videogame-like grudge match called "The Contest" in which multiple universes are played like chess pieces. This is a fairly serviceable premise, and Broderick gets a few points for ambition and creativity, but his construction of the ensuing "story" is nonsensical to the point of pomposity.

Broderick's unbelievably amateurish method of creating suspense is for the other characters to refuse to explain things to the protagonist until finally doing so, obscurely, near the end of the book. And not only is that amateurish, it doesn't even make sense for this book's plotline, as the other characters need the protagonist's help in their epic battle. If you desperately needed someone's help, but he had trouble figuring out what the problem was, wouldn't you explain everything to him precisely and immediately? You have to wonder if Broderick himself even knew what was happening while he wrote this claptrap. But don't despair because the amateurishness continues unabated. The characters nonchalantly fail to ruminate on all the vast implications of their violent multiversal struggle (which nobody else even notices, by the way), characters understand their own words after they say them, and vague subplots and entirely new concepts keep popping up before the significance of earlier ones are explained - all with diminishing connections to the main storyline.

And regardless of all of the above flaws in logic, this book is a rapidly deteriorating mishmash of disconnected explorations that subsume the already directionless plot. Broderick goes absolutely nowhere with contrived big ideas on cosmology, cyberpunk, alternative philosophies, programming languages, and even Norse mythology - not to mention the lifelike robots, talking animals, conspiracy theories, and mystical ancient tomes. All the while, the characters converse in faux-ironic loquaciousness and frequently interrupt their eternal struggles with over-described gourmet wining and dining. And Broderick didn't even try to wrap up this "story" in one book, as we have to (not) wait for the sequel to get even basic explanations of how all these characters and settings originated. Illogical storyline construction, nonsensical character interactions, disconnected subplots, and a hodgepodge of malnourished philosophical musings do not make a novel. Not even for a veteran. A high school creative writing workshop student would flunk for this. [~doomsdayer520~]

Editorial Review:

August Seebeck is in his twenties, a man of average looks and intellect. Then comes the claim of his great-aunt Tansy that she has been finding corpses each Saturday night in her bath (they vanish by morning). August dismisses this tale as elderly fantasy until he stumbles upon a corpse being shoved into the second-floor bathroom window of his aunt's house. Even that wouldn't faze him, but then someone steps out of the mirror....

August suddenly discovers he is a Player in the multi-universe Contest of Worlds and that his true family is quarrelsome on a mythic scale. His search for understanding follows a classic quest pattern of the Parsifal kind, except that August is nobody's fool.

An epic quest that is funny and engrossing, Godplayers is in the best tradition of Zelazny, Van Vogt, and the Knights of the Round Table, from one of science fiction's hottest up-and-coming writers.