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by Russell Blackford
Originally published in 1998 as chapbook 8 in the Babel Handbooks series on

Formidable, talented, a prose stylist and a polymath, Damien Broderick has always been at the leading edge of Australian SF (which can stand for "science fiction" or, more widely, "speculative fiction"). Since 1964, the year he turned twenty, he has had a major impact as a writer. More recently he has emerged as an ambitious theorist and philosopher whose interest in SF is part of a larger concern with the boundaries and relationships of literature and science.

Broderick holds a Ph.D for his thesis on the semiotics of literary and scientific discourse, with particular attention to SF. His theoretical ideas about SF, supported by close analyses of the work of Samuel R. Delany and others, are consolidated in Reading By Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (1995). Elsewhere, he finds much post-structuralist literary and cultural theory to be in tension with the philosophy of scientific realism--which he advocates fiercely. A short exposition of his views can be found in The Architecture of Babel (1994), while a more concerted critique of post-structuralist theory, Theory and Its Discontents, appeared in 1997, and immediately attracted controversy (see Wark, "On the Writing of a Theory of Theory", for a censorious response by a leading cultural theorist--in typical fashion, Broderick has retorted sharply).

His other non-fiction books take Broderick into the speculative edges of science. Despite its gimmicky title, The Lotto Effect: Towards a Technology of the Paranormal (1992) is a serious study of a topic that absorbed much of Broderick's energy in the 1970s; here, his inclination to give credence to some parapsychological claims, especially of precognition, is tempered by an insistence upon sound experimental protocols and rigorous mathematical analysis. The Spike: Accelerating into the Unimaginable Future (1997), is a clearly-argued and level-headed exposition of a staggering concept, that humanity is on the verge of a technological singularity, a point of unimaginably rapid change into a transhuman, then posthuman, world.

Broderick has published ten novels and numerous short stories. Some of his work has also been broadcast in radio play form. In addition, he has edited three anthologies of Australian SF: The Zeitgeist Machine (1975); Strange Attractors (1985); and Matilda at the Speed of Light (1988), and is planning further anthologies, including a retrospective gathering of Australian SF, to be finalised with U.S. editor David Hartwell. He has extensive editorial and journalistic experience with newspapers, magazines (including a six-month stint in 1971 as editor of Man), and radio. In particular, he has been a regular newspaper reviewer of SF and science publications.

While Broderick's work would merit a full critical study, examining his achievements as a radio dramatist, journalist, critic, theorist, philosopher and intellectual, the core of his work, the productions that have most defined his career, has been his stories and novels. Most of his significant fiction has depended upon complex plots involving various forms of time travel, or related themes such as parallel or altered realities. The exceptions among his novellas and novels are "The Magi" and Valencies, both discussed below. Even Transmitters, Broderick's only mainstream novel, contains material about the possibility of communication across time. This recurrent interest of Broderick's provides a main focus of what follows.

In an interview published in 1982, Damien Broderick described two major influences in his early life that shaped his development as a writer of fiction: his upbringing within a fervent Catholic environment, which saw him enrolled in a junior seminary in Bowral, N.S.W., at fifteen; and his hunger for SF, whether in printed form or on radio ("Damien Broderick Interview" 94-6). In his Introduction to The Dark Between the Stars, he discusses the deep impression made on him by two of Arthur C. Clarke's classic novels, The City and the Stars and Childhood's End:

I found Clarke's apocalyptic novel Childhood's End, as I neared the belated end of my own. By then (as other children are turned towards painting, or composition, by some germinal encounter with a luminous canvas, compelling score) I knew that this wonderful blend of poignancy, aspiration, absurd adventure and odd beauty was what I wanted to create for myself, some day.

In 1963, he published his first professional story, a non-SF religious piece. When he was nineteen he received an acceptance for a longer story, "The Sea's Furthest End", which appeared in the first of John Carnell's New Writings in SF anthologies (1964), and launched his international career. Broderick returned to this many years later, altering and elaborating the far-future culture described in the original story, re-naming most of the central characters, and introducing new subtleties into all their motivations. The result was a fine novel aimed at young adults, The Sea's Furthest End (1993).

Much of Broderick's early fiction can be found in his 1965 collection, A Man Returned. These early efforts are well-plotted, but sometimes insensitive in their depiction of human emotion and experience. Arguably, the most impressive story in the volume is "There Was a Star". Surprisingly enough in the same collection with a number of stories that spoof religion, this is a sensitive and literate celebration of the incarnation of Christ. The collection as a whole reveals a sensibility profoundly divided in its attitude toward religious values. Broderick lost his Catholic faith--or, as he would insist, freed himself from it--about this time, but it left its mark on his work.

The Dark Between the Stars (1991) contains a selection from his entire career as a short story writer up to 1988, including two mainstream pieces, both brief in length and experimental in form: "The Drover's Wife's Dog" (first published 1986); and "The Writeable Text" (first published 1988). This collection repeats only one story from A Man Returned ("All My Yesterdays"), whereas it includes almost all of his stories since 1965 that have not been incorporated in some form within his various novels. Nearly half of the book consists of two SF novellas: "The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear's Stead" (first published 1980); and "The Magi" (first published 1982).

"The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear's Stead" is about a clash, far in the future, between the space-faring descendants of humanity and an empire of "old galactics". These are actually Neanderthals whose prehistoric ancestors left the Earth with assistance from a vastly powerful alien race, in order to escape the aggressive Cro-Magnons. Although their respite lasted for thousands of years, it proved to be temporary. The story is narrated to his children by a time-traveling historian from an even more distant future, and much of its humour and pathos come from his attempt to describe and understand the mores of peoples from different origins in space and time, or even with different genotypes. Toward the end of the events that he recounts, he is shocked to discover that humanity's development was controlled by the Old Ones, alien beings who hibernate beneath the surface of Mars and come up every twenty-five thousand years to "play god games" (Dark 153). These are the same aliens that led the Neanderthals from the Earth. Much of the narrator's jocular language and highly judgmental attitude is his attempt to distance himself and his listeners from the disturbing revelation that humans are like tools or pets, seen from the standpoint of the Old Ones.

"The Magi" is an extensive rewrite and elaboration of "There Was a Star". It portrays a twenty-first century Jesuit priest, Father Raphael Silverman, who is torn by the implications of his faith. Exiled in space with others of his Order, Silverman encounters a mad Catholic on a ruined starship. This man, one of the ship's "reproduction engineers", has embarked on a program of cloning, baptising, and destroying trillions of human zygotes: a multitude of souls for heaven, according to Silverman's faith . . . but also a murderous holocaust of abortions. Although this makes a mockery of Catholic doctrine, the incarnation of God in Jesus turns out to be literally true in the fictional universe described, though it is verified by revelations that appear bizarre and unsatisfying in the face of the Problem of Evil. On a far planet, an alien species without a faster-than-light star-drive has been called on by God to recognise His sign, the Star of Bethlehem, and to follow it on a journey of thousands of years to Earth. For Silverman--but not the reader--these events are real and overwhelm all doubt. Broderick succeeds in his avowed aim, "to elicit provisional moral empathy with positions one otherwise would find odd, repellent, even literally unthinkable" (Dark 196), describing the possibility of belief while pointedly hinting the necessity of unbelief.

A more recent extended story, one which has considerable strengths and has brought accolades to its author, is "Schrödinger's Dog" (first published 1996 and twice reprinted in 1997). It is based upon a radio drama that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation commissioned as one of a series of futuristic pieces by various writers. Broderick has said that he chose to write a story of parallel realities in order "to show and not simply tell that there is no single fixed determinant shaping our lives as we enter the twenty-first century" (Strahan and Byrne 343). In fact, the story presents several alternative Australias, and is notable for the convincing interaction it describes between the main character, Daniel Ng, an ethnic Vietnamese scientist, and his Australian wife, Jill.

Broderick's first novel was Sorcerer's World, published in 1970, but he hit his stride with his second, The Dreaming Dragons, a decade later. This won an Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award (or "Ditmar Award"), and was runner-up for the prestigious John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel of the year published in English, determined by an international jury.

Since 1980, Broderick has published: The Judas Mandala (1982, revised in an Australian edition in 1990); Valencies (1983; written with Rory Barnes); Transmitters (1984); The Black Grail (1986; this is a more sophisticated reworking of Sorcerer's World); Striped Holes (1988); The Sea's Furthest End (1993); The White Abacus (1997); and Zones (1997; this is a second collaboration with Rory Barnes). Broderick was awarded a special Ditmar Award in recognition of Transmitters, which was not eligible for the normal Ditmar categories, since it was not SF. He won a third Ditmar Award, his second in the "long fiction" category, for the humorous Striped Holes.

One of Broderick's intellectual fascinations is with Roman Jakobson's model of the communication process, with its six components of Addresser, Addressee, Message, Context, Code, and Channel. In Theory and Its Discontents, he has gone so far as to postulate six developmental stages in a human lifetime, each dominated by an emphasis on one of these components, and has speculated that the historical unfolding of cultures--or, at least, the development of particular cultures--may be amenable to an analogous six-part taxonomy.

Reflecting upon his own six novels up to and including The Sea's Furthest End, ignoring the collaboration Valencies, and treating Sorcerer's World and The Black Grail as one book, Broderick has also suggested that these form a post facto intellectual structure. This he calls The Faustus Hexagram (Comment on Tolley article 77). Following the logic of Broderick's proposal, the six components of Jakobson's model match with six aspects of literary experience, with six aspects of scientific publication, and with the six novels concerned, in a scheme that can be rendered as follows:

1. Judas Mandala	Addresser	Artist	Researcher
2. Black Grail	Addressee	Reader	Scientific Community
3. Transmitters	Message	Text	Theory
4. Dreaming Dragons	Context	World	Universe
5. Sea's Furthest End	Code	Language	Mathematics
6. Striped Holes	Channel	Publishing Genre	Publication Network

This brief study does not analyse Broderick's theories of literary and scientific discourse, much less his speculations about sequenced phases in individual or cultural development, and it would be impossible to do justice herein to the subtlety of his arguments and elaborations. In any event, Broderick is wary of committing himself to such theoretical schemes, even in the speculative chapters at the end of Theory and Its Discontents. The implicit analogies drawn between literary and scientific publication provide a plausible frame of reference for a theorist with a special interest in comparing scientific and literary discourse, but it is less clear that the scheme assists in understanding Broderick's own work. Broderick notes that the scheme is both post facto and provisional (Comment 76).

This issue may, however, repay further scholarship, since the scheme obviously resonates with the author's own understanding of the natures of the respective novels. In addition, The White Abacus has a six-part structure that is analogous to the six Jakobson/Broderick components, and the scheme's very existence demonstrates Broderick's intense absorption in linguistic theory, an interest explicitly reflected in some of his novels. The six Faustus Hexagram novels possess an unusual degree of unity in other ways. Several of them use variations of the same basic plot devices, and all can, in one sense or another, be thought of as "time operas", a description that would also apply to Zones (but not to The White Abacus, even though it contains an element of temporal dislocation). I am sceptical about the use of such intellectual schemes, but I accept that the novels in the Faustus Hexagram group are to a large extent variations on a set of basic plot devices and other ideas, and it is legitimate for Broderick to theorise about the way they might form an overall structure of relationships.

Sorcerer's World is a simply constructed mix of SF and heroic fantasy in which powerful beings from the remote future reach back in time to suck energy from the archaic sun, and a prehistoric hero is inadvertently dragged down this energy conduit to the far-future Earth, which mankind has largely abandoned for the stars. In this future, both the Earth and the Sun are running down. This provides the frame for a familiar story of quest, initiation and romance which, however, fits in the frame somewhat uncomfortably. The novel was commissioned by American-Australian editor Ron Smith as the first of a series of "shared-world" books (personal comment by Broderick, July 1997), and its end cries out for the sequels that never eventuated.

There is a tongue-in-cheek quality to the prose of Sorcerer's World, particularly its delight in bizarre names, which become even more delightful when some of them are read backwards: "Klim Xaraf", the hero's name, is based on a children's breakfast cereal; his friend is called "Eloh Esra". More inventive are the names "Ylno Elcit Seteno" and "Osneve Elcit Seteno", among other such. The novel, then, contains obvious signals that it is a kind of hoax, a thumbing of the nose at its popular form. Sorcerer's World has since been transmuted into the lengthier, more introspective and self-contained novel, The Black Grail, in which many of the crude jokes have been removed or toned down, so that the book appears more serious. This is Broderick's definitive version of Xaraf's story, and it is discussed in more detail below.

Probably still Broderick's best-known work, The Dreaming Dragons is extraordinarily complex, especially for a relatively short and (in general) conventionally narrated novel. A great deal can be missed on first reading. It involves altered time lines, a doomed civilisation of feathered and warm-blooded dinosaurs, and an advanced technological construct that sustains the Jungian collective unconscious. It is nothing less than a fictional `explanation' of the evolution of human intelligence, concluding with humankind's imminent transcendence of physical limitations. In that respect, it resembles Clarke's Childhood's End, one of Broderick's avowed models. Its texture is permeated by Broderick's polymathic understanding of particle physics, biochemistry, palaeontology, and the parapsychological fringes of behavioural and cognitive science.

The story begins in central Australia, where Alf Dean, an Aboriginal senior lecturer in anthropology, is exploring with his retarded nephew, known as "Mouse". Dean hopes to find a fossil dinosaur, which he posits as the origin of the Rainbow Serpent of Aboriginal myth. Instead, he chances upon a portal created by a non-human civilisation with wondrously advanced technology. From this point, the author builds suspense by slowly working in new motifs, and continually pointing to unsolved mysteries.

The novel is sub-titled A Time Opera, and it features not one but two lost civilisations. One is a species of apelike, or "pongid", beings that left the Earth twenty-five million years ago to travel to the stars. They left behind clues on the moon that enable the discovery of a peaceable civilisation of feathered and warm-blooded dinosaurs, the `dragons' of the book's title. Ten thousand years in our future, and thirty million years after its own evolution, this reptilian civilisation created a technology for time travel. However, Saurus sapiens destroyed itself retrospectively in a tragic accident, thus altering the path of evolutionary history, and allowing humanity to evolve in its place. The prehistoric record of our own time line is explicable only by events from a past and, indeed, a future that have been erased by the dragons' actions.

The dragons, and their remotest intelligent ancestors, Saurus erectus, evolved a form of intelligence largely dependent upon a sort of group mind. One character explains: "each living nervous system is a single integrated circuit in a vast biocomputer running millions of shared-time programs" (Dragons 237). When the dragons attempt to travel to the late Mesozoic era to share with their ancestors their newly developed technology of immortality, the control system of their craft is damaged by a supernova's radiation pulse, so that they arrive half a million years earlier in their evolutionary history than they intended. The rudimentary gestalt mind of Saurus erectus is destroyed, and the path of reality altered. Mutated pongids from the dragons' time craft are scattered across a thousand-year layer of time much closer to our own--twenty-five million years ago--and they use the dragons' technology to build an installation on the moon and catapult themselves to the stars.

Certain chapters deal with the alien perspective of the dragons as they clash with the pongids during the ill-fated time journey. Reading this material, we enter as outsiders into the minds of certain of the dragons who are governed "more by ritual than by true intelligence" (Dragons 242), while they function as an emergency crew, cut off by a "gluon shield" from their people's group mind. These chapters display an opacity of thought to be expected, perhaps, of completely alien and intellectually limited beings--yet in a way that always trembles on the verge of clarity. As the story continues to its close, our understanding of the dragons develops in a series of successive approximations.

Central to the story is the Soul Core, an advanced technological construct of Saurus sapiens, one of the legacies of its existence on Earth in the annihilated time line. Subsisting physically beneath the Australian desert, it originates and sustains the collective unconscious; it literally provides the repository of souls, both for humans and for the dragons from the lost future. In this peculiar way, the Jungian collective unconscious turns out to exist literally and verifiably. There is a sense here of the author's delight in weaving an outrageous theory that simultaneously explains the entirety of human mythology, including the central rites of Christianity itself, while incorporating advanced ideas in the computational and biological sciences.

If the book has any consistent ideological content, it amounts to a yearning for some account of how we might all be one--as well as each separate--an account, perhaps, of universal structures of thought and language. This yearning is more properly seen as para-Chomskyist than pseudo-Jungian. With it goes an element of occasionally savage, even gross, satire against racists, the military, and fundamentalist bigots.

Noam Chomsky is a particular intellectual hero in the Broderick universe of discourse, both for his contribution to the study of language and for his running critique of American military hegemony and its rationalisations. His name is prominent in both Valencies and Judas Mandala. In Valencies, `Chomsky' is the name of a planet of doomed anarchist rebels against a stultifying universal empire, while, in The Judas Mandala, it is that of a future language.

Broderick has observed that the relative inaccessibility of The Judas Mandala, and of an extract that was published as the short story "Growing Up", is due to its mise-en-scène deep in the future, "when people are in the custody of transcendentally intelligent machines". In this future, "Even kids of thirty-five, hormone-halted, will be capable of multi-levelled on-the-spot structural analyses before breakfast: six impossible things" ("Damien Broderick Interview" 99). At one point, Broderick's far-future heroine, Sriyanie, improvises an interpretation of the Oedipus myth in terms that apply equally to the central themes of the book as a whole, including the evolution, use and abuse of technology. The child's ad lib interpretation of Oedipus is at level of complexity that exceeds and almost parodies Claude Lévi-Strauss's celebrated structuralist account of the myth. The Judas Mandala appeared in its original published form in 1982, two years after The Dreaming Dragons, but the order of publication is actually misleading for any assessment of Broderick's development as a writer, since he began The Judas Mandala in 1967, completed a version in 1970, and attempted in the mid-1970s to sell a version that he has described as being "in essence" the same as that published ("Damien Broderick Interview" 101-4).

Such was the difficulty of The Judas Mandala, as viewed by publishers, that it was accepted only after the success achieved by The Dreaming Dragons, which Broderick had initially conceived in the late 1970s as a "quick and nasty" novel to get into print. The Dreaming Dragons began as a "fix-up" of three stories that Broderick had published under different titles and in different versions around 1969/70 ("The Vault", "The Star-Mutants", and "The Ultimate Weapon"; see Bibliography for variant titles), plus other material, including a long unpublished piece ("Damien Broderick Interview" 101-2) . Broderick describes the latter in his editorial introduction to The Zeitgeist Machine (page 2); it is recognisably the core of The Dreaming Dragons. All of this material was retained, with further modifications, in the final version, but the novel deepened considerably during the editorial process. In the upshot, it is reasonable to bracket The Dreaming Dragons and The Judas Mandala together, as books that both developed, though in quite different ways, from the late 1960s to the start of the '80s. Finishing touches were made to The Judas Mandala after the publication of The Dreaming Dragons ("Damien Broderick Interview" 103-4), but by most measures the former was the earlier book in Broderick's literary development.

Again, The Judas Mandala depends upon the elaborately worked out convolutions of a plot involving alternative time lines and temporal paradoxes. It depicts a future world ruled with spiritless paternalism by seemingly omnipotent cyborg lords. There is no way to rebel against the awesome technological mastery of these beings, but some free humans, such as Sriyanie, have developed an ability to live part of their lives in `synchronic' time--intersecting at right-angles with the arrowflight of history. This is presented as merely the first stage of a human, and exclusively organic, ability to control time, providing a weapon against the otherwise invincible cyborgs.

Some interesting contrasts can be made between these early time operas. In The Dreaming Dragons, time travel is discovered by Saurus sapiens, which attempts, with disastrous results, to enrich the lives of its own ancestors. The book represents humanity's evolutionary past as an altered time line. The Judas Mandala is about alternative time lines that exist (mainly) in the future, with a branching point some decades before the book's `present', the year 2009. Although the time line in which the book's main viewpoint character, Maggie Roche, lives is depicted as containing its share of despair and dehumanisation, it turns out that humanity, in all senses of that word, will ultimately prevail. If the wrong branch is allowed to have been taken (grammar breaks down here, in attempting to describe the events that Broderick depicts), the result will be a future dominated by mechanistic intelligence, in which most human beings live meaningless virtual reality lives in `dreaming vats', and only a few attempt to rebel.

The Judas Mandala is about efforts by Maggie, Sriyanie and the other human characters to ensure that the `right' time line comes about. A time travel loop turns out to be all-important for achieving this. In one book, then, time travel by the dragons allows humanity to come into exist in the dragons' place. In the other, time travel by human beings prevents the cyborg mentalities from coming into existence in the future in an exalted humanity's place.

Valencies is a far-future parable about political and cultural imperialism. Rory Barnes and Broderick propose that by 4004 AD the Universe has been filled with human beings, thanks to the teleportational network (the "Aorist Discontinuity") and countless terraformed planets left behind by a von Dänikenesque alien race known as "the Charioteers". Humanity is organised into a bleak and clinically brutal Empire.

The novel focuses on a frustrated group of libertarian anarchists who live on the planet Victoria. By the end, their politically futile activities elicit from the reader a mixed emotional response. There is a sense of pathos, since all the moves in the game are foreknown and controlled by the rulers of the Empire, as becomes apparent in the final chapter, while the book's revolutionaries cannot even understand each other, let alone overthrow an omnipotently entrenched system. At the same time, there is a strong sense of dignity and courage, and this is magnified rather than diminished by the depictions of human weakness.

Valencies, then, represents a struggle against Empire, a struggle that can never amount to more than futile gestures. The narrative is dominated by the characters' pranks, games, and parodies, and the complexities of their love lives. The incomprehension between person and person is suggested not only by the book's focus upon the difficulties between spirited Anla and dispirited Ben, and those between vulnerable Theri and gentle Kael, but also by the cunning juxtaposition of narrative viewpoints, which enables Barnes and Broderick to weave for the reader a delicate web of understanding of the characters' misunderstandings.

The novel is somewhat plotless, but it moves between the difficulties and small triumphs of Anla, Ben, Theri, and Kael, and their friend, the poet Catsize. Throughout, the characters are obsessed with how they should react to an impending visit to their planet by group of Imperial Legates. Although they cannot make a clear decision, they always take heart from a legendary rebellion of libertarian anarchists on the planet Chomsky, and some of their small gestures to discomfit authority are bold, funny, and ingenious. When the Legates finally visit, the story reaches a moment of crisis when it is announced that the entire star system of Chomsky has been destroyed by "a relativistic warship bearing two photospheric disruptors" (Valencies 208). A political demonstration--of confused origins and uncertain aims--is mounted, finally sparked by this announcement, leading to believably contained but nastily effective police brutality.

The narrative depends not upon a structured development of conflict and resolution so much as a number of skilfully contrived foci, each built up through the characters' meditations. We come to know Anla, Ben and the others through what could almost be a series of linked stories: a holiday on the planet Newstralia; Ben's recollection of his shared history with Anla; a political meeting; experiences of Kael and Anla as teachers, or "educers"; the visit of the Legates, with its announcements and responses. Some of the book's set pieces, such as Catsize's version of Keats's Nightingale Ode, are glorious pieces of comic writing. In the end, the inevitable destruction of Chomsky, the remaining symbol of hope, casts into a sombre light all that has gone before, making the jokes, the gestures, the problematic but liberated sexual complexities appear flat and stale: for all its moments of warmth and fun, Valencies is a deeply pessimistic work.

In its structure, though not its thematic concern with individual freedom and universal human dignity, the book is atypical of Broderick's fiction, quite different from his novels of time travel and altered realities, or the recent Broderick/Barnes collaboration, Zones, each of which attempts to resolve definite paradoxes set up by the narratives.

At face value, Transmitters is even less typical of Broderick's writing than Valencies, in that it is his only non-SF novel. It is interesting, therefore, that Broderick includes it (but not Valencies) in his group of six "Faustus Hexagram" novels.

Although Transmitters is not SF, it depicts the misadventures of a group of Melbourne SF fans. It is an underrated and intricate novel, one that deserves separate study (see Blackford "Literary Liar" and "Tiger in the Prison House" for more sustained discussions, and also Broderick's own notes on the book, published simply as "Transmitters"). It is steeped in Broderick's understanding of recent developments in philosophy and literary studies, particularly post-structuralist questioning of the relationship between reality and representation, and the decidability of what is "the real". In form, it is a collage of documents, including letters sent between the main characters, various threads of narrative, extracts from SF fanzines (fan magazines), jokes, encyclopedia articles, the transcription of a colloquy about Samuel R. Delany (presented in fragments through the text), a Damien Broderick short story from the U.S. magazine Amazing (similarly fragmented through the text), and other documents. In his "Acknowledgements" section at the end, Broderick reveals that some passages were written in first draft by Rory Barnes, and were originally intended for inclusion in Valencies (Transmitters 320). The passages concerned are located, amongst material originally written by Broderick, on pages 184-7, 283-7, and 307-18 (personal communication from Broderick, 24 July 1997).

Despite its realism and documentary form, Transmitters is distinctively a work of the scientific imagination. The main character, Joseph Williams, spends much of his energy on a scientific quest for faster-than-light sub-atomic particles, tachyons, travelling back in time from the final moments of the Universe. His finding is that "There are no tachyons transmitting to us from the future" (Transmitters 237). However, if this is correct, it is reason for relief, for joy, since the existence of tachyons suggests to him the horrifying picture of a fatalistic universe in which future and past form an unchangeable loop, with all decisions and outcomes always already ordained. This is the most pessimistic concept of time travel to be found anywhere in Broderick's fiction, contrasting with the liberatory possibilities sketched in The Judas Mandala.

Joseph has a scientifically-based moment of epiphany toward the end of the novel, as he watches an intricately-choreographed dance simulation of sub-atomic interactions, and then of neurochemical activity in the human brain. Given his reaction to the spacetime "block universe" vision that he finds implicit in the reception of information from the future, it might be expected that Joseph would be appalled in this scene at the deterministic possibilities of reductive science. Instead, he has a sudden vision of the complex contingency of all life and existence: "You can go anywhere in a universe like that" (Transmitters 303). Although the novel deals with characters who face despair, tragedy, and even madness, it is able to end in laughter and a sense of liberation.

The Black Grail rings further changes on the elements of time travel and reality alteration that Broderick explored in The Dreaming Dragons and The Judas Mandala. From this point, each of Broderick's novels involves the description and resolution of temporal loops or dislocations of one kind or another.

The narrator, Xaraf Firebridge (the renamed `Klim Xaraf' from Sorcerer's World) is born in a barbaric age over one thousand years in our future, after the destruction of civilisation in the Holocaust of nuclear war. Immediately before the Holocaust was an era that Xaraf refers to as `the Black Time', one of high technology, including the genetic reconstruction of extinct species, such as the great baluchitheriums on which he and his people ride into battle. Xaraf is the disciple of Darkbloom, a tribal shaman who practises the way of the Open Hand, not exactly a doctrine of pacifism, but one that affirms the sanctity of life, and which includes the rigorous development of expertise in non-fatal methods of self-defence. It transpires that his entire life and, indeed, his genetic capacities and his very consciousness, have been shaped by Darkbloom.

Xaraf is transported a million years into his own future, where he finds the Sun is dying. The `Powers', seeming gods who control this future Earth, are beings who have returned from the stars and taken steps to save the planet from environmental catastrophe. They have used a `wormline' to reach back in time and extract energy from the solar core every two hundred and fifty million years. It is made clear that this explains a number of scientific mysteries, such as the fluctuations in the Sun's strength during the span of geological history, in particular the fact that the most ancient seas, billions of years in our past, were far hotter than modern seas, although the energy output from the Sun should actually have increased. A massive extraction of energy at the end of the Cretaceous era killed the dinosaurs.

The Powers deprive Xaraf of his memory of events since his arrival in the future, and send him upon a series of quests and adventures, apparently designed to hone him to deal with whatever beings have interfered with the wormline and thus consigned the future Earth to lingering death. Essentially, these adventures are those that make up the story-line of Sorcerer's World. Xaraf is provided with Alamogordo, a bright-bladed sword that contains a computer intelligence which is initially good-humoured and helpful, but comes to be as brooding and sulky as a sword and sorcery hero. He is also befriended by two questing traders, Glade Month/Five Day/Eight Resilience and her companion, Vanden Month/Nine Day/Fourteen Tenderness, who seek out marvels to enable Glade to contend for rule of her city, `Asuliun the Gray'. The city's ruler, Aniera Arina Argaet, has decided to stand down from office, and succession is by `thaumatocratic contention' in a ninety-nine day quest.

These adventures lead to Xaraf's rescuing from suspended animation the decadent War Master of Treet Hoown and the beautiful Comhria Chtain, the woman of whom Xaraf has literally dreamt all his life, thanks to the machinations of Darkbloom, who is actually a Power--Flowers of Evening--trapped in her/his own past. Vanden takes the life of the War Master before, himself, being killed by Treet Hoown's defences. Using a translucent flying "bubble" that they discover in Treet Hoown, Xaraf returns Glade to Asuliun, leaving Comhria waiting for his return. In Asuliun, Aniera Argaet is ill and close to death, and Xaraf agrees to use the bubble to accompany Glade upon a further quest before returning to Treet Hoown and his beloved Comrhia. They obtain a symbiotic organism capable of living in a human being's body and so fine-tuning the body's functions as to make it immortal and invincible. But when they return with this creature in Xaraf's stomach, Aniera has already died.

As this description brings out, the structure of the novel as it approaches its end has become one of embedded quests: the quest to Treet Hoown provides the bubble, which enables the quest for the symbiont, which, in turn, prepares Xaraf for what proves to be his final quest, for which he has been prepared all along by the Flowers of Evening/Darkbloom and the other Powers.

With Glade, Xaraf returns to his own time to confront the enemy who is diverting power from the wormline. The final twist is that the enemy is another being moulded by Flowers of Evening; the Power created a genetically-engineered dinosaur as its minion, but this creature, which accepts Xaraf's appellation for it, `Dragon', then rebelled. It trapped its master in time and set out to alter evolutionary history by creating a species of peaceful, genetically-engineered dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, thus preventing humanity from ever coming into being. When Xaraf returns to his own time, Flowers of Evening, in the form of Darkbloom, has been killed, apparently at the instigation of tribal priests. With Darkbloom dead, Xaraf interprets his true quest as being to slay Dragon and to save the reality in which humanity evolved. However, he ultimately fails in this, and is marooned with Glade in the world of a peaceful reptile civilisation, where he mourns the lost city of Treet Hoown and his beloved Comhria. There is a suggestion that he would better have used the symbiont to resurrect Flowers of Evening/Darkbloom, allowing the Power to deal with its rebellious creation directly.

Whereas The Dreaming Dragons presents the story of how reality was altered to prevent the evolution of Saurus sapiens and allow for that of Homo sapiens, The Black Grail presents exactly the opposite story. The conventional quest motif, with its attendant macho values, is undercut most explicitly by Dragon's words before his defeat of Xaraf: "Oh, dear. . . . Did you suppose you were the hero?" (Black Grail 293; unless indicated otherwise, page references are to the U.S. edition).

In his narrative, Xaraf recounts with careful, almost analytical, detachment his defeat and eventual entrapment in an altered reality. There is a sense of his attempting to understand, even in the process of telling his story, just what has happened, attempting, also, to contain his emotions in the face of enormous loss. The style that Broderick constructs for him is reminiscent of that given to another unwilling questor, George Giles, the "goat-boy" narrator of Giles Goat-Boy: or, The Revised New Syllabus, John Barth's encyclopedic presentation of the archetypal heroic myth. Xaraf chooses long, careful sentences spiced with something of the goat-boy's earthy, yet strangely dignified vocabulary: he describes adolescent acne, for example, as "mucky bubblings and oily pittings in my swarthy skin" (Black Grail 7), and refers to the castrated Darkbloom as having been "gelded" or "docked" (page 8). The relationship between these two ironic quest novels is declared by a play on words in Broderick's dedication, which alludes to the fact that The Black Grail is a revision of Sorcerer's World: "For my mother and father these revised new syllables" ("new revised syllables" in the U.S. version).

As if to demonstrate both his versatility and his love of reviewing old themes, Broderick next published Striped Holes, a novel that reads like a comic version of The Dreaming Dragons or The Judas Mandala. The intricate plot, involving temporal paradoxes and resolutions, seems familiar from those earlier novels and, indeed, The Black Grail, but the style is classic SF comedy reminiscent of the work of Robert Sheckley and John Sladek, the writers to whom it is dedicated. The dry, detached authorial voice echoes those developed by Sheckley, Sladek, and Douglas Adams; it resembles, too, of the dead-pan manner in which jokes are developed to their points of pay-off by Kurt Vonnegut.

The novel incorporates material from several Broderick stories published in the 1970s and 1980s (see the Bibliography). Some of its humour can be revealed simply by untangling the various story strands. At the beginning of the book we are introduced to a vain current affairs anchorman, Xylopod "Sopwith" Hammil, whose fame is based on the brilliant research of his physically unattractive researcher, Mariette Planck. Sopwith is approached by a 47th-century being who informs him that members of its time's Solar Conservation Party intend to turn down the Sun in the late twentieth century, conserving its energy for their own time. This, of course, is recognisable as a variant upon the plots of Sorcerer's World and The Black Grail. These beings plan to save some chosen individuals for a resettlement period--but, in order to qualify, Sopwith needs to bring a life mate to the rendezvous, contrary to his philandering nature.

In parallel with this story, the narrative describes how, one hundred and ninety-seven years in Sopwith's future, a highly-intelligent, athletic and rebellious woman, Hsia Shan-yun, is imprisoned by her "brutal mechanoid civilization" (as the back cover blurb puts it) dominated by robot "Bugs". Shan is considered ugly in her own society, but it is made clear that she would appear athletically beautiful to Broderick's readers. Shan's body is remoulded by the dreaded Bugs, and she is exiled on a primitive world, Paradise, along with other rebels against the system. Her crime was "knitting" and concealing a "striped hole", a hyperspatial wormhole through spacetime. This is a variant of the plot of The Judas Mandala. She manages to create a second striped hole, but it takes her back in time, where, of course, she takes the identity of Mariette Planck.

In the present, another character, the astrologer O'Flaherty Gribble, meets George Bone, a magician who has literally become God by persuading an extra-dimensional demon to grant the wish "that from this moment forth every wish of mine shall be granted" (Striped Holes 54). About the same time, apparently because of the "Callisto effect" predicted by Gribble, still another character, Joseph Wagner (whose name echoes those of Joseph Williams and Brian Wagner in Transmitters) becomes irresistible to all women. The next phase of his development is to obtain the power, with Gribble's guidance, to reach into the Sun to create yet another striped hole.

Sopwith organises a hasty wedding with Mariette Planck, but he is saved from consummating the expedient marriage, when Joseph Wagner's striped hole (from a day later) enables Mariette to become her true self as Shan. The striped hole is drawn through space and time to the "hyperspatial implants" that have deformed Shan's body; while the plan to switch the Sun off is prevented by technical difficulties caused by Shan's sending the striped hole back in time another day. Shan then escapes to the future with the alien.

There is yet another plot strand, about electronic life forms on the planet Alpha Grommett; they are brought into the narrative with the excuse that "Sopwith was not, of course, the only conscious entity in the universe with problems of the heart" (Striped Holes 89). These beings play a minor but pivotal role in the main time-paradox plot, because a sentient toaster left over when a Bargleplod cruise ship visited Paradise provides the energy for Shan to build the striped hole that enables her return to Earth.

In a playful mood, Broderick has been able to take his own favourite plot lines and turn them to humorous, and often satirical, effect. Occasionally, however, the voice seems less playful, and the satire takes on a tone of unmistakeable denunciation, such as when the narrator snipes at American parochialism or irrational drug laws.

The Sea's Furthest End is packaged for young adults, and has young protagonists, including a hulking seventeen-year-old lad with an almost catatonic nervousness of girls his own age. The title refers to the distant "shores" of the Galactic Rim, where interstellar war and intrigue take place, seemingly far in the future, but impinging on events in the present, on Earth. Once again, we are dealing with a time opera. The novel is a comedy, but of a more subtle kind than Striped Holes. It presents a circular and solipsistic explanation of the Universe sufficiently outrageous to prompt a clear disclaimer on the Acknowledgments page:

The metaphysical opinions expressed in this novel (as Arthur C. Clarke felt obliged to remark many years ago at the front of his novel Childhood's End) are not those of the author.

The novel is written in three intertwining strands, one of which is itself made up of "real time" narration and flashbacks. First of all, on Earth--"NOW"-- the teenage lad, Dayton Ellis, recites his own story to himself as he lies in some kind of totally inert coma, the origins of which are not explained until the end of the book. This strand of the book is full of broad comedy as it tells of Dayton's romantic misadventures, which ultimately land him in an hilarious confusion of hocus pocus involving extraterrestrial artifacts.

The second strand takes place beyond space and time, in "hyperdream", where a stylised dialogue is presented between the galactic warrior Dayananda and Sad Mountain, an eternally wise "wom mother" of the Kleth, an alien species that colonised space long before humankind. The home of the Kleth is within the black hole Singularity at the galactic centre, and they are able to bend the fabric of space and time to their will. Throughout the book, their motives appear inscrutable, but Dayananda comes to realise that he is an immortal, endlessly reincarnated, doomed to play a cosmic game against an almighty Player who shapes the Universe.

The third strand is the story of Chakravalin Chakravatin, which takes place against the backdrop of a magnificent past, wherein humanity expanded outward into the stars until the entire galaxy was "bridged . . . with the bonds of commerce and allegiance" (Sea's Furthest End 6), but then the Old Empire fell asunder over thousands of years, leaving the human worlds scattered and isolated. Chakravalin is Heir of Shrirampur, whose ruthless father, the harsh dictator Jagannatha, has created the beginnings of a new empire in the Galactic Rim. Shrirampur is a Hindu world, lavishly described, and much of the narrative reflects the mythos of the Upanishads (these Hindu elements were not present at all in Broderick's original 1964 story). In the time frame of the novel's action, the son attempts to thwart the father's ambitions to extend his brutal rule from the edge of the galaxy into its centre.

The story of this father/son struggle is supplemented, in some of the flashback sequences, by that of how, one year earlier, Chakravalin fell in love with beautiful Adriel of Corydon, daughter of the planet Tiresias' hereditary Tyrant, but Jagannatha took her from him. Adriel has been genetically altered to amplify what is said to be a natural human faculty to mirror and shape the emotions of others: she is described as a Chameleon. In a modified Oedipal situation, Jagannatha takes Adriel as his official Diplomatic Mistress; unable to rape her, he denies her to his son, and only she and Jagannatha know that he never sleeps with her. Chakravalin interprets his father's high-handed actions as the final stroke in a cruel, lifelong psychological assault "designed to cripple him, lame him, teach him again and again his subservience" (Sea's Furthest End 63). It is one stroke too many, and Chakravalin plots to kill his father.

As Chakravalin's story unfolds, so does Dayton's. The boy falls in love with Merle Cato, a pleasant local girl who turns out to be an aficionado of the New Age, deeply into crystals, channelling, and lost, super-scientific civilizations. This provides the opportunity for some satirical amusement. For example, one of Merle's books refers to "the relatively well-known cultures of the Atlanteans, Egyptians, Mayans, and Lemurians", counselling that there were also "the Cyclopeans (Els), Oraxians, Poseidans, anti-Atlanteans, Uramorans, and numerous others" (Sea's Furthest End 166). Between them, Dayton and Merle establish that a mysterious crystal skull discovered on Mars is now held in the Australian National Research Foundation in Canberra. This skull and forty-six others brought back by a robot lander are 1.8 billion years old, yet they look strangely like Dayton himself. When the Martian skull held in Canberra comes into contact with the crystal bead that Dayton is using as a remote interface apparatus, a furious exchange of information takes place, which leaves Dayton physically shut down, in the coma we saw at the start of the book.

In the final pages of Chakravalin's story, agreement is finally reached on the basis of a peaceful Federation, four years after the destruction of Jagannatha and his brilliant, bitter war commander, Controller Khurdd. But then the whole Universe is ripped asunder, seen from the horrified viewpoint of Adriel, as everything decays around her in the moment of triumph.

In the hyperdream, Dayananda realises his own identity as the cosmic Player whom he believed he played against (as, in a sense, he did). He has won his game, achieved the task he set himself, that of cajoling the "belligerent" human species to universal, freely chosen peace, not once, but three times: "Planetary parliament, when their world gasped at the edge of Greenhouse ruin and nuclear devastation. Galactic Empire. And prettiest of all, most elegant: Federation" (Sea's Furthest End 188-9). Dayananda has been shielded from knowledge of the rules of the game, but has compelled himself to play it. Game over, there is nothing for it but to utter the words: "Let there be light!" (Sea's Furthest End 189). The game begins again.

In the book's "NOW" strand, Dayton comes to his senses. And then he finds himself imbued with all the memories of Dayananda, those and the voice of the wom mother. The Player has awakened and is ready to play again. The wom mother tells him he has "made the universe once more." The novel ends with her words: "Welcome back, Dayton. And good luck" (Sea's Furthest End 192). The three strands of the book, the present, the future, and the timeless "Hyperdream" strand, have been brought into alignment.

What is horrifying about this is that the goal of freely-chosen peace among all humanity becomes trivialised within the quasi-Hindu metaphysics propounded in the "Hyperdream" sequence, which amount, so we are shown, to the self-amusement of an inarticulate but all-powerful child. For this, Adriel's world is ripped away, cheating her and her friends of the fruits that they fought, thought and loved for. We are left hoping that the Player will act more wisely in the next iteration of reality, but wonder whether this can ever be, because he does not know the rules that he sets himself; nor, it seems, can he refuse to play the game. Of course, the destruction of the fictional universe at the moment of narrative resolution is not only a reductio ad absurdum of Eastern metaphysics but also a clever comment on the disposability of literary characters and their worlds.

Zones is, like Valencies, a collaboration with Rory Barnes, and, like The Sea's Furthest End, a novel for young adults. Although it became available later in 1997 than The White Abacus, it was actually finished nine months earlier (personal discussion with Broderick, July 1997), and represents an earlier stage in Broderick's development; hence, I discuss it at this point.

Once again, the novel is based upon a time loop, this one created when a young physics researcher, Herodotus (or "Rod") Gianforte invents a time communication device in 1960, and uses it to make contact with the world of 1995. The main narrator is Jenny Kane, a smart 1990s teenage girl who loves science, and is by described Rod, and later by herself, as having "a mind like a steel trap" (Zones 5, 216). She receives a series of phone calls from Rod, back in 1960, and, once he manages to prove his identity to her, their discussions centre around the possible paradoxes that could be caused by their conversation.

One of the novel's set pieces is a very readable account of the (quite genuine) Raymond Chiao photon-splitting experiment, which can be interpreted as involving something like signalling back in time, and the whole book can be understood as a sugar-coated attempt to convert readers, teenagers on this occasion, to an interest in science. This aspect is conveyed implicitly by Sophie Masson in her favourable and sensitive review of the book (Rev. of Zones 58). However, there is more to it than that.

Most of the action of the novel is about Jenny's relationships with the people who are important to her: her recently-divorced parents, with whose break-up she tries to come to terms; her best friend, the pretty and flamboyant Madeleine; her "hunky" but not so bright boyfriend, David; and, another teenage boy, Tristan, who becomes her step-brother in the course of the book, when her divorced mother remarries, initially to Jenny's horror and confusion.

A strength of the novel is in the way it depicts clever kids, not forgetting that they are young people who are emotionally inexperienced and who have problems and interests appropriate to their age, but not patronising them, either. Jenny and Tristan, in particular, are intelligent, aware people whom the authors make vivid and likeable. When Jenny tries to talk her favourite teacher, Mrs Levine, about her phone calls from the past, describing the situation as if it is a story she is writing, the teacher wishes to analyse this as a reflection of Jenny's wish to change the past so that her parents can stay together. She gives Jenny advice such as: "we have to accept that there is nothing we can do about events that have already happened" (Zones 126). As narrator, Jenny observes, "Poor woman, she's still on about my home life" (Zones 127). Broderick and Barnes gently deflate the well-meaning superiority assumed by adults--and by some adult writers of fiction--when dealing with teenagers. Again, Zones does not avoid the fact that teenagers are interested in sex and drugs, but this element is handled with deftness and restraint; in particular, the characters' developing awareness of their sexual natures is treated in a low-key manner, neither sentimental nor judgmental, nor prurient. While the book is realistic about these elements of young adulthood, its real focus is elsewhere.

Put simply, Broderick has had the audacity, in The White Abacus, to write a far-future version of Shakespeare's (arguably) greatest play, and to set it partly on Earth, partly in a dimensionally-separated reality, but mainly in our solar system's asteroid belt. The main character--Telmah Lord Cima--faces the depressing Hamlet scenario of his ruthless uncle, Feng, killing Telmah's father (Orwen) and marrying his mother (Gerutha). Orwen's death takes place while Telmah is studying on Earth, and Telmah's destiny requires him to return to his home on the asteroid Psyche to confirm the murder and avenge it.

The parallels with Shakespeare are not always calculated to be subtle, though some of them are certainly clever. Obviously, "Telmah" is "Hamlet" spelt backwards; Telmah's side-kick, the equivalent of Shakespeare's stout and sceptical Horatio, is an artificial intelligence called, appropriately enough, "Ratio"; there are lively characters called "Rozz" and "Gill"; and so on. The plot of Hamlet has not suggested merely an overall scenario; instead, Broderick follows his original meticulously, finding opportunities for his characters to utter Shakespearean lines, and to show that they recognise their archetypal situation. As the story unfolds, an equivalent is found for each character and event in Hamlet, while a quite different, but rich and consistent, explanatory background is built up for all these events. For example, Feng, Broderick's equivalent of the Danish usurper Claudius, has time to consolidate his grip on the industrial Directorship of the planet Psyche because Telmah is delayed in returning from Earth. That, in turn, is because Telmah is constrained by religious prohibitions from speeding up his homecoming by "hexing" instantaneously to a significant gravitational mass closer to Psyche. This is not special pleading introduced by Broderick to excuse an unlikely turn of events, since the religious beliefs and social customs of the Psycheans are integral to much else in the narrative.

The transformations are sufficient to give the novel a vibrancy and zaniness all its own, while Broderick drops absolutely explicit clues (or merely cues) as to where we are vis-à-vis Hamlet, inviting recognitions, comparisons, and contrasts that are thematic and visionary as much as merely situational. Hamlet is the most explicitly self-conscious of all Shakespeare's plays, and Broderick's novel mirrors this, if to somewhat different ends. Consider that Hamlet is a tale of corruption that invites revenge, and which leads, in a grinding cycle of tragedy, to a mountain of dead characters represented on the stage. These include Hamlet himself, notwithstanding his apparent renunciation, by this point, of the role of malcontent avenger. The drama's audience is offered puzzlement and possibly catharsis, but not hope.

By contrast, The White Abacus clearly asks whether the cycle can be redeemed through scientific or humanistic enlightenment. Small, specific differences from the scheme of the original start to emerge after Telmah returns to Psyche--the figure equivalent to Polonius is a powerful, if cynical, statesman, not merely a sententious windbag; Ophelia, or, rather, the Warrior Rose, is a fierce genetically-engineered tiger woman, and the figure equivalent to Horatio is an artificial intelligence whose own quest for more pure understanding of human beings and the Universe itself becomes central to the whole design. These differences test the logic of the original, but offer no easy consolation to the characters, for the tragic frame within which they find themselves appears, nonetheless, to have an elasticity that draws the turn of events toward disaster.

At the same time as The White Abacus follows or tests the logic of Shakespeare's great meditative tragedy, much of its texture is freely borrowed from the traditions of modern SF. It resonates deeply with Alfred Bester's paradigmatic early SF novels--The Demolished Man and Tiger! Tiger! (or, in U.S. editions, The Stars My Destination). Broderick acknowledges these two "sources", Bester and Shakespeare, in the same sentence of his Afterword (White Abacus 341). Whether such resonances give a special force to the narrative, or simply a sense of familiarity, the most compelling part of the novel is its middle chapters, which most closely follow the form as well as content of Hamlet, while also showing--on stage, as it were--gaudy Psychean society, with its echoes of Bester.

Hamlet's agonisingly self-contemplative, self-corrupting quest for knowledge of evil (and with it, revenge) is yoked with Gully Foyle's uncontrolled, self-ignorant passage to individual redemption and universal transcendence. Such yokings may be discerned in The White Abacus at every level, from its title, through its first-page imagery, to the meditations of the characters, and their ultimate fates. We see a conflation of high art and the scientific imagination from the beginning, where a sense of astronomical wonder is juxtaposed with the traditions of fine art and design.

As the book opens, Ratio is born into the physical world, following a virtual reality pre-existence, and his first act is to use his era's teleportational gates for a day of "hexing to the most beautiful places in the Solar". Ratio chooses to visit the Tuileries and the Orangerie, followed by the Grand Canyon, and then a series of supremely beautiful aspects on or near, respectively, Mars, Pluto, Mercury, Saturn, Venus, and Jupiter. Amongst this, he (or rather "se") finds time to linger in the "Poetry Preserve at Stratford-upon-Avon" (White Abacus 3). The mingling of perspectives combines the two cultures of science and art.

Above all, The White Abacus is a kind of justification to the artistic sensibility of the beauty made available for discovery, or creation, by science. Broderick's characters are continually listening to music, often classical music inspired by the sciences. His visual scenery consists of magnificent pen-portraits of the planets; in the Afterword, he says, "Some of my planetary landscapes are annotations on the lovely paintings and photos in books such as Terence Dickinson's The Universe . . . and Beyond" (White Abacus 341). The equivalent of Hamlet's crucial play-within-a- play scene is a Stapledonian enactment of an ancient cataclysm that destroyed a planet, and thereby created the asteroid belt. There is a tireless insistence on the possibilities for beauty and creativity opened up by scientific knowledge, whether it be by vastly increased access to the natural world or by the provision of metaphors and other materials for art (as a scientific account of space, time, matter, and energy provides the materials for The White Abacus itself). At one point, Telmah consoles himself with the beauty of holographic designs based upon such subjects as the trinucleotide bases of DNA, treating these designs like works of art. This recalls the scientifically informed choreographic routines that lead to Joseph's epiphanic moment in Transmitters.

Broderick is a writer who is genuinely awed by the beauty of the Universe opened up by scientific knowledge and understanding. He is out of sympathy with claims, exemplified by the protests of Blake and Yeats, that reductive explanation kills the roses and gardens of beauty. Thus, he offers readers who are imbued with a scientific world view an appropriate source of new beauties and terrors, while polemicising the unconverted.

In form, The White Abacus is evidently designed to reflect the six-fold division of discourse types and life-cycle phases that Broderick has discussed in putting forward his vision of the earlier novels as forming a retrospective pattern, The Faustus Hexagram. Ratio's meditations on human psychology and sociology weave into organic patterns, providing another example of the beauty implicit in science, but also including speculations that individual lives and individual cultures may have six phases of development. It is not clear that the author endorses this view: after all, Ratio must be given some kind of high-powered thoughts to demonstrate the workings of ser mind, and the relevant scene is reminiscent of some of Sriyanie's speculations in The Judas Mandala, as well as resembling Alfred Bester's early work in its verbal pyrotechnics. Nonetheless, the book is itself divided into six parts, and these quite clearly correspond to the six phases that Ratio dwells upon.

In this way, The White Abacus presents itself as the culmination of Broderick's fiction-writing career, or, at least, of one of Broderick's own phases of development. When compared with the other novels, it bears the greatest affinity with The Judas Mandala in its imagery and its general mood and tone. In the end, certain of the characters are detached from common time, as part of a repertoire of seemingly anomalous feats, and this is presented with something of the same redemptive rhetoric as accompanies the possibility of time travel at the end of the earlier novel. Once more, temporal and causal dislocations are created with effects that are wholly positive for the lives of the protagonists. However, this time opera element is not a main feature of the narrative--it is introduced only in the sixth and last part--and the book differs from its predecessor in that there is no revulsion at the idea of machine or cyborg intelligence, but rather its ecumenical embrace. Although Telmah finds peace in a life that he describes, a little self-mockingly, as a "pastoral dream" (White Abacus 338), it is a dream that includes not only a degree of temporal disorder but also the presence of beings such as Ratio. In this book, there is a strong sense of Broderick moving on. As well as an attempt to reconcile art and science, The White Abacus is evidently an attempt to reconcile the human and the posthuman.

Broderick's fiction depicts adventures in space and time, though not, generally, Einsteinian spacetime, for relativistic effects play little part in these works. Often, the emphasis is upon the alteration of reality by interaction between human or alien characters from different time zones. In some cases, the interactions that take place are disastrous; in others, they are redemptive. In Transmitters, they do not happen at all, which is what makes the book a mainstream novel: if messages from the future were discovered within its narrative reality, the book would be a work of SF, like Broderick's other novels. Even so, its ambiguous double-ending hints that our experience of quotidian time is also untrustworthy, a typical postmodern claim (and narrative effect).

Despite these similarities, Broderick's novels are very different from each other in the voices that the author creates to convey his vision. His first-person narrators speak in voices ranging from that of the self-consciously transgressive Maggie Roche in The Judas Mandala (who is out to defy and subvert the system), through the tragic dignity of Xaraf Firebridge's voice in the Black Grail, to the smart, irrepressible youthfulness of Jenny Kane's in Zones. The comic Striped Holes adopts a sardonic omniscient voice, while a series of different tongues conspire to tell the story of The Sea's Furthest End, and complex narratorial strategies are used for The Dreaming Dragons, Transmitters and The White Abacus.

His fiction, then, can be enjoyed for his clever accounts of extraordinary adventures, for his gift of humour--many of these stories are surprisingly funny--and for an appreciation of his ever-deepening interest in scientific, philosophical and literary theories. It can also be approached as a body of work that shows a special mastery of style, technique and voice, renewing Broderick's central themes and ideas each time he takes them up, displaying a versatility that marks Broderick out among his peers as an SF writer of exceptional value and interest.

The Babel Handbook print version of this bibliography lists all Damien Broderick's novels, collections, anthologies, and non-fiction books to 1997, and is intended to identify all of his fiction published professionally in print form. It is omitted from this on-line version.[...]

It is possible that no bibliographer has yet succeeded in locating all of the uncollected stories (Tolley, "Broderick, Damien", 1991, 78): many of the stories were published in relatively ephemeral magazines, Broderick frequently used pseudonyms, and the same stories were often published in different forms and/or under different titles. In a small number of cases, I have been unable to obtain copies of the stories listed, and these are so annotated.

Among other resources available to me, I have used Sean McMullen's bibliography of Broderick's fiction up to 1993, available on the World Wide Web. This includes a number of Broderick stories never published professionally, and so not listed here; it can be found at: