HOME

THE PROFESSION OF SCIENCE FICTION

[published in the British journal Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, 59, Autumn 1993, and here slightly updated in places for Barbara Lamar’s unofficial but very pleasant page - DB]

Addressing the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, 1992:

Before we start, it’s worth noting, dear audience, that our topic is ‘science fiction’, or ‘speculative fiction, or ‘sf’—what it never is, is ‘sci fi’. ‘Sci fi’ is a term abominated by science fiction devotees, and hence has now been adopted in self-defence as shorthand for really foul pseudo-sf kludged together by, and for, half-wits. From the way everyone from video stores to the Age newspaper’s television guide indulges its use, you’d never guess what prickly annoyance it evokes in its target audience.  
            Having defended sf’s rights to its proud and obscure self-denomination, I now intend rather inconsistently to sink my boot into the genre. As the years roll by—my God, as the decades roll by—I find myself increasingly in the role of a disillusioned priest or witch doctor, now turning his inside knowledge to use as an anthropologist, trying to defend some barbarous piece of idiocy while knowing with a sinking heart that the faith is altogether lost, gone for good.

All My Yesterdays:

Like so many middle-aged people named Damien, not to mention middle-aged, angst-ridden Australian writers, I was raised a Catholic in the days when you went to hell and burned forever if you ate meat on Friday. So fervently was I raised in that manner, actually, that I sped off at fifteen to the Junior Seminary of the Blessed Sacrament Fathers in Bowral, New South Wales (pop. 5000). But as leading sociobiologists have shown, religion was merely prehistoric humanity’s first groping attempt to discover science fiction.
            When I arrived at Eymard College on a chilly summer’s day in 1960, the famous sf essayist John Baxter was an urbane, world-weary, apple-cheeked man of twenty-one, whose habit was to return from Sydney each weekend to stay with his Mum and Dad, just half a mile away down the highway from the monastery and round the corner. I cottoned on to this improbable fact after I found a letter of his in New Worlds magazine (reg. office, Great Suffolk Road, London S.E.1). From that point the sf genes had their way with me.
         It was not Baxter’s fault. How could I have chanced on his name in a British sf magazine, locked away as I was inside a monastery, unless I was already a helpless sf junkie?
         Such was my craving for sf that I’d reached an accommodation with Father Superior: by a special dispensation I was permitted the monthly purchase of New Worlds. Once I clapped eyes on poor Baxter’s imported sf collection I rather exceeded my prescribed dosage, escalating finally to the point where I secreted entire borrowed cartons of the stuff under my monastic bed.
          Can Anselm’s argument stand firm against temptation like that? I returned to the World, the Devil, and (eventually, but not nearly soon enough) the Flesh.

‘My Life’, as told to Richard Condon:

Hadrian had lived alone for some years because the women he loved were so sublime that he could not stand to share the company of lesser beings after they left him. Dining on lightly pan-fried schnitzel of chicken topped by a sliced hard boiled egg beside a tossed salad of hydroponic mignonette lettuce, home ripened tomato, paper thin cucumber and chunks of greyish but tangy avocado blended in his own dressing of cider vinegar, crushed garlic, and pendulous, almost gravid Italian olive oil, he listened to Kiri Te Kanawa sing ‘Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben’, the thrilling aria from Zaïde, while tears rushed to his eyes as he ate faster and faster. Dame Kiri’s projection was impeccable but tensile as he shovelled yellow fragments of crumbling yolk into his mouth. The song reminded him piercingly of Firenze’s visit to the Preston and Community Hospital the day after his rhinoplasty. Kissing him lightly, careful of the plaster crab mounted protectively over his septum, she placed on the metal bedside cabinet her own portable tape player and a K-Mart plastic bag bursting with cassettes of Grieg, Sibelius, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and haunting excerpts from the unfinished Mozart operetta. Hadrian had met her for the first time just three weeks earlier when she had visited his friend Jana with her basketted baby. As he lay dazed and nauseated the gnarled whiskery men in the beds opposite revealed that he had shouted her name as he slept after the anaesthetic. They told her slyly that Hadrian had flailed and punched the air, as if in his dreams he were punishing her brutally. Contact lenses blazed above her irises, two shades greener than light seen through crème de menthe, making a sensational contrast to her deep red scarf, chemically Titian hair and devouring red mouth. In the zonked and besotted inner world of poor nose-nobbled Hadrian, she bore a shocking resemblance to Star, Empress of the Twenty Universes, in the memorable Ed Emsh cover for Robert Heinlein's 1963 F&SF serial, Glory Road. She smiled as they told her about Hadrian’s antics and shook her head ruefully which melted their hearts and made them mutter at the strange fate of men and women. Some years later Firenze married an imported telecommunications specialist and Hadrian wrote a book about the semiotics of science fiction, another on the ways in which literature and science slide and skid sensuously around each other, and a children’s novel about solipsism and the Face on Mars. He was insanely lonely by then and didn’t know what to do about it.

A Pre-Theoretical Account of the Rise and Fall of Science Fiction:

You run this small greasy-spoon on a dusty bypass road, and one day you whop up some strange edibles like nothing anyone ever heard of. Left-over minced beef and pork and onion mushed into patties, whatever spices are to hand, over on the shelf a couple of stale buns so you toast them, and an egg might be nice, crack it on the hot plate, splat! damn it, some sliced tomato and extra onion rings, why not, and you pile it up and shoot in some tomato sauce for luck, pop the top on and bite deep—heaven! The truckie at the counter has his nostrils twitching, and he orders one, so okay—heaven!--what’s it called, god knows, give it a name, it’s a... a ‘hamburger’.
           Well, pretty soon the door’s banging, and you keep running out of ingredients and toss in what’s on hand, and that’s okay, that’s just it, because the thing about your ‘hamburger’ is there’s no recipe, nobody’s Mammy ever made one. That’s what everyone loves.
            Eventually, though, a slick guy from the city comes out and looks your operation over, and writes up a cheque for the franchise. Big bucks. You can retire. He tears out the greasy counter and moves in family-module seating and changes the roof-line and puts up big lights and standardises the formula, fixes the recipe, gets the onions and beef and tomato under his thumb and that’s the beginning and the end of the ‘hamburger’.

‘Missing the Train’, a Tale of Childhood Deception:

I have grown up to be the child I was. At tea-time my mashed potatoes cooled on the table or dried out in the ‘Early Kooka’ while the younger kids squalled and my father got ready to go out to a union meeting to battle the Coms and miles away I [aged 13 or 14] froze my bum on a wooden bench, amid the gathering dark and chill of evening, as I read sf paperbacks from the Collingwood railway station news-boy’s rack. He let me read them without payment, for as long as he was there, until the rush hour was done, and then I returned them unscarred, spines uncreased, neat as new, their extraordinary tales passed to my brain like soothing neutrino radiation. If the book wasn’t finished, I’d get on with it the following afternoon. Other days I’d rattle illegally on my concession ticket into the city, a risk if they stopped you at the gate, delving in second-hand trays for dreams and wonders. Or in the Collingwood library, the kids’ section only, alas, they wouldn’t let you borrow grown-up books until you turned 14, on my father’s bicycle to the Preston library, scummy Reservoir itself got a branch library finally: dinosaurs, the Space Beagle [by A. E. van Vogt], ‘In Hiding’ [by Wilmar Shiras], the secret insides of bodies, J. B. Rhine and Isaac Asimov, shale and volcanoes, flying saucers had landed and Men in Black were abroad but only the few knew the truth... The overdone chops cooled and dried out, and I’d wander in with some vague tale of catching the wrong train and being carried off in error along the alternative line to distant Heidelberg; little wonder they took me for a halfwit, or worse. I hid the paperbacks under the mattress after the Christian Brothers at my slum technical school warned my parents against the evils of imagination. How appalled they had been when I’d passed in an essay on the set topic ‘A Visit to a Factory’, but my factory was a place where simians were skilfully enhanced for the shit jobs, and those past their use-by date were cruelly disassembled, according to the shock ending of the essay, in a side room. I probably found the idea in Heinlein. There were ructions, rather like those at the upwardly mobile Jesuit school where earlier I’d spent grades four through seven in a hopeless daze of social and cognitive dissonance, and caused a nasty stir by persuading a pal to get his public servant father to type and roneo my three page story about the spaceship ‘Aldo-4’ and its peace-making peregrinations about the solar system, dozens of copies passed out to my fellow students without permission from the Head, hardly the behaviour of a future public servant; little wonder they too took me for a halfwit, or worse, and shuffled me off quick-smart to learn a manual trade. So now I have grown fully into child’s estate and I sit all day at home and read books, storybooks and tales of hermeneutics and quantum theory at second-hand, storybooks in high poetry and low, reviewing them for newspaper readers with authorised jobs and incomes, and sometimes, when I can bear to, writing out of them stories of my own.

‘Problems of Production and Distribution’, a Post-Industrial Case Study:

Because I am an Australian in Australia (unlike Clive James, say, an Australian in Britain or Italy or Japan, or Robert Hughes, an Australian in New York or Barcelona), in Australia where the shark-menaced water surrounds us on all sides and a meagre population can barely support the elements of industry and so survives by tearing the bowels out of the earth and shipping them undigested elsewhere, my tales have tended to go forth into the rest of the world and nobody knows what I do here, sitting on the station, reading and dreaming and writing. Perhaps they assume I have caught the wrong train. Often I think that too. For years I thought I had spoiled and obliterated my life, reading and writing in Dianne’s warm house for the decade and a half of our somewhat shared lives  while she went to work among the lunatics, the brain-damaged, the hopelessly sad, balancing their woes with clever drugs and carefully measured quantities of electricity, listening to them with her unnervingly direct gaze. Later her psychiatric duties and kindnesses would be considered politically compromised, a sort of mind control, and one could see the point, perhaps, but which of us is without sin? My own crimes were largely exported off-shore because Australians were immune, by and large, to their lure. So I learned to wonder what good it did to know that somewhere my novel The Judas Mandala was said to be available in Portuguese, though I’d never seen a copy in that tongue and you couldn’t find it in English in my own country; that my story ‘A Passage in Earth’ could be read as ‘Reis naar de Aarde’ in a Dutch collection called Top SF 1; that Germans were reading Die träumenden Drachen which was on sale briefly in Australia but not any more, on sale in the USA just long enough to pick up a place medal in the Campbell Memorial Award and a mention in Pringle’s SF: The 100 Best Novels, but not any more [the 2000 Editrice Nord Italian translation — mysteriously retitled Sull’Orlo del Ciclone, The Centre of the Cyclone—was meant to incorporate my millennial updates but the translator never quite got around to it, and it’s still not available in print in English, although Fictionwise.com offer an updated version as The Dreaming]; that Poles are reading Czarny Graal and Pasiaste Dziury which had come and gone like an eye blinking in the USA as The Black Grail and Striped Holes and never got back home...

...and all this changed in a moment, for a moment, when Mandarin Australia in 1990 brought out handsome versions in a matched set, and a bit later my short story collection The Dark Between the Stars...

...but the price was set a buck or three too high to compete with imported US paperbacks by Piers Anthony and Jack Chalker and all those fat, furry fantasies, so the stores sent them back quick smart if they’d bothered ordering them at the outset, and even as the cheerful and encouraging reviews tumbled in, off to the paper-recyclers the unopened paperbacks ran, hoppity skip.

  [Luckily, things improved during the rest of the 1990s and into the new millennium, when HarperCollins Australia published several books by Rory Barnes and me—the young adult novels Zones and Stuck in Fast Forward, and an semi-science fictional black comedy, The Book of Revelation, and my sf novel The White Abacus appeared in handsome hardback and paperback editions in New York and won a couple of year’s best awards, and Tor released Transcension, and there were two popular-science moderate bestsellers, and several more critical books, and a pair of extravagant novels generously funded in 2004-5 by the Australia Council and released by Thunder's Mouth Press, and a Distinguished Scholarship Award from the IAFA in Florida in 2005, you know the sort of thing... We’ll come back to some of this at end.]

Reading Faster Than Light:

Which is why, I guess, David Langford once mentioned me in Ansible, his snide and witty newszine, as an ‘almost famous Aussie sf writer’.

A Life For the Stars:

Everything important in one’s life is intertwined with everything else, and much of it is hidden from view. Fashionable literary critics, or ‘theorists’ as they prefer to be known, have a term for this: imbrication. Feathers on a dove’s wing are imbricated; so are the tiles on a roof. Things overlap and fold through each other, so that rain is shed without leaking inward to damage the vulnerable heart of things. But the heart’s text is shuffled, too, from a thousand scribbled leaves where our sentence is inscribed, built out of words that warm or slash, tropes that accrete in its pulsing tissues like the small droplets of cholesterol that cling to the walls of each artery’s pulsing conduit and choke off one’s life blood. Deconstruction teaches that we are all imbricated texts. There I was the other day [well, a good few years ago now], pedalling up a steep hill as I headed off from Brunswick to Reservoir in filial spirit to see my old father who’d fallen over and smashed part of his right hand into small absurd pieces replete with extruding bone and lots of blood, when I spied the yellow press Herald-Sun poster outside a milk bar: LIFE ON MARS! it trumpeted, no qualifications. I puffed on, knowing full well that it had to be just a beat-up based on the Face on Mars yo-yos going paranoid about the lost signal from the Observer space probe, but even so for half an hour my imbricated text riffled in a wind gusting across me from 1958 on the railway station bench, yes, I cannot tell a lie, I enjoyed the small adrenalin tingle of wondering if fuck me maybe it is true, maybe the bastards really did have a time-delay on their transmission for pre-vetting and have now confirmed the Face and decided to release the news... This small confession of vulnerability will perhaps comfort those who smiled wearily at the news that in 1992 I had published a book entitled The Lotto Effect: Towards a Technology of the Paranormal. I had delved into the data files of Australia’s largest gambling enterprise and dug out the accumulated guesses of millions of players who’d tried to forecast the winning six out of 45 numbered balls a week hence. SAS, a nice stats package, showed some extremely provocative bulges in the data. Had dear old John W. Campbell, Jr, been right after all? Do we have Mysterious Powers over Time and Space? Beats me, but you can always read my book and check the evidence. If you can find a copy. But for merry games with the Face on Mars, a truly stupid idea if ever I’ve heard one but good fun for a children’s story, you’ll need to look into my young adults’ skiffy confection The Sea’s Furthest End, from that brave little Aussie battler Aphelion Books of Adelaide [now, sadly, defunct].  If you can find a copy.
              Gee, what a grouch. What a sourpuss. [But by a stroke of luck the space opera core of that book, de-YA’d, is now available at Fictionwise.com under the title ‘The Game of Stars and Souls’].

A Letter to a US Editor:

Dear [X] 

We were last in direct contact at the end of June, last year. At that time you had been holding The Sea’s Furthest End for some 10 months. Another eight months have now elapsed. Despite what I’m assured were strenuous efforts by my agent to get your attention about this matter, you’ve failed to contact either [Y, my famous agent of the time] or me. You’ve neither made an offer for the book, nor rejected and returned the manuscript.
             This is the more remarkable because I instructed [Y] to set a deadline for offer-or-rejection of 15 January this year. An unfortunate side-consequence of your continuing refusal to respond to [Y]’s representations is that I no longer have confidence in her ability to represent me, and today terminated my business dealings with her. Please return the manuscript directly to me, at once.
            I’m very saddened that these steps should be necessary. It had seemed that you and I had a pleasant and productive working relationship since the start of the eighties, and a measure of friendship as well. For a time, I surmised that your delays in dealing with my book arose from an incapacity (disabling enough in an editor) to reject a friend’s work, however much you disliked it. What’s occurred is far more painful than being told (say) that my manuscript is awful or unpublishable. For my part, I suspect that this impasse marks the end of my interest in writing sf. It’s hard to work at writing when the editor’s response is an indifference verging on contempt.

Another Letter to a US Editor:

Dear [X]

Greetings, pal. Just routine checking in, you know how it is. I see two more months have elapsed since I wrote explaining (in rather stiff and perhaps offensive terms, it’s true) that I’d fired [Y] and needed my manuscript back so I could try it somewhere else. No response from you in that time, alas, either in the form of a letter or the requested ms.
            You probably know Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s theory of the four stages of dying. I was in denial for a while, a year or more, when I refused to believe that this was happening again. Then I got very angry and started to shout at [Y]. She got angry too, and shouted back. Finally I was too angry to keep shouting, and entered the phase of prayer and resignation. None of this made any difference, of course.
            Well, you have been holding my manuscript without either offer or rejection for 20 months. I am just now moving on into the final Kübler-Ross stage of terminal depression. A kind of gallows humour comes over one, I find. They say that, if you’re lucky, beyond this lies acceptance, followed by a good death. That would certainly be better.

[And then?]

[My pal couldn’t bring himself to reply. The book failed to excite any US publisher, apparently, and finally got published in Australia where it did modestly well. This same laggardly New York editor, to my amazement, later bought a quite ambitious and non-commercial novel from me, outbidding another interested publisher at auction—and showed he held no hard feelings by kindly putting me up again, with his wife’s forbearance, in their Manhattan apartment next time I visited the States. We all had dinner in Australia quite recently on his company card. He got back to New York to learn that his company had been swallowed by another, and he and the entire sf department were out of a job. Strange world.]

A Post-Theoretical Account of the Rise and Fall [and sideways scuttlings] of Science Fiction:

Cf. Damien Broderick, The Architecture of Babel: Discourses of Literature and Science, Melbourne University Press, 1994,  Reading By Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction, Routledge, 1995, [and Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science, Greenwood Press, 2000; and x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction, Wildside/Borgo, 2004].

So You Want To Be A Writer:

Dear [Z]

The way to write, as many old farts before me have noted, is to write. And read. And write more. And get people to look at what you wrote and tell you what they think, within the limits of good taste and believability. And write. And at a certain point mail out some of what you think is tight, clean, kinetic, or whatever standards you use to judge good prose. Send it to editors who’ve published stuff like it before. For sf, this pretty well rules out Australian magazine or book publishers, unless you married one (and while I had never done so, I have no reason to think that this will work either). What you showed me isn’t remotely ready for submission, however, so the recipe is scribble scribble scribble.
            Sf is a team sport. Many of its best moments (back in the 1940s and 1950s) were hot-housed in New York by fans who knew each other very closely and went on to become Asimov, Pohl, Sturgeon and so forth. Meet some local fans and if they don’t already run an informal writing workshop (face to face or by mail), push them into starting one. [You can also check out the Australian SF Bullsheet, but you'll have to find it online.]
            The rest of your questions... You can’t start a career in sf and a bank account at the same time unless you’re a genius and/or live in New York and pester the editors while smoodging with the writers. Don’t let that stop you. There are worse ways to ruin your life. (There must be.) (I guess.) Funny sf is thin on the ground unless you think Piers Anthony ‘comedies’ are funny in which case I’ve wasted my time writing this letter. Douglas Adams is okay (I see the influence) but his tricks only work when you know exactly what you’re doing with the standard tropes. Better is Robert Sheckley, who was there first in the 1950s, and John Sladek (an acquired taste). I thought the Red Dwarf series were pretty good, in a derivative sort of way. Nobody in Oz has the bucks to make such a program, so forget it (unless you’re married to...). I recommend Ian Watson, Geoff Ryman, Brian Aldiss, Samuel R. Delany, Cordwainer Smith, Alfred Bester (up to about 1956), Theodore Sturgeon (ditto), A. E. van Vogt (ditto), Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, Phil Dick. Heinlein was an authoritarian old thing but knew a lotta good tricks. Forget drugs. Read New Scientist. Read real literature. Go for it. Shouldn’t take more than 5 or 10 years of nonstop work...

Damien’s Weaselly Explanation for a Rude Cover:

It is generally agreed that the cover of my novel Transmitters, published by Ebony Books in 1984 on my 40^th birthday, is in the worst possible taste and deeply offensive to feminists and dog owners. As a soi-disant feminist sympathiser, I reject these claims, but with less and less conviction. The beautiful woman 

bathing naked on the cover is Dianne, my former partner of 16 years. The dog is our German short haired pointer Imme which was run over a couple of years later to our intense heartbroken grief. Dianne was not run over; instead she ran off with a young person up the street. Actually she didn’t run off; she stayed put, and I ran off with Hazel, the woman down the hall at Deakin University where I was writer in residence.
      Hazel, who went on to write a massive biography of Christina Stead which was instantly compared by reviewers with Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce, ran off briefly with another lad down the same corridor and then ran off overseas.  I took the chance in my grief to run off with Fiona up the road a bit and round the corner, a great-grand niece of Heinrich Hertz, who’d just been dumped (incomprehensibly) by her former chap as she went into labour. Because of my no less immature dread of small wet smelly noisy creatures not dogs but bound to intersect my lebensraum for a good part of the rest of my life, I eventually ran off to be by myself in multicultural Brunswick, which is how for some years I stupidly spent my days and nights, knocking off the occasional book to while away the hours [but these days I do them one suburb further to the north, in better comfort, with trees, when not in San Antonio, Texas, with better company... again, see below]. A sad tale, in some respects, and not one recommended to the young for emulation. Since I am probably not here speaking to the young—well, not all that young—I suppose I’m in the clear.

A University Education in the Early 1960s, Part I:

I didn’t really ignite until perhaps my fourth year at Monash university, then a sea of mud and new brick, for I had spent two years prior to this sluggish laicisation in a Catholic seminary preparing (in so far as this has any meaning in the case of a kid of 16 or 17) for the priesthood. Luckily I ended up as part of a proto urban commune or collective sex-and-speed-and-hard philosophisin’ household down the muddy track from Uni, next to a paddock full of swaybacked nags. Two couples—the writers Jean Bedford and Rory Barnes among them—and I, certain women in and out as short-term residents, a couple of them, at last, in my bed, or I in theirs. An expensively thwarted pregnancy, a broken heart (and not the last of either, despite canny use of the wonders of modern science). Tutors known to drop in and employ the place for the debauchment of themselves and their academic charges. We set fire to it midway into 1965 and had no kitchen or living room thereafter, which immensely enhanced our mutual dependency and fellowship, as cooking in random bedrooms will do. It is all mind-crushingly banal now, of course, but three decades back [more than four now, good grief] it yielded up some agitation in our mentors. Finally our lavatory stopped working. Dear old Lot 4. Tractors came later and levelled, mounded, contoured the land for factories. We went back there on a windy, cold, sunny day and danced in silence, our scarves flying all melancholy. Secret Seven Go To Uni.

A University Education in the Mid 1960s, Part II:

My recollections of Monash University are surprisingly scant, given that I was there for five years before I finally collared enough units to graduate (and then didn’t, not for years, being a snotty little anarchist). Life had come good, sort of, when I joined the student paper Chaos, which my co-editors and I swiftly changed to Lot’s Wife when we seized its helm. A while later, certain tradition-bound conservatives attempted to change the name back. As its coiner, I did what I could to hang onto our strange invention, rather as one might battle for the right to stage an annual Mock Crucifixion (a celebrated scandale of the time). We three doughty loons had shared digs in the back of a dinner-jacket hire shop, where I learned to write sf by selling awful stories to the fabled Aussie tits-&-bums magazine Man (which less than ten years later, hair down to my arse but snazzily dressed, I would edit for five and half months at an astonishing salary, trying with all my might to turn it into Penthouse or TriQuarterly, before being turfed out on grounds of taste). Eventually, my teacher-training stipend abandoned, skint, I moved into the Lot’s Wife office, building myself a cosy cave out of Fler chairs, filing cabinets and curtains. We editors and certain young persons and a mad night watchman who’d evolved his own theories of spelling reform whiled away the hours there until we grew up, drove more expensive cars or in my hemiblind case bicycles, got married or something similar, had kids or vasectomies, wrote books or marked essays, farmed the nation’s soil, designed curricula, got ahead, perhaps, or managed not to fall too far behind, and did it, I guess, without being altogether scraped headless beside the uncaring, truck-tormented roadside.

And Just in Case You Were Wondering About the Books:

A few years ago I realised that Transmitters, my non-sf metafiction about sf fans, might usefully be read as part of a larger post facto structure holding most of my novels at its vertices. By the end it contained six novels, so I chose to dub it (like some godawful fantasy N-ology) The Faustus Hexagram. Like all sf tropes, this is meant to be resonant and jesting at the same time, a difficult trick but good fun at parties. My gadget works like this: at the points of a hexagon, place the six components of Prague linguist Roman Jakobson’s model of the communication process: Addresser (me), Addressee (you lot), Message, Context, Code and Channel. For literary texts, it occurred to me, these match quite well with Artist, Reader, Text, World, Language, and Publishing Genre. By a curious stroke of luck, for scientific texts they also map neatly on to Researcher, Scientific Community, Theory, Universe, Mathematics, and Publication Network. Science fiction’s version, as you’d expect, oscillates like postmodernism’s between these two huge cultural paradigms. None of the nodes stands in isolation; each works reflexively on the others. Ideas cluster about them, more than I can list conveniently here: romantic construction of the artist, rhetorical construction of the social order, deconstruction of the text, theorised construction of the world, linguistic construction of intertextual codes, generic construction via formulae and tropes. [I discuss all this textual and cultural machinery in my 1997 book Theory and Its Discontents, from Deakin University Press, for those of a theoretical bent.] My own novels, I believe, can be mounted rewardingly on the same mechanism, or viewed most richly through its lenses: The Judas Mandala, Addresser; The Black Grail, Addressee; The Dreaming Dragons, World or Context; Transmitters, Message or Text; The Sea’s Furthest End, Code; and Striped Holes, Phatic Channel or Tropes. There are other nice parallels to this schema in both historical cycles and ontogenetic psychological development that I leave as an exercise to those who wish to earn extra marks for work after school.

And How Many Books Does That Make So Far, Doctor?

Not many, God knows. Asimov claimed 400-odd, though many of those were anthologies put together by other people. Silverberg must have notched up hundreds. I’ve hardly scratched at the edges of the memesphere: fifteen books to date [36 or so now, in 2006], three of them anthologies of other people’s work [six now], two of them still in production [usually the way, so still true, although now they’re a different pair]. Hell’s teeth, and I’m nearly 50 [well, I was once, more than a decade ago]. Still, I did discover how to see into the future using Psychic Mysteries known only to those who’ve read The Lotto Effect, hee hee.

How to Make a Reliable Living Out of Sci Fi:

Go to America and stay there. Write lots of simple books. Do not try to be complex unless you are already very famous. Do not write rude or challenging books even if your name is Samuel R. Delany, because the book-selling chains won’t stock them. If you are an Australian, forget it, but if you can’t help yourself write like a demon and keep asking the Literature Board for money to help pay your grocery bills. That’s how I get by. Barely.
            But then, ya gotta laff. Ya really gotta laff. And then ya gotta go out and conquer the stars, yeah.

That Was Then, This Is Now April, 2006

Don’t be misled by my sardonic tone. I’m quite a cheerful person, actually, this is just a defensive (and, in its way, rather typically Australian) mask I wear. Recently I’ve been writing wildly optimistic books about the century’s coming hypertechnology—ways of living based on startling scientific knowledge and technical breakthroughs that might end by making the world a genuine utopia before the close of the 21^st century. Or, more likely, remaking humanity into an augmented super-species. Is that cause for rejoicing? Maybe not, according to the technofearful. Looks promising to me: there’s the prospect of indefinite lifespan, as we swiftly learn the secrets of the human gene package, the places where it goes wrong and can be enhanced or better maintained, and fixed up using tiny smart machines the sizes of viruses. I’ve explored these possibilities in two books, The Spike (released in an updated edition in America in February 2001) and The Last Mortal Generation. If you’re wondering why I’m feeling so cheerful now, take a gander at these comments I stumbled over while reading the latest edition of Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s classic futurist book Profiles of the Future, a book that had a profound impact on me when I read it at the age of 19.
            On page 148, I found this astonishing comment: ‘Since this chapter was written, these ideas have been developed in great detail by such writers as Eric Drexler (The Engines of Creation, 1986) and Damien Broderick (The Spike, 1997). Damien’s book will serve as a more imaginative sequel to the one you are reading now.’
            As if that wasn’t enough, a bit further on here was this delightful comment on page 189: ‘In The Last Mortal Generation (1999), the Australian polymath and science fiction writer Damien Broderick has suggested that immortality is not merely desirable—but inevitable. My recommendation of this truly mind-stretching book was not in the least affected by its dedication: “For Arthur C. Clarke, who profiled the future and dreamed of advanced sciences indistinguishable from magic.”’
            Meanwhile, I’d been writing novels with my old Monash pal Rory Barnes, himself a novelist and science writer (his novel The Bomb-Monger’s Daughter is a treat, if you can find it, and his current Horsehead trilogy for younger kids is hilariously inventive), starting twenty years back with Valencies. As Rory points out in his web site, this was a strange novel, since it took his rambling tale of student life in the mid-60s and plunged it into the year 4004. I was determined to make this metamorphosis as richly plausible as I could, since I wanted to create a future where nothing was the same except human nature and the ways in which people in quite different cultures tend to reinvent similar solutions to typical issues of power conflict, intimacy, the confused identity of the young, love and jealousy, dawning political commitment. But if cultures sometimes come up with the same range of responses, those are usually cast in distinctive forms that mask the underlying resemblances. These days, of course, I disagree with that premise, since I don’t think we’ll even be recognisable as humans in 500 years, let alone by 4004 AD. As a parable, though, I think the novel was not unsuccessful. One unimaginative reviewer heaped scorn on the book for supposing that students would ever again mass in public demos against oppressive governments. Within a decade, we saw student and other mass activities bring the Soviet Union crashing down, heroic and tragic confrontations in China, attainment of black majority rule in South Africa... Confrontations between government and eager young activists seems likely to have become a recurrent and important feature of political life henceforth.
            The young adult novels Rory and I wrote nearly two decades later were lighter in mood, but dealt with quite serious topics. Zones grew from an ABC radio play of mine about a young girl who gets mysterious telephone calls from a fellow claiming to live in a different time. We wrote Stuck in Fast Forward by the ‘hot computer’ method, taking turns at the keyboard in an intensive burst of writing while I holidayed with Rory and his family during and following the famous two-yearly Adelaide Literary Festival. We invented the plot as we went, coming up with twists and turns as we walked in twists and turns along the streets of Unley, basing the thrust of the book on a notion introduced by the late great sf writer Poul Anderson, to whom the book is dedicated. (Poul wrote to me that ‘My wife and I both enjoyed the book a lot. In fact, I’d compare it to middle-period Heinlein, and that’s meant as a real compliment. We hope to see more from you.’ It is indeed a very fine compliment to be compared with Heinlein’s classic sf novels for young readers. This is the kind of reaction that makes you glad you’re a writer rather than, say, an accountant or corporate executive.)
            Our work was recognised at home as well. In 2000, the judges of the national Aurealis award for best sf and fantasy commented: ‘1997 Aurealis Awards nominees Damien Broderick and Rory Barnes continued to establish their reputation as the best writers of YA science fiction in the country, delivering STUCK IN FAST FORWARD, a work loosely based on Broderick’s bestselling science book THE SPIKE.’ They added: ‘Working solo, Rory Barnes delivered HORSEHEAD MAN, a fine novel and a strong addition to his series that we  wouldn’t hesitate to recommend.’
            In the same year, we had another book from HarperCollins Australia, this one an adult novel using the mythos of UFO abductions in a humorous if also somewhat grim journey by a young 21^st century woman to recover her memories of childhood and her relationship with her absent father, the UFO cult leader Daimon Keith. Although the book has been almost entirely ignored by mainstream reviewers—probably because its inexpensive and accessible packaging fails to impress those who insist upon pompous dignity—a major notice in Australian Book Review, by Dr Rosaleen Love, makes up for it. She said, to our delight: ‘That life may simultaneously reduce the living to both laughter and despair at the horror of it all is a subject few novelists tackle in one bite. In The Book of Revelation, Rory Barnes and Damien Broderick succeed in the near-impossible task.... The Book of Revelation stands as one of the two great realist novels to tackle the notoriously non-realist theme of contact with extra-terrestrials. It resides on the same (astral) plane as Alison Lurie’s magisterial Imaginary Friends.’ Anyone familiar with Lurie’s splendid writing will know how startling and gratifying such a compliment is.
            We haven’t stopped. Our latest book, a blackly comic crime novel with the absurdly Aussie title I Suppose a Root's Out of the Question? is due any day now. I sometimes contemplate a popular-science book discussing the apparent absence of alien civilisations in the rest of the universe, a topic of peculiar poignancy and implication if you take the postulate of the Spike seriously, as I do. Once a culture gets into runaway technological change, with one shocking and powerful innovation boot-strapping the next—genomics rewriting living forms, including our own, molecular nanotechnology providing many of our needs almost for free and opening the door to cheap and easy space flight, augmented intelligence and other abilities—it’s hard to see where it can all end. Must every society adopting such hypertechnology swiftly lose control of its genies, wiping itself out? Or will such worlds Transcend into some condition we can’t yet quite imagine, given our current limitations? Is the universe, as we gaze at it with innocent eyes, already an engineered construct, rebuilt by generations of post-Spike civilisations or even godlike individuals? Exciting topics, I reckon. And who knows, maybe I’ll continue exploring them in sf as well, as I did in The White Abacus and Transcension, and even more so in my latest doublet, Godplayers and K-Machines. This is a great time to be alive—and if everything goes to plan (it never does, alas), who knows, maybe we’ll all be here at the start of the fourth millennium, or the fifth billennium, changed and enhanced beyond recognition but recalling this ancient dawn of true history, the time when the flame flickered up out of nothing and created... the future.
            Here's how I summarized my whole damned strange life trajectory in the introduction to my short story collection The Dark Between the Stars, published in Australia in 1991. Some will find my chosen voice in this piece unforgivable florid; I hope others will find what I was reaching out for.

‘When it was young’ :

Listen near to me, for this is a story wrapped around a story, and ten thousand more hidden away inside like shadows breathed in on clouded days, on hot afternoons of Antipodean summer and evenings of gusting winter, inhaled and biddable like sweet ghosts.
             In the days when the first satellites were thrown into the sky, when I was stretching like some gawky long-limbed thing emerging from its chrysalis, chalk dust and wood planings and hot turned metal in my nostrils, tumbled by the rush of hormones which make us giddy with dreams, I toppled like a besotted fool a billion years into the future:  

That is the exultant lamentation which opens Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars, a novel based upon a tale with the even more evocative title ‘Against the Fall of Night’. Here is its ending, and the extraordinary coda that closes the book’s vision of vast futurity:  

Clarke’s book was quite simply the most important novel I have ever read, will ever read. It stapled my ambition to a kind of mad hunger, guaranteed that I yearned to be a science fiction writer, of all benighted things, and nothing else. When I was fourteen or so, I sat in class in my infinitely tedious slum technical school with the fat Corgi paperback propped open under the desk and dreamed, and dreamed, until the stern Christian Brother whacked his cane down on my isometric projection and made the pencils jump.
            Later 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, compellng 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.
           I wanted to know what happens next. I wanted to carry forward the misty collective enterprise I seemed to detect in these tales that everyone else took for tasteless tomfoolery. It was as if I had been invited to join some secret masonry of dreamers, to partake of their Gothic vision of a world where science really is close to magic, when everything has been known and done, and forgotten, when the world, failing in entropy, is kick-started back to numinous ignition.
            But I don’t wish to be solemn. This is pleasure I’m talking about. I was an inward, asthmatic child, and liked nothing better than pedalling in the cool afternoon air to second-hand swap shops (they seem to be vanishing) to exchange tattered magazines and books, with titles like Galaxy and Astounding and Science Fantasy, trading over and again the four or five I could afford as my stake. In all this, it was some haunting overtone from Diaspar which fugued through my unconscious, and forced me to become an sf tale-teller.
            Fugued? Curiously, that musical image is no less significant in what it says about my life, and its governance by sf. I knew little enough of music until quite late. Reading in Arthur Clarke’s introduction to ‘Against the Fall of Night’ of the influence on Diaspar of  Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, I listened deliberately to Debussy for the first time in my thirties, and fell back baffled. I found no link with my internal sense of that glowing jewel lying upon the breast of the desert ... of the dying, reborn Earth turning on its Pole, a perfect Hemisphere ...
            So I trusted what Clarke had written, and listened again, and again. And I discovered finally the dying falls, the romance of golden, reddened, purpled, darkened dusk. And at last I found also my own Diaspar: the Ravel of ‘Mother Goose’ and ‘Daphnis and Chloe’, Holst, Elgar, Vaughan Williams’ ‘Lark Ascending’, Mahler and Delius and Sibelius ... Oceans of flowing impressions. Rapture and misery: you know the sort of thing, shockingly out of season in this hard-edged recess of the millennium--a fin de siècle fool drunk on fragrances.
            Not that you’d guess, meeting me. A sardonic and cynical fellow is what I see in the mirror, and in plenty of the stories in this book. We each contain, of course, as Walt Whitman boasted of himself, multitudes--many of them bitterly at war with the rest, or uneasy in their company. I hide my gasping heart inside my thin, bony chest, as is the custom, but in some others of these tales you’ll see the poor unguarded dope thumping away, dizzy with the stars and the calling dark between them.

‘Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life,’ Arthur Clarke wrote, two-thirds of my lifetime ago, in the closing passage of Profiles of the Future. With the lyrical melancholy that marks the finest scientific and science fiction writing, he had kept the strangest magic until last. It is not until these stars have guttered out, he told us, not until Vega and Sirius and the Sun have burned low, that the true history of the universe will begin:

 ‘When it was young. . .’ Science fiction is the anthem and cadence of the young, I think, hovering over unexplored waters which run with bright mystery, drenched suddenly with sadness inexplicable to the workaday realists, those damned grown-ups who’ve lost it; galloping out of misery, then, into frenzies of delight, the smells of the night, the arcana of lost pages opened in the back of the library, the amazed pleasure at meeting another human soul who shares the hunger and the dreaming.

Postscript: HAPPINESS!

 Well, that was then, a decade and more back. This, of course, is still then, by the time you read it, but not nearly as far back then. In fact as I write it, it's a month after my fourth wedding anniversary.
          Reader, she married me.
          I was amazed, too, and delighted. How could such a thing have happened? I met Barbara when we were both members of the global on-line community of technological optimists and intense individualists associated with transhumanism, an emerging philosophy with some overlap with programming, cutting edge science, and sf. There were more die-hard fans of Ayn Rand there than I felt comfortable with—being an old sixties communitarian-anarchist, to give something as squishy as my social philosophy a label. Most were Americans, and most were devoted to their nation's right to bear as many private and lethal arms as possible, something that seems very alien and disturbing to an Australian. None of this turned me away, because what I shared with them was more urgent, significant and often hilarious than what sets us apart. But I feel more at home with certain extropians and transhumanists than with others.
         One I quickly came to admire and respect called herself Bonnie Austin. As it turned out, Bonnie Austin was actually Barbara Lamar, a brilliant permaculturalist who ran her own 160-acre farm in the heart of Texas, living with her teenage daughter Kat in the sprawling hand-made residence she'd designed and built herself, powered by solar cells. The more I e-talked with Barbara, the more astonishing I found her. She had read enormously in many fields. Years ago she'd been a champion competition cyclist (before blowing her knees out, a hazard of the sport), and a small aircraft pilot. She's butchered animals for their meat, and grown beautiful gardens in sand. Naturally she spoke Spanish as well as English, had a degree in mathematics and a Juris Doctorate. She's forthright, generous, insightful and very huggable. Recently, she's again taken up her law practise, interrupted during her self-sufficiency experiments on the farm, and become an adjunct professor in tax law at an Austin university. And written a novel. You know the sort of thing.
          I was smitten, and luckily Barbara felt the same way about me. Before we'd met, she started to build this site—as she says in her declaration of intent, she hoped to introduce her fellow Americans to my work. Taking a brave punt, Barbara flew to Australia several years ago to say hi in the Real. With a kind friend working in China, we carefully and laboriously arranged for Barbara to house-sit her small house a suburb away from my place. In the event, we fell together like a thunderclap and did the house-sitting from a distance, dropping by now and then to water the plants and ensure that everything was secure.
          There were some more trips, and a bit more than four years ago we realized that we were... well, a couple. A ridiculously long-distance couple, linked by daily email, like two prisoners yelling down a wire connecting a couple of steel cans. (Did you do that when you were a kid?) So we thought: hey, let's get married. 
          Most people can't imagine how bizarre that notion was to an old sixties communitarian-anarchist. Marriage was fatally compromised by religion. It was a mark of patriarchy, blah blah. Most of my old sixties communitarian-anarchist friends, oddly enough, were married, but it still struck me as entirely unnecessary. Barbara the rugged individualist felt pretty much the same way. So in our balky way we decided, `Hey, we love each other, we plan to be together for the rest of our lives, why not go the whole hog?'
          You're thinking that's desperately unromantic. Maybe you think it's a disgrace for me to be blurting out this sort of thing, an offence to my dear wife. Not a bit of it. Such are the complexities of the social animal, especially a matched pair of them living in two countries.
So on March 20, 2002, Barbara and I were married in the company of some dear friends and those of my siblings within shouting distance. And I became a happy man, as you see. What a stroke of luck! What a nice way to finish off such a ham-fisted bio sketch.

HOME