DAMIEN BRODERICK
INTERVIEWED BY PETER MCNAMARA

McNamara: Australia's premier science fiction writer, in 1998 Damien Broderick carried off both the Aurealis Award for best sf novel and the Ditmar (more formally, the Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award) with The White Abacus, a book that managed to be both wonderfully extroverted and deeply introverted, all at the same time.

After some early stories in local men's magazines, his writing career started at 19 in 1964 with his first international sale, the novella `The Sea's Furthest End', published in both Britain and the USA. Since then, he's gone on to write at least ten novels, venturing into mainstream with Transmitters (1984), and young adult fiction with Zones (1997) and Stuck in Fast Forward (1999). He's also produced two volumes of short stories: A Man Returned (1965), and The Dark Between the Stars (1991), and edited five sf anthologies, most recently the definitive Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (co-edited with American publisher and editor David G. Hartwell). And also several fine non-fiction works, including Reading by Starlight, a book about written sf and how it's read, and most recently, The Spike (1997) and The Last Mortal Generation (1999), about the accelerating rate of technological change and its impact on human life and lifespan.

Of his novels, The Dreaming Dragons (1980) is often ranked as his finest, and is listed by UK authority David Pringle in his book on the 100 greatest sf novels since Orwell's 1984. It's the only Australian book to make the list, though I'd expect The White Abacus to join it in any updated edition.

Four of Broderick's books were co-written with Adelaide writer Rory Barnes. Two were adult fare - Valencies (1983) and The Book of Revelation (1999) - the others for young adults - Zones (1997) and Stuck In Fast Forward (1999), both from HarperCollins Australia. (Rory's trilogy for slightly younger children, starting Horsehead Boy and Horsehead Man, will be completed shortly with Horsehead Soup.) Another joint novel is currently under submission.

Broderick has a PhD in literary theory, and I started by asking him what this discipline tells us about science fiction.

Broderick: Ah, by a stroke of luck, I've published four books, including Reading by Starlight, that discuss the semiotics of science and literature in some detail. The Architecture of Babel is on the relationship between the arts and sciences, and Theory and Its Discontents is an insider's critique of postmodern theories of communication. A fourth, Transrealist Fiction, came out in mid-2000 in the USA. Semiotics is just the study of the structure of meaning systems - how meaning is created and communicated - and sf is itself such a meaning system. Sf's not a genre, like romance or crime fiction, but actually an independent literary mode, a whole coding system for expressing ideas and emotions that can't be expressed any other way.

McNamara: You've also written occasionally for radio - your ABC play `Schrödinger's Dog' was Australia's entry for the 1995 international Prix Italia. Is there something about the semiotics of print that makes you a writer of books rather than the more lucrative radio, television and film?

Broderick: It's the most direct medium to work in. You blast away at home on the computer screen and there it is. If you want Spielberg to make the movie, you need to be part of a huge industrial process, and it takes many millions of dollars to put it up there on the screen. Of course, I'd love to see The Dreaming Dragons turned into a movie called The Dreaming, made by Peter Weir or Spielberg... or anybody, really, if they have talent; it could be the great Australian science fiction movie, the intersection between Aboriginal and high-tech dreamings, set in Uluru during a flood.

In fact, as a kid I got into this mode of story-telling through comics that probably don't exist any more - `Brick Bradford', `Strange Adventures', the equivalent of a later generation's Dr Who and Star Trek. The visual aspects excited me as much as the ideas. I don't draw or paint very well, so if I want to convey my images I need to express them verbally, and hope readers will be able to reconstruct them from the strings of words I've put on the page.

McNamara: Is there something about the written word that serves the structure of meaning better than the visual or acoustic?

Broderick: Possibly. (With your permission, I'm sure I'll play around a bit with the transcript of this taped interview to make myself sound more fluent, for example.) The words we use in sf are specialised instruments for conveying what doesn't already exist. We invent nouns and verbs that don't refer to anything in the real world, or utilise terms such as robot or artificial intelligence that gain a kind of collective sense from the media. They reference a shared imaginative world. The printed page patches us into this vast encyclopaedia of fanciful imaginary knowledge. In some ways, then, words do lend themselves peculiarly to that use.

McNamara: You also review science books for the Weekend Australian. So you work between opposites, a sort of right brain/left brain split - hard science on one side, fine literature on the other.

Broderick: I don't see literature as opposed to reason. Sf is often regarded as a kind of Mr Spock medium, a strange passionless rational construct unlike literature or ordinary movies, say, because its central concern is a phenomenon or a puzzle about the world, rather than the emotional issue of who's going to fall in love with whom, who's going to betray whom. In reality, the more passionate you are, the more you use your mind to accomplish the ends you desperately wish for, or to avert what you dread.

Good sf invokes both passion and imagination, imagery and thought. In The White Abacus I rework some ideas Shakespeare explored in Hamlet. I've transposed the problematic of the play into a far future civilisation that's as gaudy and baroque and flabbergasting as I could imagine, with all sorts of wonderful new feelings available to the characters. Yet at its heart is the same emotional issue and intensity that Shakespeare was dealing with.

McNamara: The Spike, your recent non-fiction book, has aroused some controversy. What is the Spike?

Broderick: It's a user-friendly synonym I coined for what Dr Vernor Vinge, a US mathematician, calls the coming `technological Singularity', a ceaselessly increasing rate of change. If he's right, this century's acceleration in computer processing power will result in a kind of soaring spike on the graph of change somewhere between 2020 and 2050, when accelerating developments in many technologies will converge and peak. We can't see beyond that point. As we approach it we'll have computers as smart as people, and shortly after that computers smarter than people. They'll pose and solve problems we can't even start to understand. That creates a great opaque wall in the medium-term future. I hope this does come about - the alternative might be fatal stagnation - but I'm also frightened by the prospect. What's going to happen to us? Will we be left behind by the strange creatures on the other side of the Spike?

McNamara: You suggest we will become transhuman.

Broderick: I go further, to the posthuman. The transhuman is a transitional state we're now in. Sf readers are already accustomed to thinking about the shift away from the hunter-gatherer that we are biologically, to thinking about genetically engineering ourselves. `Posthuman' would be some bizarre state beyond that, where we can literally rewrite our gene codes, plug ourselves into computers and the Net to enhance and expand our powers of thought and feeling. I regard myself as a tentative transhuman already.

McNamara: We're still masters of our own technology, but we approach a point where we'll no longer be in control. Or will we be indistinguishable from our technology?

Broderick: The two merge. I have a pair of glasses hanging around my neck that I need for reading. That's already a transition from the basic human genomic definition. What happens when you introduce a nano-chip into your brain that does the equivalent for your mind that specs do for your failing eyesight? We become co-extensive with technology.

McNamara: The recent movie Gattaca deals with the human spirit, what it means to be human, something many of today's sf films have no interest in - they're more concerned with blowing some of those humans up. In The Spike, I think you were trying something similar, getting to the essentials of what it is to be human by putting humanity under the severest of tests from its own technology.

Broderick: I'm not being either politically correct nor outrageously adventurous. I'm just saying: these are the kinds of things we can expect, whether we like it or not. Do I want to see humanity prevail? Obviously it can't. There won't be any place for it beyond the Spike. Will it vanish, will it be destroyed? No, of course not. Humanity will be transcended.

By the way, I found Gattaca irritating and wrong-headed. If gene-modified humans really were capable of superhuman accomplishment, the poor little courageous, gritty human simply could not have `passed'. If they weren't, if their genomic boosting was just a Nazoid fraud, that's no test at all - because real enhancements will genuinely alter us, or more likely our kids, into something very strange indeed.

McNamara: What about alien Spikes in other star systems? We'd expect such advanced technology to bring extraterrestrial Spikes to our attention, but it hasn't happened. Physicist Frank Tipler argues that if they were out there, they'd be here by now.

Broderick: Yes, Tipler showed that even old-fashioned `steam' starships travelling at far less than the speed of light, planting colonies along the way, can spread a culture from one side of the galaxy to the other in less than a million years. Since the universe has been around for 15 thousand million years, there's been plenty of time for any emergent civilisation elsewhere to have completely colonised the galaxy. That makes it look likely we're among the first kids on the block.

Tipler also suggested that if we live in a universe doomed to close at the end of its current expansion, collapsing back in a Big Crunch, a developing intelligence would gradually colonise the entire universe and eventually accelerate its own mind. As spacetime contracts it would make use of all the energy and matter pressing into this collapsing cosmos. In effect it would live forever, since it would have an infinite number of `clock ticks' to operate in. By that stage it would be a gigantic computer rather than flesh-and-blood. Tipler felt that out of the goodness of its heart, and having subjective time and energy to spare, it would actually resurrect its ancestors and give us a kind of heaven to live in - a rather Baptist future, as befits a man from the southern states of America.

I don't think that's the way things will go, despite having predicted such a theory in my 1982 novel The Judas Mandala, if only because the latest astronomical evidence seems to show that the universe will actually expand forever rather than collapsing.

McNamara: In fact, it may be accelerating.

Broderick: Apparently so, although Tipler offers reasons why these observations must have been misinterpreted. Few cosmologists agree with him. So Tipler's particular theodicy seems to be ruled out. On the other hand, your question remains a good one. If we're due to go Spike, clearly there must be many other civilisations which have had the same chance. Where are they? Why haven't they rewritten the laws of quantum mechanics? Why haven't they reconstructed the stars into a giant chess board? Well, for all we know they have - the large-scale structure of the universe turns out to be filamentary, with the galaxies all spread out around vast empty voids. That seems hard to explain. Could it be an architecture that's been imposed on the universe by early Spiked cultures? I doubt it, but it's possible.

Another possibility: when you Spike, you're soon running very fast. People will upload into computer networks rather than remain as flesh-and-blood (as in Greg Egan's novels), and these computers will get ever faster and smaller. You might end with everyone on a planet living in a grain of sand, their brains running so fast that to travel any distance away (assuming that the speed of light remains the ultimate communication limit) would be to cut yourself off from everyone else. So perhaps within a few minutes of Spiking, any civilisation watches television forever...

McNamara: What a ghastly thought!

Broderick (laughs): Very classy television! Interactive, full sensory-immersion hyper-realistic morphable virtual reality!

McNamara: For the last 30 or 40 years we've been playing around as a species with enough power to extinguish ourselves. Could it be that in the general run of things, civilisations wipe themselves out this way before reaching the Spike?

Broderick: Or as they go through it. Think of nanotechnology, engineering at the level of molecules and even single atoms. By building everything from the molecular scale up, you can make a new house out of cheap carbon atoms, say. This is the same atom our bodies are made of, as is diamond. Using little machines that can cobble together trillions of carbon atoms in the right configuration, you can build vast sheets of pure diamond for practically nothing out of common feed stocks.

Here's the hazard: if the assemblers mutate, if they run off using their own rudimentary little computer brains, or some terrorist or hacker dabbles with them, you could get the dreaded `grey goo catastrophe', where nano-machines start gobbling everything up and turning the world into sludge. Including us. How do we defend against that? Maybe `blue goo', ubiquitous police nanites to shield us against rogue nano machines. That would create an arms race at the atomic level, which is scary. So it's not inconceivable that shortly after a Spike, the world sinks into grey goo.

McNamara: It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's `ice-nine' in his novel Cat's Cradle, a more stable rearrangement of water molecules triggered by an engineered crystal that instantly froze the whole earth.

Broderick: Exactly! Terrifying.

McNamara: You've completed a fifth novel with Rory Barnes. Zones, the second book you wrote together, was also short-listed for best novel of 1997, so you were beaten by your own book, The White Abacus. The editors of the Year's Best Australian SF anthology called Zones `easily the best young adult science fiction novel of 1997'. Stuck in Fast Forward was a nominee for the 2000 Aurealis. Yet Rory tells me he knows next to nothing about sf.

Broderick: Strange but true.

McNamara: Do you find this ignorance a hindrance to production, or a source of profitable synthesis?

Broderick: I've known Rory since we were 19 or 20, sharing communal houses at Monash university. He's always been interested in writing, but sticks to mainstream novels - which I admire, although he's only had a couple published, plus collaborations with me and another writer, James Birrell, with whom he wrote a well-received contemporary novel about Indonesia. He emphasises what's often sf's weakness: human interactions and detailed description of place.

Our collaboration started with Valencies, based on the framework of a novel he wrote as a kitchen-sink realist and very funny bittersweet book about life and love in the 1960s and early 1970s. He never found a buyer, to my great surprise. After a time I thought: what if I put its events in the fifth millennium, 4004 AD? Let's invent a culture and a technology that makes it possible, and retrofit the whole plot. We sold it to the University of Queensland Press after the commercial sf market turned it down as too oddball

Zones began as an ABC radio play. I wanted to write the story at novel length but somehow couldn't get started. Perhaps because Rory's got kids of his own and I don't, he supplied some interesting directions to go in, and we worked on it by mail and diskette, chapter on, chapter off, and got rather a good novel out of the experiment. We wrote two more while I visited Adelaide, taking turn and turn about at a decrepit old Mac. While Rory doesn't know any of the uses of science fiction he does know good story-telling, and he comes up with very funny lines. We synergise each other's work.

McNamara: What can mainstream fiction lend to sf? Consider Peter Goldsworthy's Honk If You Are Jesus and Wish. These are good sf, but you don't see it mentioned in the blurb. Is the future of sf better served by this mainstream edge, or by dyed-in-the-wool sf such as Greg Egan's Diaspora?

Broderick: All of the above. Diaspora was up against The White Abacus for the Aurealis Award - Greg has withdrawn all his work from Ditmar contention - so I was quite surprised when I won. I regard Diaspora as an very important novel - not as readable as mine, but it takes sf in a fascinating direction... indeed, in the posthuman direction. As a result, it lacks some of the usual resonance with everyday experience we find in ordinary fiction or even most sf. Goldsworthy, by contrast, takes science fiction ideas and vulgarises them (sorry, Dr Goldsworthy). Honk If You Are Jesus, which is a great whimsical title, ends on the last page with the discovery that they've... wow!... cloned Jesus. Big deal! That's where an sf writer would start and then run with it. In fact, four or five sf novels have already done just that. Wish, about communicating by sign with a great ape, seems to me much more successful. But again, it cops out at the end - you've got to kill the monkey because you mustn't go off and marry her. In an sf novel, you'd set up a whole alternative culture in which the characters did come to terms with that prospect.

McNamara: Perhaps we've identified the great divide between mainstream and sf - in science fiction, the extreme solution is always viable, yet in mainstream fiction it never is.

Broderick: It's a failure of nerve, or imagination, by those who attempt to adopt the tropes of sf. It can't be that they're ignorant of what's possible; how hard is it to read a few books by Brian Aldiss? There's something about the `literary' sensibility that just recoils. `That would be vulgar! We must restrain our imaginations to what we see around us.' So `extreme' isn't quite the word; it's more a matter of taking the reins and going for it, being ruthlessly consistent, following through on as many of the implications of your postulate as you possibly can. Egan is sublime at this.

There are a lot of `slipstream' novels out there now. Think of Martin Amis, who can set books in the future, or have a character living backwards. I love Amis, but that's probably not the kind of direction I'll go in myself. I think I'll stay with the pure quill.

McNamara: Still, by writing with Rory you're obviously making some attempt to ingratiate yourself into mainstream circles.

Broderick: Well, to borrow some of the narrative skills he's got that I lack.

McNamara: Certainly the money is more evident in mainstream fiction than in science fiction.

Broderick: Despite generous assistance over the years from the Australia Council, I can't say I've earned a hell of a lot in four decades of writing. Luckily it's a job I love.