Sunday, 5th of January, 2003

It was my 29th birthday on the 2nd of January. Among other things, I got a Dymocks book voucher, so I took myself off to the George St store yesterday. Having found his latest book, The Scar at Gleebooks‘ New Year’s Day 20%-off sale, I purchased China Miéville’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning second novel, Perdido Street Station, as part of the voucher. I’m very much looking forward to reading these books; Miéville has single-handedly reinvented fantasy - basically, as science fiction! These are weird steampunk books which have been given the highest accolades everywhere. In addition, Miéville is a dedicated and active socialist.
More on Miéville when I’ve read more of him than just interviews. I’ve had his first novel, King Rat, for a while, and it’s an interesting one in that it combines dark fantasy/horror with another love of his and mine, drum’n'bass music :)

Dymocks on George St has a quite remarkable science fiction section; its Australian collection is probably better than Galaxy’s. And thus I also found there a chapbook by Russell Blackford (a critic familiar to readers of Australian science fiction periodical Eidolon) called Hyperdreams: Damien Broderick’s Space/Time Fiction which is a fascinating monograph. I’ve just discovered that it can be read in its entirety on the web, link here. I’m a long-time fan of Broderick’s. He’s one of the most important Australian science fiction authors, as well as a world-renowned critic; his book Theory and its discontents (QUP, now out of print I believe), is a well-deserved (and well-argued and researched) attack on postmodern critical/cultural theory’s flight from reason - Broderick argues passionately (and resonantly for me) for scientific realism, in the face of Theory’s more absurd claims. McKenzie Wark was deeply offended by the book, and I’m desparate to find both his review and Broderick’s response, in Australian Book Review… Broderick is also famous for his popular science writing, especially the book The Spike, about the acceleration of technological and scientific advances towards a possible Singularity in the not-so-distant future, where we possibly become transhuman and AIs become a reality, among other things…
Stumblings readers may wish to see a double review I did for Macquarie Uni’s student mag Passing Show (which my girlfriend Ange happened to be editing last year) of Broderick’s latest novel, Transcension and Greg Egan’s latest, Schild’s Ladder. It’s a little simplified for non-hard science fiction readers; I may extend it later, but for now it’s available here in HTML form at least.

I actually wanted to write this blog entry just because I wanted to link to a delightful article by Broderick in Australian science fiction magazine Ibn Qirtaiba called Living Here In the Future. Available here, it’s a sweet story about how he came to be a science fiction author, and it reminded me of just how amazingly ahead of his time he’s always managed to be.

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