Saturday, 2nd of July, 2005

One of Australia’s foremost writers, Damien Broderick has been on the cutting edge of futurism for at least a decade now - his book The Spike is just about the textbook on the Singularity (that point (either mythical or inevitable, depending on whom you ask) where the ever-accelerating computer power overtakes us and… something… happens. AI? Transcendence? Godhead?) - and he is also a highly regarded science fiction critic and anthologist.

His new novel Godplayers, his first for big small-press publisher Thunder’s Mouth, is the sort of novel that could only have been written by the polymath science fiction scholar Broderick. For me the most delightful post-modern intertexuality is the fact that the book intertwines two of Broderick’s short stories - one very recent (”Schrodinger’s Catch”, from Agog! Fantastic Fiction) and one very old (”The Disposal of Man”*, which you can probably only find if you stumble upon a copy of the early short story collection A Man Returned, of which I have a first edition from 1965, published by Horwitz Publications Pty. Ltd.)
The latter story begins:

“Every Saturday night,” said Aunt Tansy, her eyes wide and blue and honest, “there’s a corpse in my bath.”

The main plot of Godplayers starts out remarkably true to this sweet juvenile short story: August Seebeck comes home from some time-out in outback Australia and his Aunt Tansy (who’s looked after him since his parents went down in a plane crash over Thailand) tells him he can’t have a bath because of this inconvenient fact. August is a little perturbed by this, but while Tansy is a bit odd (she’s a remarkably effective psychic) she’s very down-to-earth, so August decides to camp out in the bathroom and see what happens.
What happens is that a beautiful woman climbs in through the impossibly high window, carrying a corpse, followed by another woman. And so the adventure begins.

When I first read “The Disposal (of) Man” I thought of it as a piece in the vein of Philip K Dick or early Heinlein, but from reading the new novel’s afterword it may be that Roger Zelazny and Fritz Leiber were more direct influences.
In any case, neither of the Broderick source stories are credited, which is a shame. The aforementioned afterword does list a considerable number of influences, however, including cutting-edge science galore. The story zooms through alternate worlds, and August finds out he’s a member of a very powerful world-striding family participating in a world-spanning Contest, the details of which remain fuzzy. In fact, a lot remains fuzzy and for much of the time August irritates the reader by storming out of the room or interrupting characters’ attempted explanations, wanting nothing more than to jump back home and make sure Tansy’s alright. Fortunately he’s head-over-heels in love with the beautiful woman, Lune, who’s a member of a different family of Players (but on the same side), and this along with his developing realisation of his powers keeps him mostly on target.
Things only get more complicated as the book progresses, and as is a danger with Singularity fiction (see Charlie Stross’s hilarious Tough Guide) it becomes hard to see what differentiates the awesome weapons, destinies, birthings-of-Gods (or Angels) and so on from fantasy. To be sure, there’s lots of mind-bending scientific speculation here, and the underlying Big Idea of a computational cosmos is one that hasn’t been explored in such an audacious way before, but it is hard to work out where to place the book.

In the end what it is is a perfect piece of Damien Broderick: post-modern sf to a T, with resonances of everything from Lewis Carroll to Charlie Stross himself (see his continuing Merchant Princes series), Shakespeare to Eliezer S. Yudkowsky. Broderick knows his stuff, and it helps if you know some of your stuff too. Still, it’s a honking great yarn even if you’re not up on the latest in computational physics, AI and neuro-linguistic programming. Anyone who’s enjoyed just about any science fiction from the last century is likely to be taken in by this tale.
The only downer is that while much does end up getting explained (such as what happened to August and his siblings’ parents), much more remains mysterious by the end of the novel. There’s a big (although not unexpected) Deus Ex Machina at the end, and the whole Contest is merely sketched in the background. Meanwhile a very bizarre book keeps turning up, called SgrA* - and eagle-eyed readers recognize the excerpts as a pulled-apart version of “Schrodinger’s Catch”, one Broderick’s strangest and most evocative pieces. Does SgrA* stand for the Sagittarius A* radio source, associated with the galactic centre? Or is Sgr an abbreviation of Schrodinger? Why is this book a sacred text for the K-Machines, the off-stage villains of the Contest? These questions lie on rather different levels, but they’re only half-answered by the end of the book.
Fortunately it seems that a sequel, indeed entitled K-Machines, is due from Thunder’s Mouth in March 2006. Don’t let that deter you from picking up Godplayers post-haste, though. It’s a great ride.

*Actually, the author mentioned to me in an email that this was intended to be titled “The Disposal Man” but both on the back cover and inside my edition it’s got the unnecessary “of”.

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