Damien Broderick has had a major impact as an Australian SF writer since 1964. He is undoubtedly the leading Australian theorist of the SF genre' (Russell Blackford, Van Ikin, Sean McMullen, Strange Constellations). Now, Broderick draws upon his skills as both critic and novelist to analyze science fiction of the last two decades, and its earlier roots. The book proposes sf as a distinctive form of writing, the extreme narrative of difference, then closely reads authors such as John Barnes, Jamil Nasir, Wil McCarthy, Robert Grossbach and Poul Anderson. While concentrating on exciting work published in the USA and Britain, Broderick does not neglect his own country's contributions, discussing sf by George Turner and other Australians. His critical voice is wry, entertaining and occasionally scathing.

Transrealist writing treats immediate perceptions in a fantastic way, according to science fiction writer and mathematician Rudy Rucker, who originated the term. In the expanded sense argued in this book, it also intensifies imaginative fiction by writing the fantastic from the standpoint of richly personalized experience. Transrealism is also related to slipstream writing, another category introduced into studies of speculative fiction to account for texts that seem to follow trajectories mapped by the huge body of science fiction accumulated in the last century, while retaining a central interest in traditional literary strategies.

This book examines a variety of work from the transrealist perspective, something that has not been done previously. It emphasizes the texts of Philip K. Dick and Rucker himself, while it additionally engages the texts of such slipstream writers as Kurt Vonnegut, J.G. Ballard, and John Barth. It places its argument against the antihumanist trend in science fiction and builds comparisons with more traditional varieties of science fiction works.

This book explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre. Damien Broderick explores the postmodern self-referentiality of the sci-fi narrative, its intricate coded language and discursive "encyclopaedia". He shows how, for perfect understanding, sci-fi readers must learn the codes of these imaginary worlds and vocabularies, all the time picking up references to texts by other writers. The book includes close readings of paradigmatic cyberpunk texts and writings by SF novelists and theorists including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Patrick Parrinder, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Varley, Roger Zelazny, William Gibson, Fredric Jameson and Samuel R. Delaney. Damien Broderick is an award-winning freelance writer who published his first collection of stories as an undergraduate, has since written eight SF novels, and recently completed a PhD in the semiotics of SF writing.

This book explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre. Damien Broderick explores the postmodern self-referentiality of the sci-fi narrative, its intricate coded language and discursive "encyclopaedia". He shows how, for perfect understanding, sci-fi readers must learn the codes of these imaginary worlds and vocabularies, all the time picking up references to texts by other writers. The book includes close readings of paradigmatic cyberpunk texts and writings by SF novelists and theorists including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Patrick Parrinder, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Varley, Roger Zelazny, William Gibson, Fredric Jameson and Samuel R. Delaney. Damien Broderick is an award-winning freelance writer who published his first collection of stories as an undergraduate, has since written eight SF novels, and recently completed a PhD in the semiotics of SF writing.

Science fiction is often considered a literature of futuristic technology: fantastic warfare among the stars, or ruinous apocalypse on Earth. In the middle of last century, a very different theme suddenly blossomed. This was a fiction of mind powers such as telepathy, precognition of the future, teleportation, symbolic machines reacting to these mental forces and perhaps life beyond death. Driving this explosion of paranormal narratives was John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, later renamed Analog. Almost single-handedly, Campbell made "psience fiction" into a dominant movement. Until now, no scholarly study has dealt specifically with this abrupt shift of emphasis away from space travel, atomic weapons, robots, and other once-imaginary technologies, and into the realm of the paranormal treated as science. Literary critic Damien Broderick surveys this long-ignored terrain, reading a series of influential or characteristic psience fiction novels and short stories, from the 1930s to now. This tour of the psychic fictional landscape is framed by an informed discussion of the dynamics creating this surge of interest in parapsychology, and its absorption into the genre even as real-world military experiments in the paranormal (the US Star Gate program) were being conducted in highly classified secrecy.

“Psi” is the term used by researchers for a variety of demonstrable but elusive psychic phenomena. This collection of essays provides a detailed survey of the evidence for psi at the level of scientific review. Key features of apparent psi phenomena are reviewed, including precognition and remote perception (knowledge of future or distant events that cannot be inferred from present information), presentiment (physiological responses to stimuli that have not yet occurred), the effects of human emotions on globally dispersed machines, the possible impact of local sidereal time on psi performance, and the familiar feeling of knowing who is calling on the phone. Special attention is given to those phenomena that make it difficult for scientists to get a clear understanding of psi. The body of psi research, while complex and frustrating, is shown to contain sufficiently compelling positive evidence to convince the rational open-minded observer that psi is real, and that one or more physical processes probably underlie observed psi phenomena.

Every age has characteristic inventions that change the world. In the 19th century it was the steam engine and the train. For the 20th, electric and gasoline power, aircraft, nuclear weapons, even ventures into space. Today, the planet is awash with electronic business, chatter and virtual-reality entertainment so brilliant that the division between real and simulated is hard to discern. But one new idea from the 19th century has failed, so far, to enter reality-time travel, using machines to turn the time dimension into a two-way highway. Will it come true, as foreseen in science fiction? Might we expect visits to and from the future, sooner than from space? That is the Time Machine Hypothesis, examined here by futurist Damien Broderick, an award-winning writer and theorist of the genre of the future. Broderick homes in on the topic through the lens of science as well as fiction, exploring some fifty different time-travel scenarios and conundrums found in the science fiction literature and film.

Science fiction explores the wonderful, baffling and wildly entertaining aspects of a universe unimaginably old and vast, and with a future even more immense. It reaches into that endless cosmos with the tools of rational investigation and storytelling. At the core of both science and science fiction is the engaged human mind--a consciousness that sees and feels and thinks and loves. But what is this mind, this aware and self-aware consciousness that seems unlike anything else we experience? What makes consciousness the Hard Problem of philosophy, still unsolved after millennia of probing? This book looks into the heart of this mystery - at the science and philosophy of consciousness and at many inspiring fictional examples - and finds strange, challenging answers. The book's content and entertaining style will appeal equally to science fiction enthusiasts and scholars, including cognitive and neuroscientists, as well as philosophers of mind. It is a refreshing romp through the science and science fiction of consciousness.

Born With the Dead (the novella) was nominated for every major science fiction award when it was originally published in 1974, winning the Nebula and Locus awards. *** The author now revisits the classic story with Australian author Damien Broderick. Broderick uses Robert Silverberg's original novella as a starting point for a brilliant leap into the far future, widening the scope and tenor of the original story be revisiting some of the subtler implications of the original story.

In the year 4004 AD, the entire universe of habitable worlds has been filled with human beings, thanks to an ancient teleport network and unlimited growth. Humans live on more than a hundred quadrillion terraformed planets, all woven into a bureaucratic and restrictive Empire. VALENCIES tracks a frustrated group of libertarian anarchists on the marginal planet Victoria. Kael, son of three gay doctors, and Theri, daughter of a man and woman bound by maniacal doctrinal tenets, are a young couple in a cosmos of complacent immortals. Ben and Anla the clone rage and passionately make up in a cycle of dominance and submission as old as history or myth. And slipping like a mad trickster between the four is Catsize, former commander, terrible poet crazed by two millennia of thwarted revolutions, hilarious prankster, an instigator of mischief and healer of souls. VALENCIES tells with pathos and humor a richly detailed portrait of the struggle against an Empire that's prepared to obliterate an entire world. Brian W. Aldiss said about this book: "One of the most playful SF novels of recent years."

Science fiction loves strangeness. It relishes oddities, even when it piles on fear and dystopian loathing. The technical term for a fascination with the strange and alien is xenophilia, just as the term for a terror of the strange is xenophobia. At its core, then, science fiction is...Xeno Fiction. So science fiction seeks out the strange, roams far from home in space and time, looks with avid eagerness upon the ways of the Others, human or alien. It participates, in brilliantly lighted imagination, in their strange lives. In this second gathering from Van Ikin's critical journal, Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, writers of the alien are investigated with wit and insight. G. Travis Regier follows the Other into its own home, accompanying those experts in the alien, C. J. Cherry and Samuel R. Delany. In the book's long key essay, Terry Dowling pursues the Art of Xenography as exemplified by Jack Vance's "General Culture" novels. Three expert commentators look into Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey's postcolonial and postmodern frolics into alternative realities. And the Xeno fictions of Isaac Asimov, Greg Egan, Mary Gentle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison, Neal Stephenson, and Stanley Weinbaum are read as their road maps into the strange. Eleven revealing essays on speculative fiction by some of the best critics in the field.

Theodore Sturgeon Award finalist, 2010

A. Bertram Chandler Award for Outstanding Achievement in SF, 2010

***

"The Qualia Engine" is a worthy addition to the long line of superman-in-hiding stories that stretches all the way back to Olaf Stapledon, with notable stops along the way... A dense story with a rich nougat vein of well-observed human emotion. --Gardner Dozois, "Locus"

***

Sharply told, very funny at times, and ultimately very powerful. --Rich Horton, "Locus"

***

From the infinite universes of quantum theory to the mysteries of mind and heart, from mythic depths to the end of humanity, Damien Broderick speaks all the voices of SF in a bravura display of storytelling. In this first US collection of his best short stories, the multi-award winning Dean of Australian Science Fiction takes us to a dozen worlds at the limits of imagination.

***

Tactile details are integral to Broderick's work. They offer a window into the minds of his characters. But he won't spoon-feed you. This is fiction that is "smart" and takes an engaged reader to get all the layers.

As you read this book, you'll find that every story is an exploration of a different facet of that most important element of being human. Not just emotions, or pain or even love, but "consciousness."

Together, this collection creates its own Qualia Engine. --Mary Robinette Kowal, winner of the 2008 John W. Campbell Award

***

"This Wind Blowing, and This Tide" is a beautiful story. The speculation is fascinating, but the heart of the story is a single father mourning his dead son (as signaled by the perfect title, taken from Rudyard Kipling). --Rich Horton, "Locus"

***

Making a welcome splash with some fine new stories. --Jonathan Strahan, "The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year"

Award-winning writer Dr. Damien Broderick gathers his most forthright articles from the 1960s and '70s, on topics ranging from sex, politics, and religion to drugs and the way things were before the Internet, and caps them with sharp insights from today, looking back in amazement--and often with dismay or laughter. Great reading!

In his Foreword, Rich Horton says: "First rate stories..."

"Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order" is a clever and very funny time travel romp; "The Beancounter's Cat" is set in a far future with Clarkean science sufficiently advanced to appear magical; "Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone" (with Barbara Lamar) is another look at the mystery of human destiny; "Under the Moons of Venus" is a remarkable, evocative homage to one of SF's greats." Well-known editor Gardner Dozois has said of "The Beancounter's Cat" that it ..".starts out reading like fantasy, and gradually turns into very far-future SF." Also included is an original tale with Paul Di Filippo, "Luminous Fish," taking Mike Moorcock's famous character Jerry Cornelius for a spin in the 21st century

Nine scintillating science fiction stories by a major writer in the field.

"Science Fantasy" blends science fiction AND fantasy, so it tends to be bolder and more highly colored than pure science fiction. In the middle of the last century, the British magazine SCIENCE FANTASY created its own distinctive strains of fantasy narrative, most famously by such writers as Brian W. Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, Michael Moorcock, and Thomas Burnett Swann, among others. This book looks closely at the whole trajectory of that lost magazine, from its birth in 1950 through 1967, when it was briefly called (SF) Impulse. John Boston provides a brilliantly insightful and often every funny account of the rise, evolution, and final fall of SCIENCE FANTASY, its writers, and its quirky editors. Boston is joined by writer and critic Damien Broderick, adding his own waspish and nostalgic comments. This volume, the first of three dealing with the history and development of the major British SF magazines, is a compelling night journey into the past, where the future took a turn down paths not often explored. It's a trip not to be missed.

This second anthology of the best of Australian SF Review includes pieces by Gregory Benford, Janeen Webb, Lucius Shepard, Jenny Blackford, George Turner, Yvonne Rousseau, Douglas Barbour, and others--writing about Watchmen, cyberpunk, steampunk, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Lucius Shepard. Complete with introduction, bibliography, and index.

Wild Chrome, stories by Australian Greg Mellor, represents a significant debut SF collection. The stories in Wild Chrome have appeared in Cosmos, Clarkesworld, and Aurealis, and capture the meteoric rise of Mellor since his first publication in 2006. In his introduction, Damien Broderick says of the collection: "This is a tour de force, and by itself is proof that Gregory Mellor is a writer to watch in the way we kept an eye on Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian W. Aldiss and Roger Zelazny when they were setting out, learning to pilot their burning imaginations into the realm of words shaped to ignite the dreams of their readers."

In the mid-1960s, British science fiction and fantasy were convulsed by the "New Wave." This movement emerged from the SF magazines edited by John Carnell. Such brilliant NEW WORLDS and SCIENCE FANTASY writers as J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, John Brunner, and Michael Moorcock heralded the rise of this new kind of fantastic fiction. John Boston and Damien Broderick's concluding volume of their critical trilogy examines the history and development of these important magazines--and the fiction that they championed. By the end of this period (1964), Carnell had set the stage for that major development in UK science fiction--the new wave adventures of the transformed NEW WORLDS, under the editorship of Moorcock--and had himself shifted gear into the next mode of SF publishing as editor of the paperback anthology series, New Writings in SF. Boston and Broderick's series will become the definitive critical histories of these important British magazines. Complete with indices of names and titles cited.

Building New Worlds is a history of a pivotal decades-long episode in the birth and growth of today's science fiction. Enthralling and amusing, it's written with affection and wit. This is no dry, modishly theorized academic analysis. Nor is it a rah-rah celebration of the "Good Old Days." Here is a candid and astute reader's response to a magazine that, by today's standards, was often comically bad--but was also immensely important in its time, and improved, like the Little Engine (or maybe Starship) That Could. New Worlds is best remembered today as the fountainhead of the New Wave of audacious experimental SF in the second half of the 1960s, under editor Michael Moorcock. But these first pioneering issues, from 1946-59, were edited by the magazine's founder, John "Ted" Carnell (1912-72). Carnell was a pillar of the old-style UK SF establishment, but gamely supportive of innovators--most famously, of the brilliant J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, and John Brunner, whose early work he nurtured. The story of how New Worlds got started, survived, and got better is essential to the history of the genres of the fantastic in the UK--and indeed, the world. And huge fun to read. Watch for the companion volumes, New Worlds: Before the New Wave, and Strange Highways, dealing with New World's companion magazine, Science Fantasy.

"My father is the Rev. Daimon Keith. At the age of twenty, he was abducted near a school playground by small gray aliens. Indeed, Daimon was taken up into UFOs not just that once, but from infancy, and over and again. It caused him to devote his middle years to the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ, Time Traveler, and later Scionetics."

Rosa "Flake" Rosch is a postmodern orphan. She's forgotten her mother, and her notorious abductee father Deems has vanished--again. "Dark Gray" is Rosa's unreliable memoir of her father's zany life, from his hapless prankster youth in Australia to apotheosis as a UFO guru in the 21st century. It's the story of Rosa's indomitable mother, her weird quasi-brother Ben, Zelda the horsewife, and our whole tormented era, as we blast into hyperreality.

"Tilted on the hard slab, he knows the heavy stink of the place. What awful crap do they suck up with those lipless little mouths? The gray doctor touches his forehead with a needle--sharp, glinting--and pushes it hard into his skull."

"That life may simultaneously reduce the living to both laughter and despair is a subject few novelists tackle in one bite. Damien Broderick and Rory Barnes succeed in the near-impossible task. "Dark Gray" stands as one of the two great realist novels to tackle the notoriously non-realist theme of contact with extraterrestrials. It resides on the same (astral) plane as Alison Lurie's magisterial "Imaginary Friends."... A quite brilliant achievement."
--Rosaleen Love, author of "The Total Devotion Machine"

Finalist for the Aurealis Award and the Ditmar Award.