The Hunger of Time

Damien Broderick is Australia’s dean of science fiction, with a body of extraordinary work reaching back to the early 1960s. The White Abacus won two Year’s Best awards. His stories and novels, like those of his younger peer Greg Egan, are drenched with bleeding-edge ideas. Distinctively, he blends ideas and poetry like nobody since Roger Zelazny, and a wild, silly humor is always ready to bubble out, as in the cosmic comedy Striped Holes. His award-winning novel The Dreaming Dragons is featured in David Pringle’s SF: The 100 Best Novels, and was chosen as year’s best by Kingsley Amis. It was revised and updated as The Dreaming. In 1982 Broderick’s early cyberpunk novel The Judas Mandala coined the term virtual reality. His recent novels include the diptych Godplayers and K-Machines, Post Mortal Syndrome (with his wife, Barbara Lamar), and several collaborations with Rory Barnes: I’m Dying Here, Human’s Burden, and The Valley of the God of Our Choice, Inc. Like one of his heroes, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Broderick is a master of writing about radical new technologies, and The Spike and The Last Mortal Generation have been Australian popular-science bestsellers. His long novella, “Quicken,” is the second half of the novel Beyond the Doors of Death, cowritten with Grand Master Robert Silverberg (an expansion of Silverberg’s “Born with the Dead”), and is the closing story in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection. In 2005 Broderick received the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

Rory Barnes is the author of ten novels for both adults and teenagers, five of which have been written in collaboration with Damien Broderick. His website is members.optusnet.com.au/~rory.barnes.