K-Machines

(first published at http://www.asif.dreamhosters.com/doku.php?id=godplayers_and_k-machines reviewing K-Machines along with its first half, Godplayers) 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 was just about the textbook on the Singularity when it came out - and he is also a highly regarded science fiction critic and anthologist. His 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. Its sequel K-Machines came out a year later, and I am reviewing the two together because I suspect they are intended to be one novel split in two. For me the most delightful post-modern intertexuality in Godplayers 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"[1], 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 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 in the novel, which is a shame. The 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 membe

Here is the sequel to last year's Godplayers. This continues the story of August Seebeck, an ordinary Australian man who is suddenly brought to realize that he is part of a family, all named after the months. August has been told that he and his family are "Players in the Contest of Worlds" (also the collective title of these two novels), battling foes known as the "Deformers" for -- for what? Indeed, that is one of the questions driving this second novel. August is also, all along, a very young man, and very much in love with Lune, another Player, though not a Seebeck. Lune is much older than he, and quite astonishingly beautiful. Another question driving this novel is "Does Lune really love August?" or "What does she see in him?" But in the final analysis, I think, this book is really to a great extent a commentary on SF, and on the love we (the author most certainly included) have for the genre. There are in-jokes sprinkled throughout for the delight of long time fans: a writer in an alternate world named E. Hunter Waldo and nanomachines of a sort called "offogs," to name but two. Moreover the novel is deeply entwined with the Matter of Britain: the Arthurian legends. Aside from this, the book in the end concerns, after all "Players in the Contest of Worlds": alternate worlds that often reflect SFnal dreams, such as a lush wet Venus. One cannot but think that this "Contest of Worlds" is in a way a reference to the many future worlds of SF, and that the "Players" are the writers. What of the action of this book? August, at the open, is trying to resume a life as a Philosophy student in Australia, as well as trying to enjoy his love for Lune. But almost immediately he finds himself attacked by a dinosaur-like beast: perhaps one of the Deformers' "K-Machines", "K" standing for -- what? "Killer", perhaps? Soon August is again pinballing through the various worlds in pursuit of answers from his varied (and varying) group of brothers and sisters. Also he loses track of Lune, and to his disgust finds others questioning her loyalty. An alternate thread follows the life of an Australian scientist in what seems to be our world. This man is followed through a long life, a boyhood loving science fiction, followed by an adult career marked by multiple entanglements with women, and by a spotty but interesting academic record, culminating in involvement with an effort to reach the Singularity, perhaps by creating artificial universes. Which may -- or may not -- explain just what is going on in these two books. These two books, Godplayers and K-Machine, are a very enjoyable and intelligent diptych, riffing on wild contemporary speculative scientific ideas such as Matrioshka brains as well as SF/Fantasy classics like Roger Zelazny's Amber books. At times I felt the books were victimized just a bit by the bane of certain SF and Fantasy both: the notion that just about any old thing can happen at the characters' (or the author's) convenience. But I did enj