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Foreword, by Rich Horton

I have to admit that until several years ago I didn’t really know Damien Broderick’s work. I was aware of it (as Martin says of Ray Bradbury in a Simpsons episode). I knew that novels like The Dreaming Dragons (aka The Dreaming—and don’t forget that “aka”—Broderick is an inveterate improver of his earlier work) and The White Abacus were held in high regard. I knew he had a reputation as a critic as well as a writer. I knew he was Australian. That was about it.

My loss. Things began to change when I read for review his diptych Godplayers (2005) and K-Machines (2006), wild post-Singularity sf with echoes of Zelazny and Leiber, and akin to Charles Stross’s Accelerando (2005) which drew upon the same extropian speculations surveyed in Broderick’s 1997 The Spike. These are fast-moving and highly entertaining novels, deeply steeped in the field (and as such highly allusive), also deeply informed by exotic scientific speculation. And still fun! Along the way I also read Broderick’s first novel, Sorcerer’s World (1970), which nods at Vance, and has its moments but is perhaps a bit too much a young man’s jape. (It, too, was significantly revised and extended in 1986 as The Black Grail.)

I also noticed Broderick’s impressive achievements as a critic, evidenced by books like Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction; and x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction. In addition he has produced some impressive futurist-oriented popular science work, most notably The Spike. When I finally “met” Damien on a couple of online fora, I saw immediately a highly intelligent person, clever, sometimes sardonic, and (perhaps most important!) often sharing my tastes in sf.

But, you know, I tend to approach the field first through short fiction. And in 2009 Damien Broderick began to produce a not yet abated flood of quite remarkable shorter work, beginning with “Uncle Bones” and including such quite outstanding stories as “This Wind Blowing, and This Tide,” “The Qualia Engine,” and two included in this book: “Under the Moons of Venus” and “The Beancounter’s Cat”. These stories hooked me, no doubt about it.

One feature of Broderick’s work, already hinted at, is the allusiveness towards earlier sf (or not necessarily sf: The White Abacus, for instance, is a science fictional version of Hamlet). This can be a dangerous thing—one can’t depend on the reader to get one’s allusions, to recognize who’s being pastiched or even parodied. But Broderick succeeds in walking the tightrope (stretched, I suppose, over the Scylla and Charybdis of reader frustration at missing things and reader annoyance at traducing beloved past works) between providing a fully successful story on its own terms and at the same time deepening both the new story and the work alluded to by the embedded commentary and references. These new stories notably echo writers like Philip K. Dick, Cordwainer Smith, and J. G. Ballard, while throwing in the odd reference to Sturgeon, Kipling and Wilmar Shiras. But they, I think, will delight new readers as well.

This is the latest of several illuminating story collections. Each tends to combine early work (sometimes very early) with new stories (sometimes brand new, as with “Luminous Fish” in this book). I’ve been delighted to be able to follow the evolution of Broderick’s work—for example, his very first story, “The Sea’s Furthest End,” which first appeared in 1964 in the first issue of Ted Carnell’s classic UK original anthology New Writings in SF, is available in Climbing Mount Implausible in its original form; and in drastically revised form as “The Game of Stars and Souls” in Uncle Bones. (A still different version is the 1993 YA novel also called The Sea’s Furthest End.) By all means read them both (or all three!)—the first version is indeed the work of a teenager, and shows it, but retains a distinct and refreshing energy, which manages to survive the later improvements. And from the beginning we can see the shape of the mature writer’s interests. Even better is the chance to resurrect unjustly neglected stories, such as “The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear’s Stead” (1980), which I first read in Uncle Bones, and which despite being thirty years old is one of my favorite novelettes in my recent reading. (I should have noticed it in 1980, but what can I say? I was a junior in college, and I missed a lot of stuff in favor of girls, beer, and physics.)

But what of the stories included here? They are a varied bunch, both in time of publication and theme. But every one is worth reading. There is a brand new story, “Luminous Fish,” written with Paul Di Filippo, taking on Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius character with stabs at sleazy websites and a Heinlein-like brain transplant. There are four first rate stories from the past couple of years: “Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order,” a clever and very funny time travel romp (with a serious aspect); “The Beancounter’s Cat,” set in a far future with Clarkean science sufficiently advanced to appear magic, and meditating on human destiny very effectively (on first reviewing this I called Broderick “one of our prophets of the posthuman”); “Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone” (written with Broderick’s wife, Barbara Lamar), is another look at the mystery of human destiny, beginning with an academic seeing himself in a film from 1931, and solving that mystery quite strangely; and finally one of the very best sf short stories of the past couple of years, “Under the Moons of Venus,” which is either about what it purports to be: a man left nearly alone on an empty Earth after aliens take most people to Venus, or about a man gone mad—either way, it’s remarkable, evocative, effectively in homage to one of sf’s greats but still through and through original.

And there are the older stories. “All My Yesterdays” is one of his first stories, from 1964 (though slightly revised), and it’s not bad at all, a day in the very long life of an evidently immortal man, battling with God. “Coming Back” is a mid-career story, a solid take on the story of a man stuck in a time loop. “The Womb” is a long story on the subject of UFOs and Ufologists and cults, intriguing odd stuff. And “All Summer Long” looks at intelligent robots and asks “What would they really want to do?”

Damien Broderick is one of our best contemporary writers of sf, and his recent spate of excellent short fiction, matched with excellent collections such as this, gives all of us a chance to discover this.