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PREFACE 2013

Valencies was first published in 1983 by the University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia and this edition is slightly revised and extended. It deals with an episode in a long, long face-off between repression and freedom, a future where everyone is immune to aging yet entire stars can be blown up to destroy rebels against an empire linked by teleport gates throughout the galaxy (and you have to go through them naked). It’s about strangers in a very strange land finding love. But it’s not a military adventure yarn nor a romance in deep space. What is it, then?

In The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, science fiction critic Professor Van Ikin commented: “[U]topia is an elusive grail with a different meaning in every age, and contemporary writers of speculative fiction...examine the dangers and pitfalls of utopian fervour. The most notable of these works are Beloved Son (1978) and Vaneglory (1981) by George Turner, and Valencies (1983) by Rory Barnes and Damien Broderick.” Critics Ikin, Dr. Sean McMullen, and Dr. Russell Blackford, in Strange Constellations (1999), also point out that “in its structure, although not its thematic concern with individual freedom and universal human dignity, the book is atypical of Broderick’s fiction, quite different from his novels of time travel and altered realities....”

If all this sounds a little downbeat, take heart! Brian W. Aldiss, in his classic history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, praised Valencies as “one of the more playful SF novels of recent years” and quoted it at some length. Ikin, McMullen, and Blackford say: “Some of the book’s set pieces...are glorious pieces of comic writing.” So, yes, it is a literary dystopia, but we hope it’s a lot of fun as well.

In Hyperdreams (1998), Russell Blackford described the novel thus:

A far-future parable about political and cultural imperialism. Barnes and Broderick propose that by 4004 AD the Universe has been filled with human beings, thanks to the teleportational network (the “Aorist Discontinuity”) and countless terraformed planets left behind by a von Danikenesque alien race known as “the Charioteers.” Humanity is organised into a bleak and clinically brutal Empire. The novel focuses on a frustrated group of libertarian anarchists who live on the planet Victoria. By the end, their politically futile activities elicit from the reader a mixed emotional response. There is a sense of pathos, since all the moves in the game are foreknown and controlled by the rulers of the Empire, as becomes apparent in the final chapter, while the book’s revolutionaries cannot even understand each other, let alone overthrow an omnipotently entrenched system. At the same time, there is a strong sense of dignity and courage, and this is magnified rather than diminished by the depictions of human weakness. Valencies, then, represents a struggle against Empire, a struggle that can never amount to more than futile gestures. The narrative is dominated by the characters’ pranks, games, and parodies, and the complexities of their love lives. The incomprehension between person and person is suggested not only by the book’s focus upon the difficulties between spirited Anla and dispirited Ben, and those between vulnerable Theri and gentle Kael, but also by the cunning juxtaposition of narrative viewpoints, which enables Barnes and Broderick to weave for the reader a delicate web of understanding of the characters’ misunderstandings.

If this is (like much science fiction) a relic of a future that never happened—sadly, for example, the Good Doctor Isaac Asimov is no longer alive in this real tomorrow—we’re quite content to note that in one respect we saw farther than our critics in the early 1980s. One of them denounced us for our failure of imagination in supposing that students and other radical activists would in future gather once more in the streets and parks to confront the rich, the powerful and the brutal. So 1960s! we were told dismissively. Then the massacre of student protesters in China’s Tiananmen Square shocked the rest of the world in 1989, and the Berlin Wall fell before the fury of those sickened finally by the gulag cultures, and later the Occupy movement took to the streets of the USA, and the Arab Spring changed the Middle East tyrannies, or tried to, and not all of it was hopeless and self-deluding.

So we don’t expect the real future to be much like the setting of Valencies, but we’re pretty sure that generation after generation will keep finding ways (sometimes with sarcastic laughter) to confront the absolute power that inevitably corrupts everyone who wields it.

—Damien Broderick

Rory Barnes

March 2013

Our babes’ll wander naked

through the Cities of the Universe.

Blows Against the Empire

Jefferson Airplane

The strangers of the Foundation knew nothing of the swirling days and nights of the bloody Sack that had left the University untouched. They knew nothing of the time after the collapse of the Imperial power, when the students, with their borrowed weapons, and their pale-faced inexperienced bravery, formed a protective volunteer army to protect the central shrine of the science of the Galaxy.

Foundation and Empire

Isaac Asimov