Damien Broderick

Time travel, changing history, forestalling atrocities: it's not a job for the weak. For one thing, the things people in the future wear...

The rate at which technology is changing our world-not just on a global level like space travel and instant worldwide communications but on the level of what we choose to wear, where we live, and what we eat-is staggeringly fast and getting faster all the time. The rate of change has become so fast that a concept that started off sounding like science fiction has become a widely expected outcome in the near future - a singularity referred to as The...

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....

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...

Technology has started to accelerate at a terrifying rate. By the mid-twenty-first century, we might see a Singularity: a convergence of artificial intelligence, advanced nanotechnologies for building things at the atomic scale, precise genomics, and other wonders. What happens after that? Will the descendents of today's humanity become gods or demons, or simply destroy themselves? And will we be among their number, carried along by rejuvenation and...

Poor Jack Wong is a clueless cadet at the Unified Space Academy when his pod is stranded on a planet of disgusting aliens. All he wants to do, other than escape, is to fulfill his proud duty to advance Earth Culture's Primary Heuristic: "Wherever possible, find the weak spot in an alien civilization and interfere as much as possible for the benefit of humanity." It's the Human's Burden! But everything comes unstuck, made worse by his irritating Machiavellian...

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...

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...

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...