August Seebeck is in his twenties, a man of average looks and intellect. Then comes the claim of his great-aunt Tansy that she has been finding corpses each Saturday night in her bath (they vanish by morning). August dismisses this tale as elderly fantasy until he stumbles upon a corpse being shoved into the second-floor bathroom window of his aunt's house. Even that wouldn't faze him, but then someone steps out of the mirror.... August suddenly discovers he is a Player in the multi-universe Contest of Worlds and that his true family is quarrelsome on a mythic scale. His search for understanding follows a classic quest pattern of the Parsifal kind, except that August is nobody's fool. An epic quest that is funny and engrossing, Godplayers is in the best tradition of Zelazny, Van Vogt, and the Knights of the Round Table, from one of science fiction's hottest up-and-coming writers.
Thought-provoking postmodern sf from a master in the field (first published at http://www.asif.dreamhosters.com/doku.php?id=godplayers_and_k-machines reviewing Godplayers and its second half, K-Machines (Players in the Contest of Worlds))
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 member of a different family of Players (but on the same side), and this along with his developing realisation of his powers keeps him mostly on target. Things only get more complicated as the book progresses, and as is a danger with Singularity fiction (see Charlie Stross's hilarious Tough Guide) it becomes hard to see what differentiates the awesome weapons, destinies, birthings-of-Gods (or Angels) and so on from fantasy. To be sure, there's lots of mind-bending scientific speculation here, and the underlying Big Idea of a computational cosmos is one that hasn't been explored in such an audacious way before, but it is hard to work out where to place the book (although perhaps not so hard in the context of its sequel).
In the end what it is is a perfect piece of Damien Broderick: post-modern sf to a T, with resonances of everything from Lewis Carroll to Charlie Stross himself (see his continuing Merchant Princes series), Shakespeare to Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, the kabbalah to the tarot. Broderick knows his stuff, and it helps if you know some of your stuff too. Still, it's a honking great yarn even if you're not up on the latest in computational physics, AI and neuro-linguistic programming. Anyone who's enjoyed just about any science fiction from the last century is likely to be taken in by this tale.
By the end of Godplayers, the reader still remains considerably in the dark. There's a big, strange (although not unexpected) Deus Ex Machina, and the whole Contest is merely sketched in the background. Meanwhile a very bizarre book keeps turning up, called SgrA* - and eagle-eyed readers recognize the excerpts as a pulled-apart version of "Schrodinger's Catch", one Broderick's strangest and most evocative pieces. Does SgrA* stand for the Sagittarius A* radio source, associated with the galactic centre? Or is Sgr an abbreviation of Schrodinger? Why is this book a sacred text for the K-Machines, the off-stage villains of the Contest? These questions lie on rather different levels, but they're only half-answered by the end of the book.
And that, of course, is where K-Machines comes in. It pretty much flows on directly from Godplayers, and it's worth reading the two together, if possible. There are nice structural devices that hold the two together (Godplayers starts with a framing chapter which is mirrored at the end of K-Machines, for instance), but there are also distinct differences. In particular, the excerpts from SgrA* in K-Machines are quite unlike those from Godplayers; in these ones we get a spread-out biography of someone who could be an alternate August, unaware of his nature as Player in the Contest of Games. This subplot has many, many potential meanings, some of which I'm sure I've missed: its early sections could be mutated from Broderick's own life, and have a wonderful down-to-earth Aussie veridicality to them; and indeed its later sections have the same ring-of-truth as they follow their viewpoint character into an increasingly stranger future - and there's the second meaning to these sections, because they follow this timeline's progress towards a Singularity that may or may not ever eventuate. What else these sections may mean is undoubtedly tied up with the gradual revelations of the rest of the book. As August finally (albeit slowly) works out what makes everything tick, various meta-mysteries are explained for us, the readers, as well. And also intercut between these sections and the main narrative are a series of "Exegetical Analects", sort of Zen dialogues from the K-Machines' perspective, which may well explain a lot upon a second (or third) reading.
I'm not sure whether it's because I read K-Machines some 9 months or so after Godplayers, but for some reason the sequel feels like a more mature, stronger book. I look forward to re-reading the two at some stage, back to back. These are very dense pieces of work, and the frequent humour and riffs on juvenile adventure sf shouldn't be allowed to obscure this fact. All of Broderick's strengths are on display here, and the SgrA* sections in both books contain many very fine passages of writing. There's a lot of fun to be had unpicking the threads of intertextuality through the books too (Arthurian legend being one of the more obvious references); names are very carefully chosen, and little significances often explode in the careful reader's brain scant pages before they are made clear.
Those familiar with Broderick's earlier works will be amused by his further adoption and adaptation of favourite themes here (apart from the already-mentioned short stories). The Judas Mandala (a book which made a huge impression on me as a teenager, and is credited with the first use of the terms "virtual reality" and "virtual matrix"), The Dreaming Dragons and The Black Grail also featured humanity juxtaposed with another "species" (whether mechanistic or reptilian), battling for dominance of the universe, rewriting history as they go. The Sea's Furthest End, meanwhile, features cosmic Players for whom reality is a circular (but evolving) game. These earlier works also draw extensively on stories as diverse and powerful as Hindu mythology, and the myths of Oedipus and King Arthur (for starters), while also extrapolating the most cutting-edge science and philosophy of language available to the author.
In 1998, Russell Blackford wrote a fascinating chapbook called Hyperdreams: Damien Broderick's Space/Time Fiction that explored the threads that link Broderick's writings together. Methinks it's time for an update in the light of these two novels: if The Black Grail inverts the expected position of human/Arthur/Excalibur as hero, Godplayers/K-Machines perhaps goes further, questioning the dualisms (human/machine, hero/villain etc) themselves. In any case, taken as a single novel, Godplayers/K-Machines is a formidable work that will reward multiple readings, a fecund gift to fiction geeks and science geeks alike.
[1] Actually, the author mentioned to me in an email that this was intended to be titled "The Disposal Man" but both on the back cover and inside my edition it's got the unnecessary "of" in the title.
Godbenchwarmers It's hard to figure how an acclaimed veteran author could come up with something as incoherent as this mess of disconnected ideas and directionless contrivances. In the "story" (and I use that term loosely), the young slacker protagonist finds himself mixed up in a violent mess of clashing universes, as he has some vague connection with an annoying group of demigods (who are also somehow his lost interdimensional relatives) who are in a videogame-like grudge match called "The Contest" in which multiple universes are played like chess pieces. This is a fairly serviceable premise, and Broderick gets a few points for ambition and creativity, but his construction of the ensuing "story" is nonsensical to the point of pomposity.
Broderick's unbelievably amateurish method of creating suspense is for the other characters to refuse to explain things to the protagonist until finally doing so, obscurely, near the end of the book. And not only is that amateurish, it doesn't even make sense for this book's plotline, as the other characters need the protagonist's help in their epic battle. If you desperately needed someone's help, but he had trouble figuring out what the problem was, wouldn't you explain everything to him precisely and immediately? You have to wonder if Broderick himself even knew what was happening while he wrote this claptrap. But don't despair because the amateurishness continues unabated. The characters nonchalantly fail to ruminate on all the vast implications of their violent multiversal struggle (which nobody else even notices, by the way), characters understand their own words after they say them, and vague subplots and entirely new concepts keep popping up before the significance of earlier ones are explained - all with diminishing connections to the main storyline.
And regardless of all of the above flaws in logic, this book is a rapidly deteriorating mishmash of disconnected explorations that subsume the already directionless plot. Broderick goes absolutely nowhere with contrived big ideas on cosmology, cyberpunk, alternative philosophies, programming languages, and even Norse mythology - not to mention the lifelike robots, talking animals, conspiracy theories, and mystical ancient tomes. All the while, the characters converse in faux-ironic loquaciousness and frequently interrupt their eternal struggles with over-described gourmet wining and dining. And Broderick didn't even try to wrap up this "story" in one book, as we have to (not) wait for the sequel to get even basic explanations of how all these characters and settings originated. Illogical storyline construction, nonsensical character interactions, disconnected subplots, and a hodgepodge of malnourished philosophical musings do not make a novel. Not even for a veteran. A high school creative writing workshop student would flunk for this. [~doomsdayer520~]
Banality posing as creativity Broderick tries to be original with his idea of idea of godlike beings stuck in weird dimensions, but his writing comes across as forced and his characters are overall not very interesting. Read Roger Zelazny's Amber series if you want to see the same idea done by a better writer (although with fantasy and not science fiction aspects).
What Happens When You Write a Book Without an Outline? After reading the last hundred pages of this mess of a book, I am slowly attempting to reassemble my sense of coherence. It will no doubt take some time and some therapy to do that...along with perhaps some gallons of fruit punch drunk in sight of a midget. Does that make a great deal of sense? Of course it doesn't--as does the book GODPLAYERS. There are so many self-contradictions, acts of illogic and downright reams of rants that the book gets lost in itself. Then there is how the book is so full of itself that the plot gets lost in the sauce. The lack of sense and sensibility in this book is enough to make a grown man scream for his mommy--or another glass of fruit punch.
Now, a glass of the red stuff down my gullet, let me try to at least begin to make sense of the senseless. This book begins with a young adult-ish character named August--muddling through life and living with his aunt. Corpses start appearing in the aunt's upstairs tub. The aunt disappears in one of the least coherent two paragraphs ever to appear in a science fiction novel. August takes it upon himself to use the mystical hieroglyph-thingy on one of his ankles to pull an Alice-in-Wonderland stunt and ends up dealing with a hoarde of incestuous flesh-robot relatives that have as much sense in the head as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears combined: a group of space-faring, metaphysics-ranting, zebra-hunting, gourmet-cooking psychotics who seem more obsessed with fashion and etiquette than they do in dealing with the threat at hand due to some never-defined contest. Oh, did I fail to mention that this book switches between the first-person narrative and third-person for no good reason other than variety? Again, this barely begins to make sense as a plot--if there WAS a plot. Even after drinking a liter of fruit punch--the powerful red kind--it does not make too much sense.
Not only has the plot been beaten into a senseless melange, but it also moves at a truly constipated pace. So what happened after August meets his relatives? What happened was pointless. After the first hundred pages, the book steeps into a drool-inducing series of chapters with August and his inbred flesh-robot-clone relatives doing nothing but wining and dining, ranting about the multiple universes and mucking up big time. Some other critic hereabouts said to not skim. Guess what? A person could chop out the middle hundred and forty pages and not miss much. In short, the plot progression hits a major blockage for the center of the book. I ought to give away the equally pointless ending just for that...including the fact that the main character dies a pointless death and is resurrected to find out that a pet is a petty god or something.
The book's plot was senseless; the book's progress was constipated... On top of that, it should be noted that the writing style fails. The language is nearly incoherent to anyone who didn't take any philosophy or physics cognate courses at the college level. There is little to no neutral narrator to actually explain the drivel. There is very little in the way of a narrator at all. No, the writer of the book pretty much just let the characters talk their trash without bothering to make a great deal of sense about it. It generates the impression that the writer himself probably did not know too much about what was going on--not that much was happening in this book at all.
If anything, this is an example of what happens when a person acts without forethought--or at least without a plan. GODPLAYERS is an example of a book written without an outline. Now I have heard of people doing such things, much as I have seen an Internet video of someone dressing up like banana, shouting "LET'S ROCK AND ROLL!" before setting himself aflame in front of his videocamera-holding relatives--expecting to be unsinged. A decade or so before this act of astounding human wisdom, there was also a movie director some years ago who made movies without scripts. I remember one of his films somehow involving ninjas, midgets and a triple-decker birthday cake... Then there are the irate Neanderthal husbands who insist that they can navigate hundreds of miles of highway without maps. The book GODLAYERS is nowhere close to being as amusing as setting oneself alight in a banana costume or making movies with midgets fighting triple-decker ninja birthday cakes, but it maybe makes just about as much sense. Now I'm off to consume the remainder of my red fruit punch before some psychotic robot clone-girl with hairy legs threatens to wipe my memory. Better yet, I wish that she would as so I could forget this book all the more sooner.
Energetic and engaging: intriguing speculative SF Godplayers is an extremely energetic and engaging novel, one in which the author is obviously having fun, and just as obviously a work by a writer who knows and loves the SF field.
The main action of the novel follows a young man from Australia named August Seebeck. His parents disappeared, presumed dead, when he was a boy, and he was raised by relatives, in particular his Aunt Miriam and later his Great-Aunt Tansy. He comes home to Tansy's house after herding cattle in the outback, to find that she claims dead bodies have been showing up in her bathtub. She's a bit dotty, and works as a psychic, so he tends to discount this, and goes to wash up. And naturally a dead body shows up soon after, carried through the mirror by two women, one of whom, Lune, is sufficiently beautiful that August is drastically smitten despite the unfortunate circumstances of their meeting. Especially when he notices that she has the same curious metallic design in her foot that he has. But Lune and her companion inform him that they will have to wipe his memory, and out comes the "green ray"...
Mysteriously, the memory wipe doesn't stick. Quickly August is involved in some very strange doings indeed. He tries to follow the mysterious women through the mirror, and in very rapid order indeed he is jumping from universe to universe. It soon comes clear that August is part of a family he has not suspected (the other members have significant names like Maybelline, and Juni, and Marchmain... see the pattern?), and that the family is engaged in something called the Contest of Worlds.
And so the novel goes, recomplicating again and again, as August desperately tries to make sense of things, to find his Aunt Tansy, and to learn the secret behind his new family and his parents' disappearance. He's also trying to forge a relationship with the beautiful Lune (one that develops perhaps just a bit implausibly quickly). In the process we visit numerous parallel worlds, and several different "levels" of the universe -- mostly based on real (if perhaps not precisely mainstream) physical theories. It's all great fun, very fast moving, clever stuff.
The afterword mentions as influences Fritz Leiber and Roger Zelazny. "Destiny Times Three" is the Leiber story Broderick mentions, while the obvious Zelazny parallel is Amber. And indeed the novel recalls those writers a bit, as well as perhaps Charles Stross' new series that has also been compared to Amber, The Merchant Princes. But Broderick's work is not simply hommage, nor is it derivative -- it is original SF that happily nods to its precursors. And it is, put simply, purely fun, and at the same time intriguing speculative SF.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
