World Famous Comics: K-Machines (Players in the Contest of Worlds)
K-Machines (Players in the Contest of Worlds)
By: Damien Broderick Publisher: Running Press Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Running Press Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 336 Publication Date: February 22, 2006
August Seebeck is a 20-something student from a world not quite the same as ours. In GODPLAYERS, August tumbled into a vastly larger universe, and learned that he wasn't, after all, an orphaned only child. He and his turbulent siblings, and the breathtaking Lune and others still stranger, are Players in the Contest of Worlds. They are mysteriously transformed humans whose ancient task is enigmatic battle with the dread, passionate K-Machines. Now crisis deepens. Empowered with a potent killing device of his own, an eerie gift from legend, August finds himself flung from world to world in a brutal and baffling game, with entire universes at stake and very little idea of the rules. Only two things are clear: his beloved Lune is not who she seems, and August's pivotal role is no chance accident. In this cosmos, survival of the gods themselves depends upon human victory over the K-Machines.
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 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 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.
Interesting ideas, but wandering, shaky execution. 3.4 stars Interesting ideas, wandering, shaky execution, and a dippy, unlikeable protagonist. Great opening, good teaser ending, some marvelous setpieces. I'll definitely read the next....
Hmm. In his review, Paul Di Filippo says K-Machines concludes a duology -- if so, Broderick is leaving a mop-head of loose ends... As with Godplayers, I wanted to like this book more than I could. Worth reading, but YMMV.
It would be worth your while to Google for Di Filippo's "A" review, and for a less-enthusiastic writeup at sfsignal [dot] com.
Happy reading-- Peter D. Tillman
Enjoyable and intelligent riffs on wild ideas 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 enjoy the ride, and I certainly recommend reading them.
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