Nonetheless, and indisputably, Broderick's unique voice and vision emerge from the country of his birth. Indeed, says Broderick, "I've grown up to be the child I was."
"At tea-time my mashed potatoes cooled on the table or dried out in the 'Early Kooka' gas stove while the younger kids squalled and my toolmaker father got ready to go to a union meeting to battle the Communists," he recalls. "Miles away, I froze my bum on a wooden bench, amid the gathering dark and chill of evening, as I read SF paperbacks from Collingwood's semi-slum railway station news-boy's rack. The guy let me read them without payment, for as long as he was there, and then I returned them neat as new, their extraordinary tales passed to my brain like soothing neutrino radiation.
"My home suburb got a branch library finally: dinosaurs, the Space Beagle, 'In Hiding', the secret insides of bodies, J. B. Rhine and Isaac Asimov, shale and volcanoes, flying saucers had landed and Men in Black were abroad but only the few knew the truth. . . . The overdone chops cooled and dried out, and I'd wander in with some vague tale of catching the wrong train and being carried off in error along the alternative line to distant Heidelberg; little wonder they took me for a half-wit, or worse.
"I hid the paperbacks under the mattress after the Christian Brothers at my crummy technical school warned my parents against the evils of imagination. How appalled they had been when I'd passed in an essay on the set topic 'A Visit to a Factory', but my factory was a place where simians were skillfully enhanced for the shit jobs, and those past their use-by date were cruelly disassembled in a side room. There were ructions, rather like those at the upwardly mobile Jesuit school where earlier I'd spent grades four through seven in a hopeless daze of social and cognitive dissonance, and caused a nasty stir by persuading a pal to get his public servant father to type my three page story about the spaceship 'Aldo-4' and its peace-making peregrinations about the solar system, dozens of copies passed out to my fellow students without permission from the Head. Little wonder they too took me for a half-wit, or worse, and shuffled me off to learn a manual trade.
"When I was 15 I escaped from all that by running off to a Seminary in a small country town, planning to become a Catholic priest. I escaped that fate in turn and was monstrous for a fairly long time at Monash University, where I named the student newspaper Lot's Wife (that's still its name 30-something years later). The rest is predictable -- sex and rock&roll but not much in the way of drugs because I valued my mind too much. Tried computer programming. Edited a national magazine. Now I have grown fully into child's estate and I sit all day at home and read books, tales of hermeneutics and quantum theory, storybooks in high poetry and low, reviewing them for newspaper readers with authorized jobs and incomes, and sometimes, when I can bear to, writing out of them stories of my own.
"Because I am an Australian in Australia, where the shark-menaced water surrounds us on all sides and a meager population can barely support the elements of industry and so survives by tearing the bowels out of the earth and shipping them undigested elsewhere, my tales have tended to go forth into the rest of the world and nobody knows what I do here, reading and dreaming and writing. My crimes were largely exported off-shore because Australians were immune, by and large, to their lure. So I learned to wonder what good it did to know that somewhere my novel The Judas Mandala was said to be available in Portuguese, though you couldn't find it in English in my own country; that my story 'A Passage in Earth' could be read as 'Reis naar de Aarde' in a Dutch collection called Top SF 1; that Germans were reading Die traumenden Drachen, that had been on sale as The Dreaming Dragons in the USA (just long enough to pick up a place medal in the Campbell Memorial Award); and so forth. All this changed for a moment, when an Australian publisher finally brought out handsome versions in a matched set at the start of the 1990s, and a bit later my short story collection The Dark Between the Stars. . . . They set the price too high to compete with imported US paperbacks, so the stores sent them back if they'd bothered ordering them at the outset, even as the cheerful and encouraging reviews tumbled in. Which is why, I guess, David Langford once mentioned me in Ansible, his snide and witty newszine, as an 'almost famous Aussie sf writer.' "
Of course, with the publication of the Avon/EOS paperback of The White Ababcus, this will change.
True to the Australian spirit, Broderick's book shows a penchant for " blue-sky ventures, where the chances of success might be dicey but the payoffs are great.
"The AI people in The White Abacus are way ahead of the humans," says Broderick. "My argument is that vast US defense system hypercomputers will be at the human level in number of parts and connectivity by, say, 2010. Meanwhile, some people might be augmenting their own brain power by linking to these machines. Once we have cheap desktop human-level machines, most of the jobs we humans now cling to will be done cheaper and faster by the AIs."
The theme is one Broderick has been addressing in non-fiction, too. His most recent exploration, he explains, "examines the runaway technology we can expect in the next 30 to 50 years, which Vernor Vinge has dubbed the Singularity and I call 'The Spike.'
"The point," he explains, "is to see this as a blessing -- an opportunity to enjoy the benefits of abundance and freedom. The risk is that people will be left rootless, purposeless and seething with rage -- and with unprecedented access to mechanisms of mass destruction. So if we don't wish to see Bosnia everywhere, we need to start planning utopia."
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