In Damien Broderick’s Quipu Caroline is about to go psychotic – and with her family, no surprise. Joseph can’t talk to women even if he is a certified high IQ clever dick trying to take snapshots of the end of the universe. Ray and Marj have their own hassles with in-laws, but student terrorists get in the way. Meanwhile Brian, misogynist and wit, appalls everyone in the quipu world. Quipus? They’re the scandalous fanzines that hikes traded before blogs were invented. Hikes? High IQ clever dicks, of course.

In Quipu (appearing for the first time as an E-Reads publication), Australian writer Damien Broderick reimagines his prize-winning 1984 novel Transmitters as the surprising saga of a “family” of genius-level one-of-a-kind individuals.

Damien Broderick is Australia’s dean of science fiction, with a body of extraordinary work reaching back to the early 1960′s. Like the late George Turner, he captures the distinctive flavor of his native country while reaching out to American and European readers. The White Abacus won two year’s best awards. His stories and novels, like those of his younger peer Greg Egan, are drenched with bleeding-edge ideas. Distinctively, he blends ideas and poetry like nobody since Roger Zelazny, and a wild silly humor is always ready to bubble out, as in the cosmic comedy Striped Holes. His award-winning novel The Dreaming Dragons is featured in David Pringle’s SF: The 100 Best Novels, and was chosen as year’s best by Kingsley Amis. It has been revised and updated as The Dreaming. In 1982, his early cyberpunk novel The Judas Mandala coined the term ‘virtual reality.’ His most recent novels are Godplayers and K-Machines.

With David G. Hartwell, he edited Centaurus: The Best of Australian SF for Tor in 1999.

Like one of his heroes, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, he is also a master of writing about radical new technologies, and The Spike and The Last Mortal Generation have been Australian popular-science best sellers–both books strongly recommended in Clarke’s millennial revision of his famous Profiles of the Future.

“Schrödinger’s Dog” was chosen for Gardner Dozois’s SF: Year’s Best 14.

His homepage is The Spike, and you can read a great interview with him in Missions Unknown.

You can download Quipu now, but if you want to hold a print edition in your hand, watch these pages for updates; the paperback is in the works!

Incidentally, E-Reads publishes another book of Broderick, this one in collaboration with Rory Barnes: The Hunger of Time. Check it out!