As I’ve said before, E-Reads is very selective about publishing original fiction, but we were thrilled when Damien Broderick, the award-winning Australian writer, and co-author Rory Barnes offered us The Hunger of Time. Broderick appears in so many “Best of” anthologies that he should consider changing his middle name to “Best of.” His bio states that he coined the term “virtual reality” in a 1982 novel, when the only reality was the kind that skins your knees when you fall on the sidewalk. I haven’t researched the claim but that’s good enough for me.
In The Hunger of Time Broderick and Barnes have created a mad scientist who seems to have read too much H. G. Wells, and, like Wells’s Time Traveler, protagonist Hugh’s time machine works – sort of. That is, it’s accurate to the power of two, or maybe three, or maybe ten. I suppose that when you’re one step ahead of a pandemic and the Pox Cops, you can’t get too fine about these leaps into the Singularity.
Broderick and Barnes can add another “Best of” to their credits. The Hunger of Time is one of the best originals E-Reads has ever published.
– Richard Curtis
E-Reads interviewed Damien and Rory about their novel The Hunger of Time in March, 2004.
E-Reads: What was the inspiration for The Hunger of Time?
Damien and Rory: It’s no accident that the book is dedicated to the great SF writer Poul Anderson, who sadly died several years ago but not before he’d read our early draft and told us he liked what we’d done. That was very gratifying, because we’d chosen to design the novel using a method Poul pioneered in his classic novel Tau Zero, in which the engines of a starship fueled by hydrogen in space get jammed on, so the ship accelerates faster and ever faster until it carries its crew to the end of the cosmos.
In Poul’s version, the big bang at the start of space time is mirrored by a big crunch at the end, with all the galaxies collapsing back into a gigantic `atom’. His starship rather magically manages to orbit this cosmic egg through its expansion into a new universe, where the crew finally slow and find a new home planet. Since then, though, science has learned that the universe is actually expanding ever faster, not slowing, so the end of space and time seems fated to be eternal cold and emptiness. A grim prospect. How could you tell an engaging, warm, human story against such a bleak background? Well, we took a leaf from Poul’s book. His method was to use what a mathematician might call logarithmic progression from one chapter to the next: each step is exponentially greater than the one before. It’s a very interesting way to match ordinary human time against the vast expanses of cosmic duration.
In each segment of the story, our characters plunge farther and then immensely farther into the future. It’s as if the first time you woke up, it was the next day (as usual); the next time, it was 10 days later; the next, 100 days later; the next, 1000 days had passed; then 10,000 days, 100,000 days… You get the picture. It doesn’t take many days before you’d be far into the deep future. Something like that happens to our family, Hugh, Grace, Suzanna and Natalie. The world gets insanely strange, fast, then stranger still. This way of telling the story is a sort of metaphor for what might really happen to the human species much sooner than that. Damien has discussed an event some scientists expect to erupt around the middle of this century, which some call the Singularity and we’ve called the Spike (because that’s shorter and easier to picture). At the Spike, many kinds of new technology converge and accelerate each other’s progress. In short and shorter periods of time, more and more jumps in scientific and technical knowledge will be attained, if this picture of the near future is true. Change ends by running straight up the graph of progress, like a spike. In The Hunger of Time, a sort of botched Spike occurs in the near future, following a terrible global plague, the kind of medical emergency that the SARS outbreak threatened to become. Our four characters manage to avoid that plague, by leaping forward in time, but they find they can’t return home. They are doomed to travel ever onward into weirdness (an idea foreshadowed in another brilliant Poul Anderson tale, `Flight to Forever’).
But we wanted our story to be about people, recognizable humans you can identify with. So we came up with a family somewhat in crisis, and then put pressure on them. We hope what we’ve created is funny and disturbing and heart warming by turns. Although the D’Anzsos are not based on the real-life families of either of us, Rory does have two sons of about the same age as Natalie and Zanna, the young women in the novel, and Damien has a step-daughter aged about midway between them. Their dog Ferdy is, of course, the ideal doggy companion everyone wants, and both of us have had wonderful dogs in our lives. (Damien and his wife Barbara’s dog, Rufus, who lives in Damien’s second home in San Antonio, even shows up transformed into a character in his forthcoming children’s book Jack and the Skyhook.)
Damien, have your thoughts about “singularity” been updated since The Spike was published a couple of years ago?
The prospect only seems more likely with each year that passes. True, we’re in the middle of global economic downturn, and that might slow the rush of development in some of these technologies. The bursting of the dot-com tech bubble didn’t help either, because although most of it was vapor, it’s frightened away some skittish venture capital from genuinely exciting possibilities. But new work keeps bursting out of the labs: discoveries in genomics, medicine, nanotechnology. And above all, Moore’s Law is still tracking the speed of computer power available per dollar. Today you can buy a far faster, superior desktop computer at a cheaper price than you could when The Spike came out. And big research establishments are building computers that will match the capacity of a human brain. It still seems quite plausible that a technological singularity will take place before the middle of this century.
Damien and Rory, you’ve done a few projects together now. How does The Hunger Of Time relate to the previous work you’ve done with each other? What’s it like working together in collaboration?
The surprising thing is that the co-operative process varies wildly from book to book. To be candid, our first joint novel, Valencies, was written with no co-operation at all. Rory wrote the base text as a mainstream novel, without any help from Damien. Damien then moved the story to a different planet and jumped it forward in time by a couple of millennia–all without any help from Rory. But a very different process emerged with short works such as Zones and Stuck in Fast Forward (which eventually grew up to becomeThe Hunger of Time). With both, we spent some time at Rory’s place in Adelaide working on the one computer. If one author got restless and abandoned the keyboard in mid sentence, the other might sit down and keep going, having first edited the existing text on the screen. And, of course, with our later novels we’ve been able to bat stuff back and forward between Adelaide and Melbourne or San Antonio by email as often as we like. The real trick to joint authorship is to accept that the final version will be something completely different from the novel you’d have written alone. Control freaks need not apply. The rewards of working together are easily stated: you get twice the inventiveness when it comes to twists and turns in the plot and you have characters who are the products of two different minds. In some ways, the interaction between characters in a jointly written novel mirrors the interaction between the authors. And it’s fun working with somebody else.
What other projects are you both working on?
Rory: I’m trying to finish three books at once. And will be very glad when I’ve done so. I’m also thinking of turning the text of an absolutely ripsnortering Young Adult novel I recently wrote but couldn’t place with publishers (too dark, too aggressive, these guys don’t go to Harrison High) into a fully paid up Adult novel.
Damien: I’ve just completed a book about recent sf, called x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction, to be published shortly, and am hard at work on a new sf novel, Yggdrasil Station.
Damien, asking you as a leading literary figure for Australian SF and critical theory, does SF still have a unique perspective in Australia or are those qualities harder to pinpoint than before?
More than any other genre of fiction, in many respects science fiction transcends national boundaries, even language boundaries–but under the surface, there are surely distinctive tones that set Aussie voices apart. Our fiction shares a kind of relaxed, mocking tone toward authority—what Australians call a `larrikin’ attitude. Even when we’re writing about the end of the world, we remain a bit facetious, a bit ironic, a bit playful. Luckily, it’s an approach that appeals to readers. Transcension, Damien’s last novel, drew on input from Rory and Barbara, and it won this year’s Aurealis award for the best Aussie sf novel of 2002. We hold high hopes for this one, too.
Useful Links:
http://users.bigpond.net.au/rory.barnes
www.thespike.us
