Damien Broderick

Earth Is But a Star: Excursions through Science Fiction to the Far Future edited by Damien Broderick

July 2001, no. 232

From its mix of fiction and criticism to the format of its contents page, this collection is clearly a follow-up to Helen Merrick and Tess Williams’s feminist science fiction anthology, Women of Other Worlds (1999). There are, however, major differences. Women emerged from a unique and unrepeatable event, a meeting of live minds at the twentieth WisCon Feminist SF Convention. It is wildly eclectic, often irreverent, ranging from recipes and e-mail debates on gender to full-blown critical articles on female fan culture, united only by the feminist perspective and the contributor’s presence at WisCon. Its reprints go back no further than 1986. The reader is encouraged to dip. In contrast, Earth is united by its ostensible theme, ‘far futures’, with reprints from as far back as the 1930s, but only ‘proper’ fiction – stories, excerpts from novels – and ‘proper’ critical pieces. The overall tone is sober if not solemn, and the single-minded thematic focus produces a strong similarity to Vegemite. Small dips are quite enough.

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The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy edited by Paul Collins

by Damien Broderick •

October 1998, no. 205

Damien Broderick reviews 'The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy' edited by Paul Collins

Science Fiction (speculative fiction, sf, sci-fi, whatever) is not much more than a century old. H.G. Wells called his pioneering efforts ‘scientific romances’, still a good name, and his wonderfully fecund The Time Machine and War of the Worlds were published as late as 1895 and 1898. So Australia as a Europeanised nation is even younger than this ‘space age’ genre. If you push it back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818, its birth coincides with white settlement. Time enough, you’d think, to grow plenty of Aussie sf.

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'Why do I write?' | A survey compiled by Rosemary Sorensen

by ABR •

April 1990, no. 119

'Why do I write?' | A survey compiled by Rosemary Sorensen

Would it surprise you to know that a number of our well-known writers write to please themselves? Probably not. If there’s no pleasure, or challenge, or stimulus, the outcome would probably not be worth the effort. If this effort is writing, it seems especially unlikely that someone would engage in the activity without enjoying the chance to be their own audience.

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Life Among the Scientists: An anthropological study of an Australian scientific community by Max Charlesworth, Lyndsay Farrall, Terry Stokes and David Turnbull

by Damien Broderick •

April 1990, no. 119

It’s a lovely idea – to go among the scientists in a pith helmet, learn their lingo, suss out what’s really going on behind the myths of cool objectivity. Like any other major human undertaking, science is a matter of interests, conscious or covert, set by policy and ideology alike. Such factors are all too easily accepted as inevitable and innocent; think of the male-dominated, reductive cast of traditional laboratory practice.

During the last decade, a kind of anthropology of urban subcultures has arisen, abandoning the highly romanticised jungles of the Third World to colonise the offices and labs of our own. Exchanges between participants are explicitly treated not as an ethnographic resource to be taken at face value, but as a topic for sceptical investigation.

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