Vale Damien Broderick, Australian SF writer, thinker and futurist

It seems not a day goes past without the news of yet another passing of an important writer, this time Damien Broderick, who has died just short of his eighty-first birthday. He greeted me not long ago, 2016, in his kitchen in San Antonio, Texas, where I was interviewing him for my last book A Letter to Layla: Travels to our Deep Past and Near Future. Read the chapter in my book describing our conversation. He was brilliant and funny and eccentric. He was credited by the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction for first using the term “Virtual reality” in his 1982 novel The Judas Mandala.

His 1999 book, the Last Mortal Generation, told of the efforts being made towards immortality in laboratories at that time and speculated on what kind of tomorrow we are in for. His description of AI was prescient. Here’s the conversation we had for my program Books and Writing, on ABC Radio National in 1999.

Ramona Koval: As a writer of fiction as well as a cultural cogitator how do you think about a world in which we are immortal?

Damien Broderick: It's very different if you're thinking as a fiction writer, compared to the way that you'd proceed as a commentator on real science and real technology. They interpenetrate, of course, and the fact that I've been reading science fiction for thirty-five or more years means that I probably have a somewhat more louche approach to these remarkable possibilities than many people do. In science fiction, what you're trying to do is tell an interesting story or, in my case, create some sort of ornate postmodern structure as well. In The Last Mortal Generation or The Spike which came before it, what I'm trying to do is to confront the reality of exponential change, which I really do think is the description of the world that we are in - and it's extraordinary.

Ramona Koval: So what kind of a world do you imagine, in the part of your brain that is the science fiction writer, when you are confronted with what you know the reality of what is going on in peoples laboratories and minds and various other places that they're working? How do you image a world where people don't die, what would it be like? How would the human being be?

Damien Broderick: I don't do it systematically. To some extent I suppose I do, but basically I let it percolate through my mind and body, then I tell a story by living in the universe that I've invented. Quite often it's an adaptation of some structure I've got from somewhere else. My most recent novel The White Abacus is a series of tropes and variations on Hamlet and other Shakespearean plays and the language used in those plays - which is rich and humorous and intellectually demanding and all sorts of fun. What I'm trying to do is say: `If Shakespeare were alive now and imagining what it was like in a thousand years time, what sort of story would he make out of the found materials that he used when he invented Hamlet?' Of course I don't think that I am anywhere near as good as good old Will, but ...

Ramona Koval: But answer the question.

Damien Broderick:...what happens is that you look at the structures of the play, you see what you think are some interesting tensions, some interesting moral issues, some interesting characters. Then you start to put a futuristic or science fiction spin on it. What I did was to have a robot or an "AI" (sort of pronounced "I ") in my future world, called "Ratio" rather than Horatio, so that it contains the idea of reason, and I have him as a sort of narratorial voice that continually observes these strange passionate uncontrollable driven creatures who are humans. He's - se, in fact, "say" or "see", I'm not sure how to pronounce it, but I've invented a series of new pronouns which are non-gender specific. "Se" thinks: `These are very strange creatures, these humans', and I suppose in some ways that always has to be the stance of the science fiction writer too.

Ramona Koval:Well let's take one thing at a time, cause that's actually an answer to all my questions at once. Let's try and answer this one question. How will we be as human beings if we don't die? What kinds of people will we be? What kinds of things are cancelled out?

Damien Broderick:The worst answer is that we will be the same, only forever. We will go and play bingo for a thousand years and come home and have TV dinners and eventually get so bored that we throw ourselves under a jet-bus. In fact you won't be able to throw yourself under a bus in a world of immortals because they will be so fail-safed that it will be difficult to off yourself. One would hope that people will actually go through a series of changes. As long as we are not physically failing, if we retain what amounts to the vigor of youth, we also have the opportunity to learn lots of things and experience lots of things. We will get wise. Old people in their seventies are partly so nice, when they're not crabby and horrible, because their bodies are actually shutting down and the hormones aren't surging through them. On the other hand, they've been through a lot, they know a lot, they can tell you calm stories about how often this sort of thing has happened and they've seen it all before. Now if in fact that process occurs to people who are physically vigorous we'll have an extraordinary situation that is unlike anything except perhaps people like Bertrand Russell.

Ramona Koval: Who didn't lose his passion at all really?

Damien Broderick: Exactly, that's right. All he lost was some of the physical concomitants of youth. Or Mother Teresa or whatever Saint you care to pick.

Ramona Koval: This is an optimistic of view though. Haven't there been crabby terrible dreadful old people who haven't learnt a thing.

Damien Broderick: All of them described by Kingsley Amis in various books, yes of course, and one of the reasons they get like that is due to the horrifying experience of getting older. Which is something that I am beginning to find in my own body and my own mind. I'm becoming stupider, I can feel it happening to me. I can compensate for it, luckily, these days by using a computer, which is much better than a typewriter ever was, because you can see the mistake in front of you and go back and seamlessly correct it.

Ramona Koval: Or you can ask the computer to.

Damien Broderick: That too. Yes.

Ramona Koval: How do you mean you are becoming stupid? Are you forgetting things?

Damien Broderick: Yes, I'm forgetting things. I'm not as capable of locking big structures together in my mind, or perhaps in my unconscious, so that they just pop up at the right time. On the other hand it might be that I've trained myself - I've found this with some other writers - to think more slowly, so that your discourse becomes more measured, or in fact more gappy. You're sitting there in front of the writing machine, actually producing words at about a quarter the rate of a person sitting here in front of a microphone, and there are these white-out moments when nothing happens and you're searching, waiting for the right word to jump up. That's also what happens as people's minds go, and with any luck we will have the equivalent of the computer to help us along, it might even be a computer system, a series of chips we implant into ourselves that beef up our grey matter.

Ramona Koval: When did you start thinking about immortality, was it when you hit forty or did you think about it as a young man?

Damien Broderick: People often ask me if this is some sort of mid-life crisis - no, that's well behind me. I probably started thinking about this when I was twelve. It just seemed to me a terrible shame that people got old and worn out. In my twenties and thirties I used to run around arguing that it would be a good thing if we solved aging on a technological basis, and people looked at me sideways. They still do of course, but it is becoming more and more plausible. I would never have imagined back in the sixties that it was actually likely to occur in my lifetime, but as with the cloning process, as with a number of other wonderful and scary technological innovations, here they are and we're in a position to actually shape the use of them, shape their development, put money into them rather than other things.

Ramona Koval: You've said that you can't think of anything to be said in favour of death. That at the moment we're stuck with death's pain loss and grief and that we have to make as decent a fist of it as we can. What will writers write about in a world where the pain of death and final separation isn't there or as sharp as it is now?

Damien Broderick: It's up to them to find out. That would be the challenge of art in a different world. One of the advantages of living in a world where change is always occurring is that we always have new things to talk about and new ways of doing art. Maybe we will find ways of linking our minds together directly so experiences can be shared in something that makes virtual reality look like a cartoon (which is what it looks like now). There is no point really in speculating. When I write fiction I tell a little story that gives us some sort of notion of how the people of the future might experience their world, and the story I tell in some sense mimics the story they might tell. Of course science fiction is a story that's told for us by people now, and however futuristic or remote or strange or alienated it might appear to be to readers of conventional fiction, it is after all time-bound. When you look back at the science fiction written in the nineteen fifties you can tell instantly that's when it was from.

Ramona Koval: Because it's got encoded in it all the nineteen fifties kinds of concerns?

Damien Broderick: Yes.

Ramona Koval: But death has been really important, the pain of death and loss and fear of death, it's a really important theme, isn't it, in human literature.

Damien Broderick: It's THE theme. It may be the theme of civilization - it may be that the consciousness of death, the consciousness of the inevitability of decay and death, is what drives us into the kinds of cultural structures we've developed. In some ways the removal of death as an urgency is going to completely alter the fundamental architecture of culture and art.

Ramona Koval: What's it going to do for Christianity?

Damien Broderick: It'll find a way around it, it has in the past, with all sorts of things.

Ramona Koval: But someone who died for everyone's sins, I mean Jesus is not going to be the main icon anymore.

Damien Broderick: Jesus, of course, is the first immortal. Jesus is the one who came back from the dead in a purified, transformed, preternatural body. Now it might be that this will be seen as an impious desire on our part, that we should wish to emulate Jesus without having been through the transformation of death.

Ramona Koval: Without the bother of being the Son of God.

Damien Broderick: Yes, quite. I suspect that some of the other religions with reincarnation built into their centre are going to have a little bit more trouble, because if you don't go, you can't come back. But then I keep remembering that old song, "Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die" - if people were that eager to go into this transformed blissful state they would be happy to embrace death, but you see people kicking and shrieking against it. Not everybody of course. My mother died some years ago of cancer and it was terribly painful for her, but in her Catholic belief, and surrounded by priests and all manner of iconography, she managed this transition fairly peacefully (to my mind deludedly) but all power to her that she managed to do it without too much grief. In some ways probably it helped us that she was able to do that. Again these are issues that are to be confronted by the people who go through it. We may BE those people.

Ramona Koval: I don't know about that - I bet we won't be.

Damien Broderick: We'll fall off the twig too soon, damn it.

Ramona Koval: You've also speculated that the population will worsen and the price of immortality will be elective or imposed sterilization, so what literary speculations will come out of this world without children.

Damien Broderick: No children, yes I've only read a few novels that deal with this idea and it's rarely connected to immortality.

Ramona Koval: Your science fiction has been at the literary end of things your last book has a sub theme of an intergalactic several Shakespeare plays running through it, but you also invent a world where artificial intelligence kind of morphs with biological bodies and you've got a meeting of an emotionally primitive human beings with peace loving and thoughtful artificial intelligence's and you've got kind of a road movie to as a friendship is happening there. I mean there's a prodigious amount of ideas in this book The White Abacus. Tell me how you go about creating a world like this, do you start with what's the go in laboratories and the minds of people at the edge of physics and energy and psychology and every thing, and do you sort of take it to the next level or three, where do you begin?

Damien Broderick: Yes, but you could have asked me five other questions and I would have agreed that that was also where I started. Where I really start is with what I call the "science fiction mega-text" which is the body of extant work which exists out there, which has been building for a hundred years, tens of thousands of novels and short stories, that have worked up commonplaces, tropes, enabling principles and devices, ways of telling stories, shorthand jargon, the sort of thing that you get a very debased version of in Star Trek, "transporter beams" and "warp speed" or whatever it is. That sort of shorthand is the only way you can possibly talk about the future because that's the way we talk about the present. We say, "hop in the car and I'll drive you to the mall".. You don't say, "we are about to open the door and get into this internally combusted device--".

Ramona Koval: A transporter vehicle.

Damien Broderick: Exactly. "--and we will go to places where food is vended by a centralized system of distribution." So of course people in the future, as we describe them in science fiction, are going to use shorthand. Every writer has to invent his or her own particular little snazzy version of the shorthand - and of course there's points to be had if you can think up some terrific new gadget - but essentially you create a lived-in world by just having people do this strange stuff using a curious kind of terminology that points to things that don't exist outside the rest of science fiction.

On the day I was born, the ai Conclave deputized me to a hu committee on matters of general concern. My meeting was fixed for four hours after my birth, so I spent that time hexing to the most beautiful places in the Solar. The spring blooms of the Tuileries were fragrant in their profusion, lovely as the Monet murals in the Orangerie. It was warm morning when I visited the Grand Canyon, and chilly morning as I stood some minutes later in the green, torrent-foaming Valles Marineris on Mars, and later still watched the whole ochre and khaki world, it seemed, from T'ian-an-men Piazza at the caldera peak of Olympus Mons, kilometers above the vast planetary bulge of Tharsis Planitia. From Pluto's observatory blister the sun was a poignant star, a delicious contrast to its fireball beyond the crater's lip high above Mercury's icy south polar station. I lingered in the hu Poetry Preserve at Stratford-upon-Avon: quaint, meditative, ancient beyond belief, long repaired after its centuries of industrial ruination. At the end of my four hours (Saturn's braided rings, burning Venus all a-tremble from the festung in Beta Regio, Father Jove turning in majesty just a million kilometers overhead, as I watched from Ganymede) I hexed to Melbourne for my committee meeting. Most ai spend the whole of their first day in a feverish spin about the galaxy, blipping through hex gates as fast as they can manage it, blazing with ten thousand impressions. My own wanderday had been truncated for reasons I barely understood at that time, but I held no grudge. I was dizzy with love, with the gladness of Awakening. We love you, love you, they had told me, opening my eyes, my sensors, my mind, my links. Welcome to the Real, young ai. Your family greet you. Radiance and joy!'
An extract from The White Abacus, published New York: AvonEos, 1997.

Ramona Koval: So okay, the word "hexing"- you've got people blipping through "hex gates". Where does "hexing" come from?

Damien Broderick: I've forgotten. I think it's Holophrastic Exchange, the teleportation device in this world. It has a kind of field that flimmers into existence. It looks like hexagons, but I liked it because "hex" sounds like magic. It conveys the idea of magic transportation and it's a nice short word. We know that if you invent something everybody uses all the time, it's going to have a short name and "hexing" sounds pretty good.

Ramona Koval: What about the "wanderday" that's not a birthday that's a "wanderday"?

Damien Broderick: I suppose that should have been "Wandertag" or however one would say it in German. I just like it because in our world we have a wanderjahr, a wanderyear when we're adolescents and do the whole of Europe with a backpack. For these robot creatures who live so fast, who can go places so very rapidly, they have a wanderday.

Ramona Koval: And that's their first day, their awakening?

Damien Broderick: Yes.

Ramona Koval: So they go all over the universe?

Damien Broderick: In fact most of them go all over the Galaxy because the Galaxy is connected by these "Hex Gates". Ratio decides just to restrict himself to the Solar System so he goes to those places described . That's followed through in later chapters by a kind of game, in which two teams (led by Ratio and Telmah, the Hamlet figure) compete to find a kind of emblematic object. They go to all the different planets of the Solar System - and we follow as the team actually take themselves one by one to the different worlds. What I've tried to create there is a really vivid sense of the incredible diversity of worlds out there in our Solar System.

Ramona Koval: You spoke before about language or settings I suppose or when we talked about how you create worlds, filching them from pre imagined worlds of earlier writers. That means that you have to trust that your readers are really up to speed.

Damien Broderick: It's a problem, yes.

Ramona Koval: Yes it is a problem, because, otherwise it's like reading a complicated text that you know is hard work, it's hard work for the reader, who comes afresh to it.

Damien Broderick: Yes - I speak of it as an apprenticeship process and in fact most science fiction enthusiasts have started reading sf at the age of twelve. I can't imagine what it's like to be inducted into this whole mega-text now because when I was a kid there was no television - but nevertheless, I agree with you. If you want to read sonnets you have to read a lot of sonnets to understand how it works. Historical novels set in the nineteenth century, or the seventeenth century, if they're well done, are replete with strange jargon, and one of the pleasures of the process is to struggle on until you eventually assimilate the stuff and then suddenly it crystallizes and you're there - you're no longer being told something, you are actually dwelling in this virtual space.

Ramona Koval: In The White Abacus you've got all sorts of references to things like Tristan and his Isolde, or the Scottish word for castles, or something about Shakespeare - you've got reference to those in the text but you haven't got references to some of the words that you've made up.

Damien Broderick: That's right. What I gesture at in this book is the notion that people in this future world, by and large, have access to... I use the word "aks" - which looks like a sort of typo for ask and in some ways it is - but "aks" means to access the system, the information system. All these people are imagined as having a connection to the "Gestell" which is kind of a vast collective artificial intelligence system, into which also most of the humans in this world are connected, probably by chips in their brains - we never actually find out about that. Most of the universe is described as being a kind of anarchistic collective of humans and ai, but my cast are a small group who've taken themselves off and who resile from that way of living. Arguably the only way you can tell such a story is by finding a small group who live something like the way we live now and then interfacing them with this extraordinary and almost unspeakable reality.

Ramona Koval: You said just before that there could be artificial intelligences or chips. You weren't quite sure of how something was done, but in science fiction, do you need to explain the world by the laws of nature as we know them now or expect them to be? Why can't science fiction be exactly that - fictional in all aspects? There is a tendency for science fiction to become really hung up on knowing what is possible knowing what the thoughts are and extending them but not making up something that's completely inexplicable.

Damien Broderick: There's a traditional division in fanciful writing between fantasy and science fiction. Fantasy is a world in which anything can happen. But science fiction really is special because it does have a respect for the accumulated knowledge of human kind. All sorts of rules get broken. Relativity is thrown out the window and immediately you have faster than light space ships. In a sense nobody cares that if you had real faster than light space ships they would be moving backwards in time and that would completely screw up any story that you wanted to tell.

Ramona Koval: Because you want to tell about the future?

Damien Broderick: Well you want to tell about a narrative in which people progress at the same rate that we do, you don't want them popping back into the week before - unless, of course, that's the sort of story you're telling. We know from relativity theory that that's probably an implication of moving faster than light, at least under most circumstances. In that sense, science fiction has no respect for genuine science. While it seems very unlikely science will ever allow those sorts of changes to occur, if you want to tell a story you stick in a faster than light space ship so you can get somewhere interesting. If you want to tell a time travel story you have to throw away certain restrictions on causality that you wouldn't ordinarily experience - well, you need to retain other constraints, since you don't allow anything at all to happen. In a sense, it's a big shell game. Those rules have been established in the mega-text and people gradually learn what they are. Every now and then somebody comes along who blows a hole in it and thinks up a whole new way of doing things, and there's a big ripple of excitement, and other people go "Sniff, sniff, you can't do that, it's quite wrong". So it does keep renewing itself.

Ramona Koval: Do you get lots of emails from scientists working in these areas who are kind of tickled at the kinds of things you are writing?

Damien Broderick: Occasionally, yes. I'd more likely get in touch with them. In the acknowledgements of The White Abacus I actually thank several people in America who've provided me with absolutely invaluable information. One was a planetary scientist who came from Australia originally and he just provided me with scads of fabulous information and did number crunching for me to find out when asteroids would be in the right spot.

Ramona Koval: That's a lot of work to do for a novel isn't it?

Damien Broderick: Well he had the software there. If you mean it's a lot of work for me, no, not really.

Ramona Koval: Do you ever think where is it going to go? Or hang on a minute that number crunching's wrong - that asteroid belt is not going to be within cooeee of Earth at that particular time?

Damien Broderick: Yes they do it all the time.

Ramona Koval: Do they?

Damien Broderick: Yes there's a famous novel by Larry Niven called Ringworld which imagines an entire constructed world which is a sort of huge ring floating around its Sun with a radius the equivalent of the Earth from the Sun, and this thing is a thousand miles across (or something) and has eight million times the surface area of the Earth (or whatever) and all sorts of people living on it and so on. But it turned out that the thing was completely unstable. In terms of the dynamics of a Solar System it would quickly fall into its own Sun, going off center. People wrote in and got furious so Niven had to think up a whole series of solutions to this and write a sequel in which he made that the basis.

Ramona Koval: Did he happen to have a physics degree in his back pocket?

Damien Broderick: Yes all these people. I don't but many people do.

Ramona Koval: You've got other kinds of degrees though. A postmodern thinker you are.

Damien Broderick: Yes that's right

Ramona Koval: Does that make it easier?

Damien Broderick: Master of all knowledge. You realise that it's all so transitional that it doesn't really matter that much.

Ramona Koval: You're aiming for people to be adapted to change aren't you?

Damien Broderick: Yes.

Ramona Koval: You're really interested in change, you're interested in the pace of things?

Damien Broderick: And the experience of change. Yes.

Ramona Koval: Not faster than light, but faster than life.

Damien Broderick: On the other hand we can't live like that. We do need certainties, we need something to hang on to, and I suppose in some ways that's what art does for us - it anchors us in the experience of life however fanciful its presentation. Some people have complained that in The White Abacus (which is full of music) most of the music is nineteenth or twentieth century music.

Ramona Koval: You mean you didn't put any twenty-fourth century music in?

Damien Broderick: Only a bit. Only a bit, I named it of course. Yes, this is the point - we live in a world drenched with music, and in order to convey anything of that quality of living in such a world, one has to refer to the actual music that we've got - so then you have to find a justification for people in the thirtieth century to be listening to it. So I actually went beyond the point of justifying it - I made it parodic to some extent. So I have these people all considering that the finest music of the twentieth century is Miklos Rosza (the guy who wrote all the movie music for El Cid and Ben Hur and stuff like that), so, you know, this is pretty unlikely but it also fits in with the telling of the novel (which is a great big space opera drama kind of thing) so you can imagine that all this lurid bombastic richly coloured music is playing in the background.

Damien Broderick's book, The Last Mortal Generation, is published by New Holland Press.