Godplayers | ||||||||
Damien Broderick | ||||||||
Thunder's Mouth Press, 328 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Rich Horton
The main action of the novel follows a young man from Australia named August Seebeck. His parents disappeared, presumed dead,
when he was a boy, and he was raised by relatives, in particular his Aunt Miriam and later his Great-Aunt Tansy. He comes home
to Tansy's house after herding cattle in the outback, to find that she claims dead bodies have been showing up in her
bathtub. She's a bit dotty, and works as a psychic, so he tends to discount this, and goes to wash up.
And naturally a dead body shows up soon after, carried through the mirror by two women, one of whom, Lune, is sufficiently
beautiful that August is drastically smitten despite the unfortunate circumstances of their meeting. Especially when he
notices that she has the same curious metallic design in her foot that he has. But Lune and her companion inform him that they
will have to wipe his memory, and out comes the "green ray"...
Mysteriously, the memory wipe doesn't stick. Quickly August is involved in some very strange doings indeed. He tries to
follow the mysterious women through the mirror, and in very rapid order indeed he is jumping from universe to universe. It
soon comes clear that August is part of a family he has not suspected (the other members have significant names like
Maybelline, and Juni, and Marchmain... see the pattern?), and that the family is engaged in something called the Contest
of Worlds.
And so the novel goes, recomplicating again and again, as August desperately tries to make sense of things, to find his Aunt
Tansy, and to learn the secret behind his new family and his parents'
disappearance. He's also trying to forge a relationship with the beautiful Lune (one that develops perhaps just a bit
implausibly quickly). In the process we visit numerous parallel worlds, and several different "levels" of the
universe -- mostly based on real (if perhaps not precisely mainstream) physical theories. It's all great fun, very
fast moving, clever stuff.
The afterword mentions as influences Fritz Leiber and Roger Zelazny. "Destiny Times Three" is the Leiber story
Broderick mentions, while the obvious Zelazny parallel is Amber.
And indeed the novel recalls those writers a bit, as well as perhaps Charles Stross' new series that has also been
compared to Amber, The Merchant Princes. But Broderick's work is not simply hommage,
nor is it derivative -- it is original SF that happily nods to its precursors. And it is, put simply, purely fun, and at
the same time intriguing speculative SF.
Rich Horton is an eclectic reader in and out of the SF and fantasy genres. He's been reading SF since before the Golden Age (that is, since before he was 13). Born in Naperville, IL, he lives and works (as a Software Engineer for the proverbial Major Aerospace Company) in St. Louis area and is a regular contributor to Tangent. Stop by his website at http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton. |
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