Damien Broderick

Damien Francis Broderick (22 April 1944 – 19 April 2025) was an Australian science fiction and popular science writer and editor of some 74 books. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credits him with the first usage of the term virtual reality in science fiction, in his 1982 novel The Judas Mandala.

Broderick held a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from Deakin University, Australia, with a dissertation (Frozen Music) comparing the semiotics of scientific, literary, and science fictional textuality. He was for several years a Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.

He was the founding science fiction editor of the Australian popular science magazine Cosmos from mid-2005 to December 2010.

Broderick lived in San Antonio, Texas, with his wife, tax attorney Barbara Lamar, before they moved to Portugal in 2022. He died in Castelo Branco on 19 April 2025, at the age of 80.

Five of Broderick's books have won Ditmar Awards (including the non-SF Transmitters, which was given a special award); the first, The Dreaming Dragons, was runner-up for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. He has also won the Aurealis award four times. In November 2003, Broderick was awarded a grant for 2004–05 by the Australia Council to write fiction exploring technological singularity. In 2005 he received the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. In 2010, he tied for second place in the juried Theodore Sturgeon Award for best sf short story of 2009, and at the World Science Fiction Convention received the A. Bertram Chandler Memorial Award for 2010.

Broderick's best-known works as a futurist and science writer are The Spike (1997; revised 2001), a nonfiction book exploring the future of technology, and in particular the concept of the technological singularity; The Last Mortal Generation (1999) on the prospect of radically extended youthful longevity; and Outside the Gates of Science, on the scientific evidence for some anomalous or paranormal phenomena (2007). A revised and updated edition of The Spike was published in 2001 as The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies.

His critical studies, x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction (2004), Ferocious Minds: Polymathy and the New Enlightenment (2005), and Unleashing the Strange (2009) were released by a small US press, Wildside. Several of his books feature cover art by Swedish transhumanist Anders Sandberg, including Earth is but a Star (2001), Broderick's anthology of science fiction stories, and thematically related critical discussions, concerned with the far future. In 2012, with Paul Di Filippo, he published Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985–2010, which was short-listed for a 2013 Locus Award.

His most recent novels were the diptych Godplayers (2005) (selected in the annual Recommended Reading List from Locus), and K-Machines (2006) (winner of the 2007 Aurealis Award for year's best SF novel), and, with Rory Barnes, a comic noir crime novel, I'm Dying Here: A Comedy of Bad Manners (2009), first released in very limited numbers as I Suppose a Root's Out of the Question? (2007). With his wife, Barbara Lamar, he wrote the near-future sf thriller Post Mortal Syndrome, serialised online by Cosmos magazine (2007). He edited a book of original essays on the far future, Year Million (2008), which was favorably reviewed by Nature, the Wall Street Journal, etc. In 2010 Climbing Mount Implausible, a collection of mostly early stories, interspersed with memoir commentary, appeared from Borgo/Wildside Books, as did (in 2011) Embarrass My Dog, a collection of mostly early articles on sex, religion, and politics, framed by commentary recalling life in the 1960s and 1970s.