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    Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel
    Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel
    Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel
    Ebook184 pages3 hours

    Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel

    By Damien Broderick and Rory Barnes

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    In the year 4004 AD, the entire universe of habitable worlds has been filled with human beings, thanks to an ancient teleport network and unlimited growth. Humans live on more than a hundred quadrillion terraformed planets, all woven into a bureaucratic and restrictive Empire. VALENCIES tracks a frustrated group of libertarian anarchists on the marginal planet Victoria. Kael, son of three gay doctors, and Theri, daughter of a man and woman bound by maniacal doctrinal tenets, are a young couple in a cosmos of complacent immortals. Ben and Anla the clone rage and passionately make up in a cycle of dominance and submission as old as history or myth. And slipping like a mad trickster between the four is Catsize, former commander, terrible poet crazed by two millennia of thwarted revolutions, hilarious prankster, an instigator of mischief and healer of souls. VALENCIES tells with pathos and humor a richly detailed portrait of the struggle against an Empire that's prepared to obliterate an entire world. Brian W. Aldiss said about this book: "One of the most playful SF novels of recent years."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWildside Press
    Release dateMar 20, 2013
    ISBN9781479409952
    Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel
    Author

    Damien Broderick

    Damien Broderick is Australia’s dean of science fiction, with a body of extraordinary work reaching back to the early 1960s. The White Abacus won two Year’s Best awards. His stories and novels, like those of his younger peer Greg Egan, are drenched with bleeding-edge ideas. Distinctively, he blends ideas and poetry like nobody since Roger Zelazny, and a wild, silly humor is always ready to bubble out, as in the cosmic comedy Striped Holes. His award-winning novel The Dreaming Dragons is featured in David Pringle’s SF: The 100 Best Novels, and was chosen as year’s best by Kingsley Amis. It was revised and updated as The Dreaming. In 1982 Broderick’s early cyberpunk novel The Judas Mandala coined the term virtual reality. His recent novels include the diptych Godplayers and K-Machines, Post Mortal Syndrome (with his wife, Barbara Lamar), and several collaborations with Rory Barnes: I’m Dying Here, Human’s Burden, and The Valley of the God of Our Choice, Inc. Like one of his heroes, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Broderick is a master of writing about radical new technologies, and The Spike and The Last Mortal Generation have been Australian popular-science bestsellers. His long novella, “Quicken,” is the second half of the novel Beyond the Doors of Death, cowritten with Grand Master Robert Silverberg (an expansion of Silverberg’s “Born with the Dead”), and is the closing story in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection. In 2005 Broderick received the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

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