The White Abacus

by Damien Broderick

Overview

Long before William Shakespeare, tales were told of the Dane Ameleth whose noble father was murdered by the uncle who swiftly weds new widow Gerutha. Must Ameleth repay this crime by killing his uncle? The White Abacus dares to reconfigure the best known version of the classic tale, Shakespeare's Hamlet, to create a futuristic revenge drama with an entirely different outcome. Telmah is an inventive genius. Ophelia is no sobbing suicide but rather the impressive Warrior Rose, who shockingly revises the fate of her lover.

In this exotic future history, the galaxy is open to anyone who passes through a hex gate, whether hu (augmented human) or ai (artificial mind). Telmah's close friend is the ai Ratio, newly embodied to the Real. Like all members of his asteroid tribe, Telmah is forbidden to use the hex transport system, since that would doom his rebirth.

Out of this agonizing dilemma comes a feverish pursuit of truth and duty, love and near-madness, in an endlessly startling future where nothing turns out the way you expect.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781473230149
Publisher:	Orion
Publication date:	05/07/2020
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	862 KB

About the Author

Damien Broderick is Australia's dean of science fiction, with a body of extraordinary work reaching back to the early 1960's. Like the late George Turner, he captures the distinctive flavor of his native country while reaching out to American and European readers. 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 has been revised and updated as The Dreaming. This new version appears for the first time at Fictionwise.com. In 1982, his early cyberpunk novel The Judas Mandala coined the term 'virtual reality.' His most recent novels are Godplayers and K-Machines. With David G. Hartwell, he edited Centaurus: The Best of Australian SF for Tor in 1999. Like one of his heroes, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, he is also a master of writing about radical new technologies, and The Spike and The Last Mortal Generation have been Australian popular-science best sellers--both books strongly recommended in Clarke's millennial revision of his famous Profiles of the Future. Schrödinger's Dog was chosen for Gardner Dozois's SF: Year's Best 14.

What People are Saying About This

Roger Zelaney

Damien Broderick is a striking and absolutely unique writer.

Alexander Jablokov

A psychological thriller balanced on the edge where physics and philosophy meet.

Editorial Reviews

Telmah's father, Orwen, has mysteriously died, and Orwen's younger brother, Lord Feng, has married Telmah's widowed mother, Gerutha. Moreover, Telmah suspects his uncle of having murdered his father. Sound familiar? It should, and if it doesn't, consider the anagrammatical possibilities of Telmah's name. This Shakespearean tour de force by Broderick (Striped Holes and The Black Grail) is a tale that challenges and provokes by liberally mixing quantum mechanics, literary patterning and psychological mapping. (The book is dedicated to Samuel R. Delaney, a pioneer in the yoking of science fiction to poststructural thought.) Though this is Telmah's tale, there are actually two narratives operating in Broderick's story. One concerns the Hamlet-inspired shenanigans that shape Telmah's abrupt departure from Earth (where he has been a student) to confront his uncle, who has usurped the Directorship of their homeworld. Another focuses on Telmah's evolving friendship with Ratio, a more-than-android-like being whose destiny is to assist Telmah in the discovery of his space- and time-bending abilities. The two, however, are linked by the story's implicit theorizing of its own possibilities. Broderick's virtuoso handling of his material crisscrosses his own textual universe, establishing links where none might have been seen before. The result is a tumultuous, often challenging, roller-coaster ride of a story that rises and plunges with astrophysical wonders, literary puzzles and psychological insights.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Arriving too late for a full review, Broderick's latest science fiction venture (Striped Holes, 1988, not reviewed, etc.) leaps two thousand years into the future where "hu" (humans) and "ai" (self-willed robots) mingle freely on Earth (and are narrated in the past tense). The hu of asteroid Psyche (no ai need apply), led by Orwen Lord Cima, are barbaric but energy-rich, thanks to their white-holelike Metric Defect (and are narrated in the present tense). When Orwen's son, Telmah, visits Earth, the ai Conclave orders Ratio, a newborn Gamemaster, to befriend him—Psyche's impending power struggle requires careful handling.

A yarn that's too assured of its own cleverness and significance—such as the ho-hum gender-neutral honorifics and the pronouns Broderick invents and invites us to share—but, still, impressive and thoughtful.

Kirkus Reviews