Credit: Nick Cubbin

Newsflash! Winner - 2006 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel

K-Machines is a sequel to Godplayers (2005), with which it forms a complete diptych. They develop an appealing vision of how a high-technology future might turn out, if everything goes as well as we can hope. At the same time, Broderick toys with the popular idea that our universe may be part of a greater reality; perhaps all we see is a computation on an underlying substrate, or a simulation controlled from without. The tone is playful and knowing, marked by allusions to other literary authors (Lewis Carroll, W.B. Yeats, and others) and the newer tradition of science fiction (Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny).

Godplayers introduces August Seebeck, who has grown to adulthood in a slightly skewed version of modern Australia.

Weird incidents plunge him into another reality - a whole series of realities that provide the grand battlefield for his godlike brothers and sisters to wage war against the inimical K-Machines.

August soon falls in love with the comely Lune. Between bouts of lusty sex, he tries to figure out what is really going on.

In K-Machines, August keeps trying to sort it out, frustrated by the unwillingness of his family to give him honest answers - or is it their own ignorance of how they are more pawns than players? Separate chapters tell the story of intellectual James Davenport, which take us into the next decades of our future. These strands tie together in an astonishingly inventive conclusion.