Cirrus@Austlit

Born in Melbourne in 1944, Damien Broderick attended Monash University where he co-edited the student newspaper Lot's Wife. He holds a PhD from Deakin University in the comparative semiotics of science and literature, with particular attention to science fiction. He had a brief career in journalism before becoming a full-time writer, mainly of science fiction. Broderick's strong Catholic upbringing and his hunger for SF were the two major influences in his early life that propelled him into a career as a fiction writer. He has become one of the leading writers of Australian SF, which can stand for science fiction or Broderick's preferred term, speculative fiction. His work has been widely anthologised in Australian and overseas publications.

Among Broderick's many published works are the novels Sorcerer's World (1970), The Dreaming Dragons (1980), The Judas Mandala (1982), Transmitters (1984), The Dark Between the Stars (1991) and The Book of Revelation (1999). His novels depend on complex plots involving several forms of time travel and parallel or altered realities. The Dreaming Dragons was runner-up in the worldwide John W Campbell Memorial Prize for science fiction. The White Abacus (1997) is a futuristic version of Shakespeare's Hamlet. He has collaborated with Rory Barnes, a colleague from Monash student days, on several publications including Valencies (1983) and Zones (1997).

His non-fiction includes The Architecture of Babel (1994), which gives his view of post-structuralist literary and cultural theory, finding it to be in tension with the philosophy of scientific realism. A stronger critique of this theory can be found in Theory and Its Discontents (1997). He has also written The Spike : Accelerating into the Unimaginable Future (1997), a closely argued exposition about how our lives are being changed by rapidly advancing technologies and The Last Mortal Generation (1999).

Broderick, who has been awarded many fellowships and writing grants has been described as 'the enfant terrible' of Australian SF, taking the genre to the boundaries of its imaginative potential.

Broderick has lived in San Antonio, Texas.