My reaction to reading this novel in 1998. Spoilers follow.

This novel was a pleasure to read.

I originally read it because I saw a review comparing it to Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Broderick, in his afterword, acknowledges an “immense debt” to Bester; however, the resemblance is not as strong as I hoped. Broderick, like Charles Sheffield in his Bester inspired The Mind Pool, seems to associate aristocratic societies with Bester though I can’t recall either Bester’s The Demolished Man or The Stars My Destination featuring such a society. However, Broderick, even if he lacks the flair of Bester’s read aloud language (his prose is denser and definitely not as witty), captures the baroqueness of Bester’s worlds. I liked the cyborg chicken and cyborg dog spaceship pilots, the group of humans nostalgic for the “lost satisfactions of rote labor”, the asteroid Genetics with their feathers and tiger stripes (the latter perhaps a reference to Gully Foyle in The Stars My Destination). There seems to also be a hint of the Freudian motives Bester was so fond of in Telmah’s (and it took me almost 200 pages to discover that was Hamlet backwards) seemingly incestuous attraction for his mother.

Broderick also freely admits to rifling many sf ideas from others. Ratio, his robot, is inspired by C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” (I don’t see much of a final similarity). The marvelous space fountain that gets Rato and Telmah off Earth is from Dr. Robert Forward’s non-fiction Future Magic. Broderick’s “nonexclusive gender particles” are original but similar to some creations of fellow Australian Greg Egan. Lord Brass seems to be reminiscent of the obscene Baron Harkonnen of Frank Herbert’s Dune. The background of the story with personalized virtual realities everywhere (and I really liked everyone having personalized musical accompaniment), the vast Gestell (a sort of computer overmind – benevolent – you can access for knowledge), the asteroids heroically working for centuries to bring the metric defect to Earth only to be left as a useless, backwater, overcompensating society I liked.

The basic plot is explicitly taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The secret (and this is another similarity to Bester since he used Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo as the plot template for The Stars My Destination) of using classic literary plots in sf is not following them too closely and adopting when necessary. Broderick does a good job in using the plot of the most famous of all Jacobean revenge dramas. He does the complete setup with murder (though that turns out to not be what it seems play), dead father’s call for vengeance, “incestuous” marriage, and seeming insanity. He does this with clever rationalizations.

The asteroid societies believe in reincarnation and try to preserve the souls in soulbanks. It is at a soulbank (rather than Hamlet’s Elsinore) that Telmah’s father possesses him and gives him poltergeist powers (later this seems to be explained as a peculiar trait of Telmah’s family to use the “metric defect”) – Telmah, unlike Hamlet, is fully committed to vengeance later on. Telmah stages a Mousetrap-like play. However, Broderick deviates significantly from Hamlet where his Ophelia – stand-in, the Warrior Rose (definitely not meek and insane), murders Feng, the Claudius figure. The plot goes off to detail the union of Telmah and the Warrior Rose and the timehopping, space altering abilities of their offspring. Psyche’s politics are dealt with too.

Broderick goes off on some interesting philosophical tangents that don’t integrate that well with the plot of his self-described “neo pulp ficto-critical novel”. One section (which is partly presented in typography reminiscent of the telepaths' conversation in Bester The Demolished Man) seems to be based on the literary theories of Harold Bloom. Essentially, it’s a description of the stages of man’s life (Shakespeare gave us a different version in As You Like It) and the life of a civilization. I suppose it’s relevance to the novel is the course of Telmah’s life. Another, more interesting, section was the philosophy of the fictional (I think) Daimon Keith. He talks about the ingrained human need for narrative (and that certain narratives, called archetypes, may have been selected in the human brain structure via evolution) and that science, myth, and religion are attempts to impose a narrative on the universe. I don’t think this novel works as an integrated structure, but it was an entertaining read, a fun reworking of a classic drama (I liked this version better but then I don’t think Hamlet works), and sometimes philosophically thoughtful. This is my first Broderick, and I’d be interested in reading more. ( )

This book basically is a recreation of Shakespeare's Hamlet in space in the backward asteroid belt. Intriguing idea mostly good-written with an interesting background of humans AI's and genetically modified creatures but sometimes a bit plain, boring and aimless... ( )

I didn't find this book engaging. ( )