n an Earth similar enough to our own for minor differences to stick out like sore thumbs, third-year med-school student August Seebeck returns to his Great-Aunt Tansy's house in Australia after a few months of cattle and sheep tending in the outback only to be informed by the old lady that the hot shower he's been dreaming of during the day's long and dusty motorcycle ride will not be possible due to a peculiar plumbing problem: "Every Saturday night, recently, there's been a corpse in that bathroom."
August decides to humor the dear old thing by arming himself with a cricket bat and staking out the bathroom. But no sooner has he ensconced himself behind the shower curtain than the bathroom window opens and two women carry a man's corpse through. When he reveals himself and his trusty weapon, one woman flees while the other, Lune, mistaking him for someone called Ember, hesitates long enough for him to slam the window shut, trapping her. A fight ensues wherein he finds that she has a strange strip of silvery metal inscribed with runic characters set into the instep of her foot—an anatomical anomaly he happens to share. Then the woman who ran off, Maybelline, returns with some kind of blue ray gun that vaporizes the window, and a short man with a meerschaum pipe steps through the mirror above the sink and things start to get really weird.
Turns out that the corpse is a machine—something called a K-machine, to be precise. And Maybelline is a Seebeck herself, though Lune, with whom August promptly falls head over heels in love, is no relation. Determined to find her after she disappears from the bathroom, he uses the metal strip on his foot to pass through the looking glass and into a series of alternate or congruent Earths that resemble fantasy landscapes or futuristic science-fiction scenarios. There he encounters more Seebecks, as well as K-machines intent on killing all Seebecks, himself especially. Some of the Seebecks don't exactly welcome him with open arms, either.
Gradually, August learns about the Contest of Worlds, a deadly conflict between the K-machines and the Seebeck clan and their allies (such as Lune, a member of something called the Ensemble), who, though resembling humans, are actually "Vorpal homunculi," artifacts "on the deep algorithmic substrate of the Contest." The Contest is apparently organized, or will be organized, by all-but-omnipotent beings that are about to come into existence following the collapse of a pocket universe resulting in the Omega Point postulated by mathematician Frank J. Tipler. In the eternal godlike computational state that will ensue, death and entropy will be conquered, the dead resurrected and immortality everyone's (re)birthright. Unless the K-machines interfere. And it's up to August, who is a kind of upgrade to the Contest software, able to manipulate unified force particles called Xons, to stop them.
At least, I think that's what's going on ...
Grand allusions
The resemblance of the above to Roger Zelazny's Amber series is plain, and Broderick acknowledges his influence, along with that of Fritz Leiber, in an afterword. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. References abound to the works of Neil Gaiman, Lewis Carroll, Philip K. Dick, Robert E. Heinlein and Michael Moorcock (whose Von Bek clan seems related, at least linguistically, to the Seebecks), to list only the most obvious of the genre authors to whom Broderick tips his hat while picking their pocket universes. Nor does he restrict himself to genre authors ... or to authors, period. He rummages with equal glee through the theories of scientists, from Tipler to Max Tegmark to Stephen Wolfram and more. Forget the Contest of Worlds—just reading this book is a contest in itself, to see how many of the author's winks, allusions and name-droppings leave you chuckling knowingly or flat-out baffled.
Does the sum of so many influences add up to anything original, or, more to the point, intelligible? Godplayers is great fun at times, and one can't help admiring the author's erudition and intelligence, but the frustration level mounts as one waits in vain for a story or plot to develop and for characters, including August, to display any hint of a genuine inner life as they move randomly from scene to scene, world to world, reality to reality. Perhaps Vorpal homunculi do not possess inner lives, and Broderick's point is that these seeming superhumans, for all their power, are soulless automatons without a shred of humanity. Such appears to be the opinion of the K-machines, at any rate ... though this tantalizing thread is dropped as quickly as it's introduced, never to be taken up again. Surely there should be some character, somewhere in a novel, to which human readers can feel connected. August's love for Lune is inescapable and inexplicable: less an emotion than a force of nature. The same is true, even more so, of her love for him. Untroubled by doubt or circumstance, they experience almost at once that blissfully athletic sex that is both a testament to and the culmination of romantic love. As the sequence of events grows increasingly frenzied, with ever-greater reliance placed on what might be termed info-splatters, the lack of a deep humanistic substrate left this reader, at least, with no ground to stand on. Nor, on a more superficial level, was it made clear to me how Omega entities from one collapsed universe would have the power to influence events in other universes.
But perhaps it's not fair to criticize the novel on these grounds. After all, does one fault Through the Looking Glass for skimpy characterizations and arbitrary events? The only possible answer to this is that Broderick, for all his talent, is no Lewis Carroll. Nor is he writing for children. While the comparison to Zelazny is apt, unfortunately Godplayers resembles the final Amber books more than it does the first, though it's far better than those perfunctory offerings in a series that had obviously outlived its author's interest.
Broderick's riffing on the literary and scientific past and future of an exceptionally fertile SF tradition, the many-worlds story, does have its inspired moments, and his pages are replete with sharp one-liners and cool ideas. But in the end, this maddeningly madcap novel seems too much like fanfic, a polymath's in-joke that flouts its sources while delighting in its own obscurity.
