Archives: Aurealis Interviews

 Q1.   Damien, I note that you are the fiction editor for Cosmos e-Magazine and that a number of interesting pieces have appeared.

Damien Broderick: Hi, Rob. Actually, I'm not. What I am is the fiction editor of the bimonthly print edition of Cosmos that you can buy at newsagents or by subscription. There is also an offshoot of the paper magazine at http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/, which everyone can read free of charge. This online wing, edited by Sara Phillips, has daily updates of interesting science news, and some sample articles and most of the fiction from previous print issues. Recently, Sara has started acquiring new shorter-than-usual stories for the website, maybe one every month or two. At the moment, these stories are chosen by Sara from submissions I pass to her that I can't use, but she is the one making the choices.

My main role is to find one excellent 2000-word story per issue (and two pieces for the December/January issue, which contains a bonus 4000-word story). I don't have the final say on selection, which remains with the editor, Wilson da Silva. Cosmos is a general or "family" magazine whose readership includes substantial proportion of kids still at school, which imposes certain restrictions on subject matter and treatment.

That doesn't mean my writers have to back away from difficult topics that confront sex or violence or religion (consider the stories we published by Charlie Stross and Pam Sargent), but a certain sensitivity to our audience is necessary. That's why I ask people to read the magazine, if they can get hold of it, before submitting stories -- or at least to check out the stories available online.

Q2. Cosmos isn't your run of the mill science fiction publication so acquiring stories for their inclusion must be a very interesting process.

Damien Broderick: Correct. Cosmos is not a science-fiction magazine at all, it's a popular science bimonthly whose editor, Wilson da Silva, chose to include a short sf piece in each issue, partly from personal sentiment (he's an old sf fan) and partly as a way of reaching out a hand across the science/literature gap that still exists in our culture.

Q3. When evaluating a story, just how far can the scientific extropolation go? 

Damien Broderick: I want the science to be as accurate and imaginative as possible, but that doesn't mean we won't accept stories that use great traditional narrative devices -- time travel, faster than light starships, paranormal abilities, etc -- which still remain outside the gates of science (a phrase that comes to mind for reasons that will emerge shortly). But the emphasis in Cosmos has to remain on the people in the stories, and the narrative flair of the telling.

Q4. And, do you request fiction submissions or is this more of an open market?

Damien Broderick: Both. Before the magazine was launched, Wilson obtained reprint rights to a Ray Bradbury story he was very fond of from the '50s, and used that in the first issue as an indication of the voice he hoped to hear in future stories. Early on, I requested stories from some old friends, especially Joe Haldeman and Gregory Benford, as well as some of the newer writers such as Charlie Stross and Paul Di Filippo. All of them came through with good tales, but I must admit that Joe's remains my favourite -- and, not to my surprise, it was selected for two Year's Best anthologies of 2005.

But it's also important to Cosmos to provide a well-paying outlet for the best new writers as well, especially those from Australia and New Zealand. We have already published some great local writing, and I hope to see even more of it. I'm especially interested in seeing science-fiction stories from women, who still seem a little bit shy of the genre.

Q5. With the selection of fiction, and your own scientific accuracy displayed in your own works, have you see extrordinary future visions that really do push the boundaries the genre so often promises to do. Any piece in particular that impressed you?

Damien Broderick: It's difficult to push boundaries in 2000 words, and still tell a human story that makes sense to the reader. That requires extreme compression and acuity of vision. I'd say that Liz Martin's story about quantum communication in the December/January 2006/7 issue does that.

Q6. Though you are the fiction editor, do you contribute articles to Cosmos and then find complimenting work to clarify your contribution?

Damien Broderick: I did have a short "think-piece" in the first issue, but no, I don't make any effort to match up fiction choices with non-fiction stories -- partly because I am buying stories months in advance, and the real science pieces are often more timely. That doesn't mean Wilson might not occasionally slot a story in to an issue with a particular theme, which I think happened with Virginia Shepherd's story, "Foundling". That is a moving and allegorical story about life in a future ruined by global heating and other human-induced atrocities, which fitted in nicely to the October/November 2006 Green issue.

Q7. To me it is an interesting position to be in and I just like to know how things work. 

Damien Broderick: It is indeed an interesting position, and sometimes a frustrating one. A surprisingly large number of would-be contributors don't bother to read the guidelines linked from the website at http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/pdf/Cosmos_ShortStoryGuidelines.pdf , which specifies the small number of restrictions in play and the specific formatting requirements we need because I work directly on screen with electronic text. This is then sent to Sydney electronically -- perhaps I should mention that I am living in Texas at the moment, so it's very much a long-distance process for me -- and used as the basis for setting type for the print magazine, as well as the eventual online version.

Q8. Cosmos is a fascinating concept, and top marks for the high production values and quality of articles and fiction.

Damien Broderick: It certainly is an extremely beautiful production, but that's something I can't take any credit for at all.

Q9. What would you like to see achieved in future with the publication?

Damien Broderick:  Really, I think Wilson and the team in Sydney are doing an excellent job, and I just hope that the small local market can continue to support a magazine that obviously costs so much to produce. (I believe there are plans to expand overseas, which would be terrific!)

Q10. To switch note a tad. I have just completed your K-Machines, which is very, very good by the way, and I am interested in what we could expect from you in the near future?

Damien Broderick: Why, thank you, Rob. Godplayers and K-Machines comprise a single larger book, so it's a shame that this is not made clear on the book jackets. (It's notorious these days that books longer than about 300 pages do not fit comfortably within sausage-machine mass marketing, except for a few very big-name writers, so we are obliged to organise more complex stories into a series of linked books.) These two comprise a diptych, and the writing was supported by a generous grant from the Australia Council. My ambition was to write a genuinely cutting edge narrative based on the idea of Singularity -- that is, runaway technological change -- that nevertheless used as many traditional science-fiction tropes as I could squeeze together. There's a huge amount of material under the surface, twined together with a complex apparatus drawn from mythology, Tarot, astrology, Jung, as well as advanced physics and a smattering of parapsychology. This doesn't mean for a moment that I believe in astrology or the Tarot, but they are ancient organising principles that appear to be about as complex as the human mind can cope with in attempting to understand intuitively the world and our place in it. Moreover, the reality that my characters inhabit is not precisely our familiar world. I'll leave it to readers to work out what that might mean...
Coming up? A popular science treatment of recent work in parapsychology, especially from the brilliant and gifted people who ran the long-classified CIA program Star Gate. The book is Outside the Gates of Science, and should be out by May next year from Avalon/Thunder's Mouth Press in the States. As for sf... I might get back to some short fiction myself, after a long time away (it's how I started, back in—yikes!--1962 or so).

Q11.  Thank you for taking the time to answer these few questions, Damien and look forward to your editing work for Cosmos as well as your own material. If you had to say one final thing to the readers of this interview (generally a mix of writers and readers), what small gem would you utter?

Damien Broderick: It seems that fewer and fewer young people are reading for the sheer delight of doing so. Reading has such formidable competitors these days, from television and the movies to blogs, massive near-virtual reality immersion experiences such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, sports, and the pressures of work. I hope people never lose the joy of sitting with print -- whether on screen or on paper -- and sinking into an imaginative reconstruction, a kind of guided dream, that is drawn as much from their own memories, experiences, and aspirations as from the words they're reading. And I hope that writers who love words and stories will send their best work to me, so that Cosmos will just keep getting better.

That, my dear friends was Damien Broderick, Cosmos fiction editor and SF author.