The Hunger of Time

Damien Broderick · Rory Barnes

Apr 2014 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

A time machine may be one family’s only salvation as the world hurtles toward an apocalypse in this cyberpunk thriller.

Technology has started to accelerate at a terrifying rate. By the mid‐twenty-first century, we might see a Singularity: a convergence of artificial intelligence, advanced nanotechnologies for building things at the atomic scale, precise genomics, and other wonders. What happens after that? Will the descendants of today’s humanity become gods or demons, or simply destroy themselves? And will we be among their number, carried along by rejuvenation and immortality treatments? For Natalie and her irritatingly beautiful young sister Suzanna, these are no longer abstract questions. The familiar world is on the brink of crisis. Dumped by her live‐in boyfriend and stuck back at home with her parents, Nat is not a happy person. And her father, Hugh, is acting like a mad scientist. What the hell is he building out there in the garage? When Hugh frog‐marches his family into the garage, it looks as if he has really gone mad, and they are due to perish even before the plague wipes out all life on Earth. But the machine Hugh has been working on hurls them all—not forgetting their dog Ferdy—ever further into the future, and the escapade doesn't stop until the very end of time and space. 

About the author

Damien Broderick is Australia’s dean of science fiction, with a body of extraordinary work reaching back to the early 1960s. The White Abacus won two Year’s Best awards. His stories and novels, like those of his younger peer Greg Egan, are drenched with bleeding-edge ideas. Distinctively, he blends ideas and poetry like nobody since Roger Zelazny, and a wild, silly humor is always ready to bubble out, as in the cosmic comedy Striped Holes. His award-winning novel The Dreaming Dragons is featured in David Pringle’s SF: The 100 Best Novels, and was chosen as year’s best by Kingsley Amis. It was revised and updated as The Dreaming. In 1982 Broderick’s early cyberpunk novel The Judas Mandala coined the term virtual reality. His recent novels include the diptych Godplayers and K-Machines, Post Mortal Syndrome (with his wife, Barbara Lamar), and several collaborations with Rory Barnes: I’m Dying Here, Human’s Burden, and The Valley of the God of Our Choice, Inc. Like one of his heroes, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Broderick is a master of writing about radical new technologies, and The Spike and The Last Mortal Generation have been Australian popular-science bestsellers. His long novella, “Quicken,” is the second half of the novel Beyond the Doors of Death, cowritten with Grand Master Robert Silverberg (an expansion of Silverberg’s “Born with the Dead”), and is the closing story in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection. In 2005 Broderick received the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
 
Rory Barnes is the author of ten novels for both adults and teenagers, five of which have been written in collaboration with Damien Broderick. His website is members.optusnet.com.au/~rory.barnes.