Let’s take a quick look to see what’s arrived in the mail here at the Geek Compound.
The Judas Mandala by Damien Broderick
Promo copy:
Maggie Roche is an out-of-work poet and single mother. Spied on by a cyborged rat, attacked, drugged into panic and rapture, seduced, drawn into conspiracy, she’s flung four thousand years into her own future. In the alien world of the Ull- Upload Lifeform Lords who are human-machine hybrids of overwhelming power-she learns that she is history’s first true time traveler, hunted by friend and foe to the end of time. The entire future of the cosmos will be reset by these terrifying events. The Judas Mandala introduced the terms "virtual reality" and "virtual matrix," anticipating Frank Tipler’s influential Omega Point Theory, William Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction, and The Matrix…
A new Afterword describes the strange publishing history of this ground-breaking novel, and includes the full text of an omitted chapter.
"Experience an epic sense of immensity: an inkling of humanity’s perhaps limitless possibilities within the strangeness of our universe." –Australian Book Review
Pennterra by Judith Moffett
Promo copy:
Pennterra is a beautiful and fertile planet and humanity’s last hope for survival. But Pennterra is already inhabited. After warning other colony ships to stay away, the small advance colony of Quakers has adapted to life on Pennterra. Heeding the empathic warnings of the native hrossa, they have settled in a single valley, sharply limited their population, and continued to use no heavy machinery in their building and farming. But surviving under these conditions has left the Quakers little time to learn more about their native neighbors. Catastrophe or peace—Tanka Wakan, the omnipotent master spirit of Pennterra, will decide.
The Dreaming by Damien Broderick
Promo copy:
Selected as one of the top 100 science fiction novels of the century! Updated and revised edition of award-winner The Dreaming Dragons. An anthropologist travels to the central Australian desert to search for the source of an aboriginal myth; he suspects the terrible "Rainbow Serpent" is connected to the sacred Uluru rock formations. The holographic "Gate" he discovers with his nephew explains not just the origin of a legend, but the origin of man, and the true fate of the dinosaurs.
The Serpent and the Hummingbird by Wilson Roberts
Promo copy:
The Serpent and the Hummingbird, tells the story of six people whose lives become entwined in a complex mixture of fear, love, violence and bizarre religious practices, as they struggle with matters of belief, reflecting the confusions, the threats, and promises of deeply held faith central to our current political, social, and economic dialogues. The story deals with these issues in a timely fashion, and is peopled with fully realized characters who live in a world close to our own, but bizarre enough to approach the grotesque that Flannery O’Connor said was necessary to shock readers into a realization of the misshapen nature of our times.