Godplayers (Paperback)

~ (Author) "AS SHE LISTENED from a small side table to the house crooner sing "Moon River" in a smoky room of perfume and fumes of brandy..." (more)
Key Phrases: ontological mechanics, local cosmos, green ray, Great-aunt Tansy, Good Machine, Contest of Worlds (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In SF veteran Broderick's brain-stretching stand-alone, 20-something August Seebeck enters a mysterious game, the Contest of Worlds, in which some of the godlike players are his brothers and sisters, battling against terminatorish "deformers." August discovers superhuman powers of his own and falls in love with a heartbreakingly beautiful female player, Lune. But the game's ultimate purpose remains unclear while the context of the action keeps changing, as August zips through multiple universes. The more he learns of other worlds, the less he can be sure of—but the more his decisions matter. As things get increasingly serious for August, the story's tone remains wry, packed with offhand literary references and bookish puns. Broderick (The Dreaming) pays homage to Fritz Leiber's tales of alternate histories and to Roger Zelazny's Amber series; the narrative also resembles Robert A. Heinlein's The Number of the Beast in its cheerful trashing of comfortable but undependable certainties. In a universe where nothing can be taken at face value, scientists and SF readers need to be ready to move on, to ask the next question. Broderick shows that the effort needn't be a grim duty but actually fun. (May 3)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* August Seebeck fears that Great-aunt Tansy's claim that for several weeks there have been dead bodies in the bathroom on Saturday nights means she's losing her grip. When he meets two women coming in his second-floor bathroom window to dispose of a body, it's shocking, despite Tansy's warning. August learns he and the women have something in common--the string of symbols that is etched into their feet. Moreover, the women's light-show trick to make him forget the encounter doesn't work. And, anyway, the 11 Seebeck siblings are players in a Game of Worlds, and none of the others believe August is their brother until certain proof--more than just the foot-hieroglyphics--is forthcoming. August travels a multitude of worlds, visiting siblings and falling in love with Lune (one of the women in the bathroom--not a Seebeck), bent on understanding the game in which they're all players, while his hitherto-unknown family squabble over his sudden appearance and are attacked by the Deformers, their opponents in the game. Broderick's influences are writ large even before he confesses in the afterword that they are Roger Zelazny and Fritz Lieber. He follows in the footsteps of giants, and does it elegantly, drawing further inspiration from contemporary scientific thought. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Running Press (April 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560256702
• ISBN-13: 978-1560256700
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,294,666 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A frustrating, plotless read, March 6, 2006

By	K. Butler (escondido, ca United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Sorry to be wrench in the works but I hated this book...even though I did finish it. It had me hooked when the first few pages contained some very cool concepts: Super beings looking in on a collapsing universe and rooting for the hyper-evolved intelligences contained therein to achieve a sort of godhood--I'm loving all that. Somewhere near the middle I realized with dread that the author was going NOWHERE with any of it.

The book changes reality frames so randomly and often that I just couldn't believe any of it. That kind of thing can work if the author lays the groundwork to make it feel plausible (so masterfully done in John C. Wright's "The Golden Age"), but Broderick just doesn't bother with the legwork. The tech is never explained or even differentiated from fairy tale magic. The characters hardly have a chance to interact before they're hurled off into another reality and have to deal with it. It's hard to get involved with any situation when you know the carpet can be pulled out at any second.

If someone asked me to explain the plot I really couldn't tell them. It's one of those books where a bunch of stuff happens and the characters react to it. The main character certainly has no plan other than exploring and scoring with babes, and the superintelligent players of "the game" NEVER explain what "the game" even is. This is actually what kept me slogging throught to the end. Surely he'll tell me what "the game" is since that's the very reason the characters even exist. But I guess that was asking too much. I had a feeling it involved apposing the "K-machines", but the book pretty much ignores that angle in favor of jumping around "Sliders" style.

Most frustrating of all was the main character who I grew to hate passionately. He gets hurled into a multiverse of super beings and acts like he's at a neighborhood barbeque. He NEVER asks the kinds of questions an actual person would. At the rare occaisions when he gets a chance to talk with friendly characters I'd be mentally screaming at him, "Ask what the hell is going on, you fool!" but he always managed to find other distractions more important than the things crucial to his survival. By the end I was rooting for his death. If we had a Darwin award for fictional characters, he'd be a shoo-in.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What Happens When You Write a Book Without an Outline?, July 2, 2006

By	Elliot Bowers "Elliot Bowers" (Somerset, New Jersey) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

After reading the last hundred pages of this mess of a book, I am slowly attempting to reassemble my sense of coherence. It will no doubt take some time and some therapy to do that...along with perhaps some gallons of fruit punch drunk in sight of a midget. Does that make a great deal of sense? Of course it doesn't--as does the book GODPLAYERS. There are so many self-contradictions, acts of illogic and downright reams of rants that the book gets lost in itself. Then there is how the book is so full of itself that the plot gets lost in the sauce. The lack of sense and sensibility in this book is enough to make a grown man scream for his mommy--or another glass of fruit punch.

Now, a glass of the red stuff down my gullet, let me try to at least begin to make sense of the senseless. This book begins with a young adult-ish character named August--muddling through life and living with his aunt. Corpses start appearing in the aunt's upstairs tub. The aunt disappears in one of the least coherent two paragraphs ever to appear in a science fiction novel. August takes it upon himself to use the mystical hieroglyph-thingy on one of his ankles to pull an Alice-in-Wonderland stunt and ends up dealing with a hoarde of incestuous flesh-robot relatives that have as much sense in the head as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears combined: a group of space-faring, metaphysics-ranting, zebra-hunting, gourmet-cooking psychotics who seem more obsessed with fashion and etiquette than they do in dealing with the threat at hand due to some never-defined contest. Oh, did I fail to mention that this book switches between the first-person narrative and third-person for no good reason other than variety? Again, this barely begins to make sense as a plot--if there WAS a plot. Even after drinking a liter of fruit punch--the powerful red kind--it does not make too much sense.

Not only has the plot been beaten into a senseless melange, but it also moves at a truly constipated pace. So what happened after August meets his relatives? What happened was pointless. After the first hundred pages, the book steeps into a drool-inducing series of chapters with August and his inbred flesh-robot-clone relatives doing nothing but wining and dining, ranting about the multiple universes and mucking up big time. Some other critic hereabouts said to not skim. Guess what? A person could chop out the middle hundred and forty pages and not miss much. In short, the plot progression hits a major blockage for the center of the book. I ought to give away the equally pointless ending just for that...including the fact that the main character dies a pointless death and is resurrected to find out that a pet is a petty god or something.

The book's plot was senseless; the book's progress was constipated... On top of that, it should be noted that the writing style fails. The language is nearly incoherent to anyone who didn't take any philosophy or physics cognate courses at the college level. There is little to no neutral narrator to actually explain the drivel. There is very little in the way of a narrator at all. No, the writer of the book pretty much just let the characters talk their trash without bothering to make a great deal of sense about it. It generates the impression that the writer himself probably did not know too much about what was going on--not that much was happening in this book at all.

If anything, this is an example of what happens when a person acts without forethought--or at least without a plan. GODPLAYERS is an example of a book written without an outline. Now I have heard of people doing such things, much as I have seen an Internet video of someone dressing up like banana, shouting "LET'S ROCK AND ROLL!" before setting himself aflame in front of his videocamera-holding relatives--expecting to be unsinged. A decade or so before this act of astounding human wisdom, there was also a movie director some years ago who made movies without scripts. I remember one of his films somehow involving ninjas, midgets and a triple-decker birthday cake... Then there are the irate Neanderthal husbands who insist that they can navigate hundreds of miles of highway without maps. The book GODLAYERS is nowhere close to being as amusing as setting oneself alight in a banana costume or making movies with midgets fighting triple-decker ninja birthday cakes, but it maybe makes just about as much sense. Now I'm off to consume the remainder of my red fruit punch before some psychotic robot clone-girl with hairy legs threatens to wipe my memory. Better yet, I wish that she would as so I could forget this book all the more sooner.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Energetic and engaging: intriguing speculative SF, May 22, 2006

By	Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Godplayers is an extremely energetic and engaging novel, one in which the author is obviously having fun, and just as obviously a work by a writer who knows and loves the SF field.

The main action of the novel follows a young man from Australia named August Seebeck. His parents disappeared, presumed dead, when he was a boy, and he was raised by relatives, in particular his Aunt Miriam and later his Great-Aunt Tansy. He comes home to Tansy's house after herding cattle in the outback, to find that she claims dead bodies have been showing up in her bathtub. She's a bit dotty, and works as a psychic, so he tends to discount this, and goes to wash up. And naturally a dead body shows up soon after, carried through the mirror by two women, one of whom, Lune, is sufficiently beautiful that August is drastically smitten despite the unfortunate circumstances of their meeting. Especially when he notices that she has the same curious metallic design in her foot that he has. But Lune and her companion inform him that they will have to wipe his memory, and out comes the "green ray"...

Mysteriously, the memory wipe doesn't stick. Quickly August is involved in some very strange doings indeed. He tries to follow the mysterious women through the mirror, and in very rapid order indeed he is jumping from universe to universe. It soon comes clear that August is part of a family he has not suspected (the other members have significant names like Maybelline, and Juni, and Marchmain... see the pattern?), and that the family is engaged in something called the Contest of Worlds.

And so the novel goes, recomplicating again and again, as August desperately tries to make sense of things, to find his Aunt Tansy, and to learn the secret behind his new family and his parents' disappearance. He's also trying to forge a relationship with the beautiful Lune (one that develops perhaps just a bit implausibly quickly). In the process we visit numerous parallel worlds, and several different "levels" of the universe -- mostly based on real (if perhaps not precisely mainstream) physical theories. It's all great fun, very fast moving, clever stuff.

The afterword mentions as influences Fritz Leiber and Roger Zelazny. "Destiny Times Three" is the Leiber story Broderick mentions, while the obvious Zelazny parallel is Amber. And indeed the novel recalls those writers a bit, as well as perhaps Charles Stross' new series that has also been compared to Amber, The Merchant Princes. But Broderick's work is not simply hommage, nor is it derivative -- it is original SF that happily nods to its precursors. And it is, put simply, purely fun, and at the same time intriguing speculative SF.