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Rory Barnes

In 1956 I arrived in Australia as a ten year old whinging pommy migrant. Apart from the odd year or two spent wandering around the globe, I’ve lived here ever since.

In the 1960’s I completed an Arts degree at Monash and occasionally demonstrated against the Vietnam war. In the 1970s I worked in educational research and teacher training. In the 1980s I taught creative writing at the Institute of Technology in Sydney. Now I live in Adelaide and write full time.

I’m the author or co-author of various novels for both adults and young adults. The most recent are The Book of Revelation (written with Damien Broderick) and Horsehead Man.

My recent fiction relies on wild extrapolations from modern technological practices. The action may involve brain transplants, nano-technologies for bringing the dead back to life, remote sensing for out-of-body experiences, cloning, worm-holes in space and other devices beloved of techno-freaks. But in truth, I don’t much like science fiction and very rarely read the stuff. Science provides us with splendid opportunities for satire and farce, and that is how I use it. But, of course, there is nothing to stop weird and farcical backgrounds being used for entertaining and plausible interactions between realistically drawn characters. And bizarre future worlds can bring us face to face with genuine philosophical problems. I find this a very satisfying mix.

I have written a number of novels with Damien Broderick, a writer very much at the forefront of contemporary science fiction. On the surface it may look as if our widely differing approaches to the subject would make co-operation impossible. In fact we work very well together, and, if I say so myself, the resulting fiction blends our world views into something greater than the sum of its parts.

My web site, complete with an extended autobiography, list of publications and links to on-line extracts from novels, is at:

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