The Judas Mandala

The Faustus Hexagram #2

by Damien Broderick

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 an inkling of humanit's perhaps limitless possibilities within the strangeness of our universe." -Australian Book Review

Genres: Science Fiction

189 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Damien Francis Broderick was an Australian science fiction and popular science writer and editor of some 74 books. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credits him with the first usage of the term "virtual reality" in science-fiction, in his 1982 novel The Judas Mandala.

Reviews

[Julian White · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intriguing - on the face of it a standard first time time traveller story but there are complications that require philosophical discussion about Nature and the Machin. I confess that much of that went over my head ('Our language is just inadequate' one of the main characters says at one point; mine certainly is.

As Marguerite (Maggie) Roche bounces from 1999 to the 6030s and then back to 1966 we almost grasp an understanding of what is happening. The final line is quite telling, though: 'History shudders.'

A more recent reprint has a previously cut chapter restored, as well as a new Afterword; I may have to pick up an ebook copy before deciding whther or not to read thr other two books in the sequence.