From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jan 27 2000 - 17:52:11 MST
At 01:11 AM 27/01/00 PST, John Grigg wrote:
>I like the idea of several people working together under one name to create
>the impression of a superhuman intellect. I had the idea I could gather
>some of my brighter friends at school based on majors (bio, computer sci,
>chem, engineering, english lit., etc.) and we could be a one of these
>"communal superminds!"
I've now co-written five novels with an old university/communard buddy,
Rory Barnes, who is nothing like me except for his intelligence and delight
in silliness and wordplay. We seem to synergise each other's writing, using
a variety of different approaches from one writing a book and the other
totally redoing it, through to the hot computer keyboard method, where we
take it in turns at the machine and then I smooth it all at the end. Our
most recent novel, THE BOOK OF REVELATION (HarperCollins Oz, not in the USA
damn it) has been reviewed as one of the two great realist novels on the
topic of purported alien abduction (the other being by the wonderful Alison
Lurie), and all the reviewers talk happily about the humour (so they must
have got the jokes...). Neither of us could have produced the book alone.
Literary readers despise collaborative fiction, of course, so we will be
spurned for all the lucrative prizes.
But I'm here for the communal superminds!
Damien
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