The Judas Mandala

The revised edition of The Judas Mandala was published in 2002.

The classic that coined "Virtual Reality"! Maggie Roche is an unemployed poet and single mother in 2009. Before the day's done, she is spied on by a robotic rat, physically attacked, drugged into panic and rapture, seduced, drawn into conspiracy, then flung four thousand years into her own future. In the alien world of the Upload Lifeform Lords, who are human-machine hybrids of overwhelming power, she learns that she is the first true time traveler in history, hunted by friend and foe. More than her own survival is at stake – the entire future of the cosmos will be reset by these terrifying events.

Damien Broderick's classic science fiction novel of time travel to the end of the universe has long been out of print in the USA. First written in the mid-1970s and published in 1982, The Judas Mandala introduced the terms "virtual reality" and "virtual matrix", and anticipated both Frank Tipler's influential Omega Point Theory and the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson. This revised edition retains these startlingly creative elements, while bringing the novel firmly into the 21st century... but not necessarily our 21st century. Broderick adds a new Afterword, written specially for this Fictionwise edition, that describes the hilarious publishing history of this ground-breaking novel and includes the full text of an omitted chapter.