Damien Francis Broderick is a popular Australian science fiction and popular science writer and editor of some 74 books, who is also an immortalist and a transhumanist. His work contributes to make life-extension more mainstream. His science fiction novel The Dreaming Dragons (1980) introduced the trope of the generation time machine, his The Judas Mandala (1982) contains the first appearance of the term "virtual reality" in science fiction, and his 1997 popular science book The Spike was the first to investigate the technological singularity in detail. Broderick holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from Deakin University, Australia, with a dissertation comparing the semiotics of scientific, literary, and science fictional textuality. He was for several years a Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He was the founding science fiction editor of the Australian popular-science magazine Cosmos from mid-2005 to December 2010. Five of Broderick's books have won Ditmar Awards (including the non-SF Transmitters, which was given a special award); the first, The Dreaming Dragons, was runner-up for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. He has also won the Aurealis award four times. In November 2003, Broderick was awarded a grant for 2004–05 by the Australia Council to write fiction exploring the technological singularity. In 2005 he received the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. In 2010, he tied for second place in the juried Theodore Sturgeon Award for best sf short story of 2009, and at the World Science Fiction Convention received the A. Bertram Chandler Memorial Award for 2010. Broderick's best-known works as a futurist and science writer are The Spike (1997; revised 2001), and a nonfiction book about the technological singularity; The Last Mortal Generation (1999) on the prospect of radically extended youthful longevity His recent critical studies, x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction (2004), Ferocious Minds: Polymathy and the New Enlightenment (2005) and Unleashing the Strange (2009) were released by a small US press, Wildside. Several of his books feature cover art by Swedish transhumanist Anders Sandberg, including Earth is but a Star (2001), Broderick's anthology of science fiction stories, and thematically related critical discussions, concerned with the far future. In 2012, with Paul Di Filippo, he published Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985–2010, which was short-listed for a 2013 Locus Award.