|
PS Publishing |
Babylon
PS Publishing
Whitechapel, London. 1888. Madeleine Fell is
dreaming of Babylon. Not the Victorian Babylon
of London, but a second, Mesopotamian
Babylon that exists in a parallel dimension, a world
populated and ruled by Ishtar’s sacred prostitutes
that has of late gained ascendancy over our own.
In Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper is murdering Babylonian
whores. And off-world, on Babylon itself, the
men of the Black Order plot revolution—by instituting
a ruthless program of gendercide. Unbeknown to
her disapproving parents, Madeleine enters the Babylonian
novitiate, her heart set upon travelling to the
exotic, parallel world of her dreams, fearful, yet at the
same time strangely excited, by the intimation that
her demon lover awaits.
When Madeleine’s parents discover what she has
done, she escapes to Babylon with the help of her
irrepressible friend and fellow novice, Cliticia. As the
two adventuresses journey through a landscape of
magnificently bizarre ruins towards the consummation
of their amour fou and a concomitant disillusionment,
they begin to understand that Babylon the
Great, like London, is as much a city of the mind as a
set of co-ordinates on a transdimensional map, and
that they owe the Black Order, and even Jack the Ripper
himself, a debt of complicity.
‘Calder’s visions of Babylon are both allusive and alluring. How can one resist a scene like this?
‘“Lord Azrael and Mr Malachi stood by the railway lines that ran down the middle of the street. I
looked south, to where the lines receded towards the vanishing point of our destination: a saw-
toothed horizon comprised of ziggurats surmounted by a bloated moon. The moon neither waxed nor
waned, nor did it cross the heavens; it simply remained where it was, night after night, like a
great Chinese lantern above the tiny, distant buildings – a goddess brooding over her deathly still
world.”
‘Later invocations of Fuseli, Rossetti, and the like are equally intoxicating – bizarre, sensuous,
channelling the essence of late 19th-century decadence … His goal may seem to be nothing but fin de
siècle atmosphere erupting into pulpish mayhem. But then comes the kicker … and we can see how it
applies to us, at the dawn of the 21st century … If Babylon is a dark dream from another age, it’s
also very much our own.’
Locus
In the same issue of LOCUS Nick Gevers lists After the Party as a ‘recommended story’ and writes:
‘Interzone has been serializing Richard Calder’s controversial novella After the Party: A
Nymphomaniad, starting in the December issue and concluding in that for April. A companion to the
author’s imminent novel Babylon, this can be seen as a culmination of Calder’s long fascination
with issues of eroticism: the association of orgasm with death; the fetishization of the sexual
Other as Object; decadence and the politics of “perversion”. The setting is an alternate Earth of
the late 19th or early 20th century, where female worshippers of Ishtar, long exiled to a parallel
world, have returned, changing history by toppling patriarchy and installing a new global order
dominated by Orders of sacred prostitutes and the male Illuminati who relish the attendant fleshly
circus. The problem for women in this timeline is that although they have in a sense liberated
themselves from bondage, forcing men to concede their equality and their power, they have also had
to reify themselves in the image of masculine desire, becoming stereotypical maenads or dolls in
consequence; nymphomania has become a plague, often of a literal and lethal kind. And males who
resent the dictatorship of sensuality, in effect the ideological brothers of Jack the Ripper, have
formed a dissident Black Order, dedicated to the destruction of all whores. What occurs in After
the Party is the tentative, only vaguely successful reconciliation of the conflicting opposites, as
a doctor belonging to the Order encounters a prostitute who draws him platonically as well as
physically; the fatal psychological contradictions of the late Victorian Age come into sharp focus,
and Calder achieves a powerful bleak finale.’
|
|