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St Martin's Press, US, 1998
Little, Brown, UK, 1998 |
Cythera
Little, Brown, UK, 1998; St Martin's Press, US,
1998
'Industry has conquered the world's last natural wilderness,
bringing rampant consumerism to the southernmost continent. There's
karaoke in Antarctica; in Thailand, the vaguely superhuman leaders
of the Army of Revolutionary Flesh are plotting to overthrow The
Censors; in England, an abused child dreams of being abducted by
aliens … This is the story of 21st century outlaws Zane Weary and
Dahlia Chan. Zane is a fugitive from the authoritarian capitalism of
"Empire De Luxe". Dahlia is a mesmerizing chanteuse, an "anorexic
harlot", and a former kung fu killer of manga and animé. The
besotted Zane is her number one fanboy but Dahlia is a construct of
light from the fibreoptic VR, Earth2. She escaped via The Wound, a
leaky interface between virtual and real worlds. Zane becomes "both
exile and pilgrim" in his obsessive search for the mythical land of
Cythera … Calder's SF is often frenetic, yet highly articulate and
agreeably stylish. He brings much post-cyberpunk pizzazz to the
man/machine theme and its sexual equations … Cythera's narrative is
busy, fascinatingly complex and crackles with discharges of
multicultural fancy …'
Starburst
'A girl, a gun, a
luxury car and a boy on the run from patricide: we're in Calderland
again. Like its predecessors, Cythera, Richard Calder's fourth
novel, is an hallucinatory rush through decimated landscapes dense
with allusion to 20th-century popular culture, thorny,
confrontational, and compelling … The landscapes are realized with a
vivid and dense lyricism; the characters' dialogues are wry, tough
and edgy; it is truculent, obsessive, and possessed by a fierce and
restless intelligence … Read it because it promises to be one of the
best sf novels of this year …'
Interzone
'The author of Dead Things succeeds again in blurring the
borders of perception through his exhilarating, imagistic prose,
reminiscent of the landmark writings of William Burroughs and Samuel
Delaney.'
Library Journal
'Elegantly and powerfully written.'
Norman Spinrad, Asimov's
'Let us imagine an alternate history for SF. An elderly and
respected Edgar Allen Poe becomes editor of a magazine called
Arabesque Stories, circa 1875. From his pulpit, he promotes a new
kind of tale called "Symbolist Fiction," modelled on his own
crepuscular work. A host of brilliant writers from many countries -
Machen, Beardsley, Apollinaire, Huysmans, Hodgson, Bierce - flock to
his banner. Over the next few decades, Poe's brand of SF, now
represented by dozens of magazines, becomes the dominant mode of the
fantastic, incorporating scientific speculation as well as more
Gothic material. (There are schisms and feuds, of course, over this
latter development.) Clark Ashton Smith, Ben Hecht, Fritz Lieber,
and numerous others push the genre forward in the twenties,
thirties, and forties of our century. By the time the 1990s roll
around, nearly 120 years of Symbolist Fiction have culminated in one
writer. And his name is Richard Calder.
'Postulating this imaginary tradition seems the most natural
way to get a handle on what Calder is doing in his newest novel,
Cythera. While Calder expertly uses speculative elements in our
familiar SF way, his primary concerns are the mannerist depictions
of rarefied emotional states verging on the otherwordly
…'
Paul Di Filippo, Asimov's
'Cythera boasts Richard Calder's usual beautiful writing,
bizarre speculation and wickedly perceptive observations
…'
Starlog
'Richard Calder’s ‘Dead’ trilogy was perhaps the most
extraordinary of the many post-cyberpunk science fictions. A furious
‘n’ frenzied mix ‘n’ (mis)match of the usual cyber tropes with
themes ‘n’ motifs blagged from the darker corners of the European
surrealist tradition, de Sade and Bataille and their sexed-up fellow
travellers, these dense and intense novels were deliriously and
ambiguously positioned in the dim spaces where critical theory,
pornography, postmodernism and sci-fi met. They were the ravings of
both a madman and a genius, a fucked-up pomo geezer with a copy of
Baudrillard’s Simulations in one hand and a sado-erotic porn mag in
the other...whilst tucked into the pockets of his leather jacket,
molotov cocktails, black matte dildoes and floppy disks containing
downloads from The Black Plague website. These books were also, as
if this needs to be said, quite dazzlingly brilliant.
'Cythera is more or less in the same mould. A typically
contemporary post-cyberpunky fiction which seeks to blur the
boundaries between actuality ‘n’ virtuality, biology ‘n’ technology,
the real ‘n’ the hyperreal, the novel comes across as yet another
routine meditation on the post-human condition, all epistemological
‘n’ ontological doubt against a backdrop of television skies,
neon-lit cities and hi-tech sex ‘n’ dance clubs.
'At another, and perhaps more interesting level, however,
Cythera broods darkly on contemporary regulatory discourses around
childhood; the figure of the dangerous/endangered child which haunts
the imagination of today’s politicians and moral entrepreneurs; that
simultaneously angelic and demonic kid, blue-eyed and snot-nosed,
innocently sinful, who must be regulated, controlled, socialised,
properly educated, managed, administered, constantly surveilled and
ordered.
'As such, the novel posits a future where the figure of the
(dangerously libidinal) child is caught in a Foucauldian panoptic of
surveilliance and punishment, a disciplinary system constructed
around concerns and anxieties about children’s access to the
(virtual) worlds of sex and violence, worlds Calder implictly, if
not explicitly equates with those of the imagination. As such,
Cythera might be read as a kind of allegorical satire (or satirical
allegory) of contemporary Britain (to which, apparently, the author
has recently returned), a landscape regularly swept by ‘moral
panics’, more like paroxsysms of hysteria, around children and the
media (‘video nasties’, ‘video violence’, computer porn, etc.),
panics which have led to the development of an almost baroque system
of film and video censorship, one predicated almost entirely on
fears for the psychological health and welfare of children. No
surprise,then, that the villains of this piece are the Censors,
psycho-puritans from Hell, obsessively policing the dreams and
imagination of children and young people. A brilliant, sometimes
savage novel.'
David Alexander, The Edge
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