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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 animι. 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
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