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HarperCollins, UK, 1992 |
Dead Girls
HarperCollins, UK, 1992; St Martin's Press, US,
1995
Dead Girls features in Locus Online's retrospective 'Best
of 1992' list, compiled by Claude Lalumière.
'For nearly 40 years the sf field has been looking for the
heir to Alfred Bester, author of such doom-laden classics as The
Demolished Man (1953) and The Stars My Destination (1956). A master
of baroque pyrotechnics, rapid pacing, cosmopolitan sangfroid and
knock-your-socks-off conceptualization, Bester has left traces
everywhere, but no solid progeny. Until now. On the evidence of his
brilliant debut novel, Dead Girls (St Martin's), Richard Calder bids
fair to make off with Bester's mantle of charmed literary
omnipotence ... The density of allusiveness in this book is
astonishing. Tom Sawyer, Pinocchio, Lolita and Frankenstein are all
deftly evoked. Proust, Wells, Burgess, Dick and Dickens poke through
Calder's sophisticated prose as warped armatures. Historical
incidents and eras as diverse as the belle epoque and the Holocaust
are replayed as tragic farce. But over all reigns the ghost of J.M.
Barrie and his "Peter Pan." Explicitly and implicitly, the oversexed
Ignatz and Primavera are a debased Peter and Wendy, icons for a
diseased age.'
Washington Post Book World
'Packed with fascinating speculation on tomorrow's economics
and technology, European romanticism and quantum reality, Dead Girls
is a stunning achievement … This is a terrific first novel and a
great start to a trilogy that should enthrall
…'
Starlog
'Calder's debut has already been praised by William Gibson
and other sf notables as an ingeniously original vision of a
technologically and culturally warped twenty-first century … This
first part of a planned trilogy is likely to be lavished with
attention in the sf community and may herald the arrival of a major
new talent.'
Booklist
'A gender-specific nano-virus threatens humanity with
extinction by transforming its female victims into doll-like vampire
killing machines. When Ignatz Zwakh tries to protect his former
lover Primavera from those who would exterminate her, he falls into
a dark web of intrigue and sinister politics. This first novel
begins a trilogy that draws its ambience from its cyberpunk
underpinnings while manifesting a clarity of vision at once unique
and disturbing. Fans of cutting-edge sf will enjoy this taut,
provocative debut.'
Library Journal
'Dead Girls is, quite simply, dead
good.'
Interzone
'What Calder can really do is write jewelled and flashing
prose, like J.G. Ballard on speed.'
Vector
'Calder, who lives in Thailand, seems to have a clear notion
of the scope "pornocracy" has reached in the Far East, and his
dazzling evocation of the brutally corrupt 21st-century Bangkok and
Nongkhai is perhaps the greatest strength of this disturbing novel.
Described through prose that is alternately breakneck and overripe,
the cities seem as convincing and terrifying as the Calcutta of Dan
Simmon's 'Song of Kali' - and what we learn of a depopulated London
seems even worse … What helps to make the novel disturbing is that -
for a tale which revolves around carnality and desire - there are
virtually no human women anywhere in sight. The few grown women are
automata, nanoengineered through "fractal programming" down to the
quantum level; the girls are "lilim" - born normal, but infected by
a nanotech plague, transmitted through their fathers, which
gradually transforms them into mechanical nymphets facing an early
death, but already biologically "dead." If one believes that the sex
industries dehumanize women, Calder offers the most dramatic
metaphor yet to show just how this works: his lilim partake of every
aspect of the woman-as-alien from Lolita to dominatrix to vampire.
The protagonist, Ignatz Zwakh, has been infatuated with one of them,
Primavera, since he met her in school while she was still human. Now
he has escaped with her from a plague-quarantined London and works
as a decoy to set up her targets for murder. Captured by American
intelligence agents who want to know how they escaped quarantined
London, they become pawns in an international game whose stakes seem
to be the survival of humanity as a biological species
…'
Locus
'Does he succeed? I think so, despite appeals to trendy
quantum fractal bafflegab that quite fail to convince. We know how
to ignore that in favour of his really quite astonishing high-wire
dance of ultimate technological vampires and reductio ad absurdum of
the war between the sexes, not to mention racism and bigotry and
other human follies.'
Analog
'The impossible environment which Calder attempts to describe
draws on Lewis Carroll's looking-glass world as well as William
Gibson's cyberspace to model its features, and manages to forge the
difficult connection between science fiction and English romantic
gothic which only Michael Moorcock has really pulled off in the
past. Get it today.'
I-D
'Wild, daring, confused, brash, pyrotechnic … an intriguing
and encouraging debut.'
Kirkus Reviews
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