Cythera

Rating:
Summary: Welcome to the vortex
Review: Lovers of Richard Calder's Dead Boys/Girls/Things will lap up Cythera. A swirling giddy mix of William Gibson and William S Burroughs, Cythera is a veritable vortex of images - Lolita-like doll children, beautiful cyborgs, pirate ships, Antarctican mansions, computers, ghosts. Bubbling up through this fractured narrative are such themes and concepts as childhood's end, violated innocence, uploading, geopolitics, virtual universes, nanotechnology. Not so much a story, running on its rails from start to finish, this is more a kaleidoscope, or better yet, a hologram, meant to be viewed from a multitude of angles (a hologram that has fallen off the mantlepiece and shattered!) Well, I'm kind of old-fashioned, I love stories with a plot I can follow, characters I can relate to. Cythera has its gems, many flashes of sharp and surreal brilliance, but it was rather like watching a firework display that went on too long; reading more than a chapter or so had me reaching for my headache pills (I've given myself a headache now, just from thinking up all those metaphors!)

Rating:
Summary: Cythera
Review: When I initially read this book, I found it somewhat confusing, seemingly a let down from the Dead Girls series. The writing itself may actually be somewhat improved, but the plot seemed difficult or impossible to follow.

I've since re-read it twice more, along with re-reading the Dead Girls series several more times, and I've read Calder's most-recently-available-Stateside book, Frenzetta, twice to boot. Seeing them all again, and next to one another, it becomes more apparent that these books fit together in a larger scheme. With this in mind, a lot of the confusion in Cythera vanishes. There is still some ambiguity to the plot, but with the context of Frenzetta especially, some of the more seemingly inexplicable threads are resolved, for me. The remainder of them work well as deliberate ambiguity. And who knows, perhaps his other novels will provide greater clarity.

I'm looking forward to picking up The Twist, just to see where it fits in, and what clues it leaves. I know it's already been alluded to at least once, in Cythera I believe, at that.