From Publishers Weekly
Time and space collapse-and nearly pull narrative coherence into the void with them-in this audacious but sometimes impenetrable sequel to the praised Dead Girls (1995). The world of the 21st century is still governed by a "pornocracy" that ritually desexes "dead girls," or women turned into vampiric "dolls" by a nanotech virus. There, Ignatz Zwakh, hero of the continuing saga, mourns his executed dead girl Primavera by pickling her extracted reproductive organs in a whiskey bottle. His perverse fascination has a purpose: from her future life on the planet Mars, Vanity, the daughter Ignatz will program from Primavera's residual wetware, is "using her mother's ablated uterus as a transdimensional mailbox" to guide her genesis. As the author cross-cuts from Ignatz's decadent adventures in Thailand to Vanity's efforts to elude a dead boy bounty hunter, identities blur and timescapes blend into one another. At the heart of the novel lies a critique of Western capitalism and sexual politics, of how they dehumanize and homogenize all they touch. But it is often difficult to see this point for the prose. Calder's penchant for allusive wordplay redolent with references to B-movies and other SF stories produces scintillating dialogue, but it deteriorates into obfuscatory self-indulgence when characters are left alone to ruminate on their fates, or on the universe's entropic decline.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Calder's
Dead Girls (1994) won raves for its surrealistic vision of a twenty-first-century society threatened by
lilim adolescent females transformed by a nanotechnological virus into robotic sexual predators. Still mourning the destruction of his own cherished "dead girl," Ignatz Zwakh, the former novel's narrator, returns to discover that the virus has begun infecting males, including, as the first victim, himself. Under the influence of the quantum-based programming driving the virus, Ignatz begins seeing his future on a terraformed Mars, where the
lilim have run rampant and are ritually executed. Soon it becomes clear that the plague's reach extends not only into the future but into the very structure of time itself. Calder's often morbid, metaphor-chocked prose may be sf's imaginative leading edge or merely an eccentric detour; it probably will turn away more than a few tradition-bound readers. Yet Calder's exceptional talent is hard to ignore, and the buzz about him in sf circles should put this and his future work in heavy demand.
Carl Hays
