Author Language English Genre Science Fiction | Country United Kingdom Series Dead Publisher HarperCollins | |
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Dead Boys is the second novel by British science fiction author Richard Calder, and was first published in 1994.
Contents
The novel is the second in Calders 'Dead' trilogy, and is preceded by the novel Dead Girls.
Synopsis and Influences
Dead Boys is a science fiction novel set six months after the events of Dead Girls.
Richard Calder has said that William Burroughs "gave birth" to Dead Boys.": I was certainly influenced by the New Wave...The idea, for instance, that SF could go anywhere and appropriate the stylistic and cultural concerns of writers like William Burroughs...In other words, the New Wave encouraged a belief that SF could be radical and experimental literature.
Plot summary
1 - STRANGE BOYS
Doll-junky Ignatz Zwakh lives in the Mut Mee guesthouse in Nong Khai. He has preserved the excised womb and matrix of his dead lover Primavera, and gets high injecting himself with Lilim junk...
The future: the dolls have evolved into the Meta: female Lilim who infect human males, and Elohim dead boys who keep the Lilim numbers under control. Elohim Inquisitor Dagon, armed with his gamekeeper gun, wants to hunt down traitoress Vanity St.Viridiana who has turned catgirl and is heading to Mars where she is offered sanctuary. Instead the governess sends Dagon on a mission to track down an information broker who sold Vanity a virus...
Ignatz is proposition by human prostitute Phin but turns her down. Ignatz finds a ball of paper in the jar containing Primavera's pickled uterus: a message from his daughter in the future, sent back in time through the quantum magic of the Lilim. Having been infected by Primavera Ignatz will infect whatever woman he sleeps with the doll plague, and his daughters message tells him who he has to infect. Fearing that Primavera's nanomachine infection has driven him mad Ignatz seeks help from Dr International, who examines him...
2 - STRANGE GIRLS
Ignatz' daughter Vanity has defected to Paris, Mars. Since Ignatz time the Martian diplomats have been responsible for banning the killing of Lillim by 'slink-riving' (impaling through the vagina). Mars is off-limits to human terrestrials and Elohim. Mutagenic rain soaked up by the early Mars colonists has rendered the Martians immune to Lilim doll plague infection. By this time Ignatz has died and Vanity wears Primavera's fossilized womb as an amulet. By the time of Vanity's generation the quantum magic is no longer strong in the Lilim. Vanity meets her new social worker Sabine before going to La Sucette bar where she has oral sex with a Martian called Tintin, fantasising she is being executed in the old belly spike manner by Dagon. Frustrated, Vanity sends instructions back to Ignatz...
3 - STRANGE SEX
Ignatz wakes from his stupor, finding Dr International has tried to drug him to steal the sexstuff from Primavera's womb. Later Ignatz gives a present of a sentient phallus called Mr Rochester to Phin's grandmother, as he intends to infect her with the doll plague the next day. Back at the hotel he once again gets high on Primavera's womb...
Inquisitor Dagon is in Paris, Mars, tracking down Vanity. Entering her abode he causes one catgirl Lilim to spontaneously die from Black Orgasm, executes another with his gamekeeper, before giving in to his marauder urges with a third, killing her by eating her ovaries from her living womb. Vanity arrives back at her apartment and Dagon captures her, rendering her unconscious.
Ignatz beings to sense the Meta reaching back through time and changing reality, creating a new past where the Lilim were created by the Nazis converting Jews into cyborg weapons. Ignatz meets Phin and barters with her a price to let him get her pregnant. Ignatz features begin to take on an Elohim aspect...
4 - STRANGE GRACE
Dagon has taken Vanity back to Bangkok, Earth, and reveals the history that the Meta (the god-like descendent of the self-replicating nanoware that was the seed of the dolls) is overwriting...
...how the Human Front government was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup, with Queen Titania leading a new age of human/doll co-existence, with the Elohim inheriting the ability to trigger the death-wish of the Lilim, and thus keep them from overrunning the humans they need to replicate and survive as a species. Back then Dagon had still been known as Ignatz Zwakh, and following Primavera's death he was summoned by Titania to return to England. Over time Ignatz turns fully into Elohim. Later Titania is arrested by the presidium and executed. Ignatz is tutored by Mephisto in the ziggurat that has grown from the Seven Stars, where Lilim desire death and Elohim desire murder. Phin has also moved to London, where she begins transforming into a Lilim. Ignatz/Dagon is expelled for slink-riving a Lilim in violation of the Martian treaty and is sent to Bankok, where he is reunited with Phin, now transformed into Vanity, before she flees to Mars...
Back in Dagon's present the condemned Vanity begs Dagon to kill her, and begins to fellate him...
...as back in Ignatz's present Phin breaks off from the same act in disgust at Ignatz's Meta-infected semen and leaves.
5 - STRANGE TIMES
Having failed to get Phin pregnant Ignatz leaves the Mut Mee, tying Primavera's womb around his neck as an amulet. Ignatz goes to the Wat Khek datamart to look up Dagon, and finds his history changing: Dagon/Ignatz is now born Gabriel Strange 100 years earlier, with Primavera his sister...aliens from Mars make contact with Earth in the nineteenth century fuelling a technical revolution...Dagon slaughters numerous Lilim in the ziggurat before being captured...in 1978 Dagon is sentenced to 15 years in a virtual prison in Nongkai, Thailand...
6 - STRANGE BEAUTY
Ignatz meets pornomarketeer O'Sullivan, who gives him an erotic magazine. Through the magazine Ignatz and Vanity communicate, exchanging sexual fantasies. Ignatz goes to a bar, and finds himself transformed...
...into Dagon, where he has been released from his virtual imprisonment where he had dreamed his life as Ignatz. Dagon joins Mephisto on the spaceship Sardanapalus, where their mission is to fly through the green sun that is all that will be left of meta superfemininity. In doing so Dagon travels through a closed time-loop back to where he started...
7 - STRANGE GENETALIA
Ignatz visits a virtual masseuse, where he dreams of a pastoral existence with Primavera. As Meta infects the universe Ignatz realises that when he returns to reality it will be just as fictitious.
Dagon hunts Vanity through a multiverse of realities...
Critical reception
Calder has always been aware that his books polarize readers: There are those who enthusiastically embrace them, and there are those who regard them with an unremitting enmity about that. I am philosophical about that. There is no book that this is more true about than Dead Boys. A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews wrote that this book is: A thoroughly unpleasant piece of business
However even sympathetic reviewers have issues with the experimental nature of this book: 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. Review in Publishers Weekly