Occupation Writer Alma mater University of Sussex Role Fiction writer | Name Richard Calder Nationality British | |
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Genre Postcyberpunk Science Fiction Nominations James Tiptree, Jr. Award Books Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Malignos, Dead Things, Frenzetta | ||
Richard Calder (born 1956, London) is a notable British science fiction writer who lives and works in the East End of London, but who spent over a decade in Thailand (1990–1997) and the Philippines (1999–2002).
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Writing career
Calder began publishing stories in 1989, and first came to wider notice with the postcyberpunk novel Dead Girls (1992). Dead Girls expanded into an acclaimed trilogy of books, for which he was compared to William Gibson, J.G. Ballard and Alfred Bester.
Since 1992, he has produced a further nine novels, and about twenty short stories. A notable theme running through his work (most notably the 'Dead' trilogy) is agalmatophiliac male lust for young female gynoids, as well as the darker undercurrents of British national culture. His novels and stories have links and plot overlaps between one another, and together form a mythos. His "epic masterpiece" ("Reading Richard Calder", Claude Lalumière) is said to be Malignos (2000).
He cites as inspirations Angela Carter and Georges Bataille, among others.
He was interviewed in the magazine Interzone in August 2001 about the theme of escape and his own attempts to break away from, "the physical and psychological constraints of the cloying suburbia of his childhood." He said: The quest for metaphysical, or psychological homeland you mention, a place of fulfilment seems to end, for my heroes and heroines, in a debacle often involving some apocalyptic rendering of the world. But they do seem to discover something more important than the prospect of mind-blowing, Wagnerian transformation. And that something is tenderness.
In 2004 Dead Girls was under option to an Australian film production company. Richard Calder was commissioned to draft a screenplay. When however the film did not materialise he got the idea to re-imagine the book as a graphic novel. This was published in 2014.It is illustrated by Filipino artist Leonardo M Giron who was introduced to Richard Calder by Terry Martin the editor of the quarterly magazine Murky Depths. The graphic novel was originally serialised in the Murky Depths.
Short stories
Calder's short stories have been published almost exclusively by the magazine Interzone since 1989
Critical reactions
The Edge said: "Richard Calder's 'Dead' trilogy was perhaps the most extraordinary of the many postcyberpunk science fictions."
Calder is a fine stylist, however, and the complex history and nano-biology he has created for his Dead novels is fascinating. The trilogy holds many rewards, cerebral and aesthetic, for those willing to persevere.Review of Dead Things in Publishers Weekly
His Dead trilogy is analysed in the third section of the book Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought by Patricia Melzer (University of Texas Press, 2006). ISBN 978-0292713079
Calder refuses to romanticize or glorify his characters' unpleasantness, or even to be judgemental towards them. He invents repulsive characters and presents them with neither love nor contempt. Readers must deal with their reactions to his creations on their own...Where Calder is passionate is with the baroque and perverse qualities he invests into his fantastical settings. Calder's bizarre imagination and idiosyncratic prose style provide the momentum, perversely seducing with their fetishistic overindulgences. Review of Lord Soho by Claude Lalumière
Impakto's trick is take the creakiest of plot structures and the crassest of clichés, and make something fabulously knowing about them...A kind of incitement, Calder's witty end to this stunning riot of retooled clichés suggests that imaginative ideas leak off the page and into readers' lives, just as religious beliefs had earlier leaked into the novel's multiverse. - Review by Matt Hills of Impakto in Interzone (magazine).
For all Richard Calder's works share one thing in common - they could not have been written by anybody else. The universes contained within them are his alone. Interview by Charles Rudkin in Interzone (magazine).
His work is also discussed in the books Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs and the Culture of Consumption by Robert Latham (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and The Body's Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture edited by Michele Aaron (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) ISBN 978-0748609611