Cythera

Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things #4

by Richard Calder

The illegal immigrants of 2025 are not Third World emigrants - they're coming from cyberspace. Downloaded eidolons walk the streets as holograms by day, and at night they grow corporeal. These "ghosts" are growing more human and more real than the world that spawned them...and now they're looking to alter reality in order to accommodate their needs. Young Dahlia Chan, star of such chop-socky masterpieces as Kung Fu Nymphet from Hell, is becoming the most important ghost of all. She is a copy divorced from its original, and she's growing more powerful. A thief named Mosquito has been hired by Madame Kito (one of Bangkok's powerful pornocrats) to steal Dahlia and neutralize the threat of the ghosts. But Mosquito recognizes something of himself in Dahlia, and kidnapping her may be just the start of something bigger ...

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Cyberpunk

312 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 1, 1998

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four and a half stars? This is weird, wild stuff. Beyond of the fringes of good taste, on the far side of fantasy, this manages to be wonderfully surreal, wickedly intelligent SF. Somewhere on the edge of modern culture, in an Antarctic wasteland populated by virtual pulp simulacra given new flesh, there is Cythera. If it didn't exist then Richard Calder would have to invent it. So he did.

[Dr. Barrett Dylan Brown, Phd · Rating 4 out of 5]

most innovative new writing style I have discovered in quite some time. Calder reads like some strange mixture of William S. Burroughs and Neal Stephenson. Sexy and Evil with mucho futuristic content and bizaire prose.

[Liviu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never read anything by R. Calder and I have to say I liked the style of this one; weird, and not making full sense from time to time, Cythera is a very interesting mix of not-quite-cyberpunk, multiple-realities and all around strangeness; not for the easily offended though

[Zwahk Muchoney · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be honest the only reason I read this book was because I heard it had returning characters from calder's first three books, those sections of the book are a lot of fun but if you're coming in as somebody who's never read those first few books you're not going to appreciate those sections. There's also some weird pedophile stuff in the book that I didn't really appreciate oh, I could really understand a person being turned off by those aspects of the book.

[unrequitedangst · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stylistically interesting? I don't know, it seems like a rehash of Dead Girls, but in a much more trite kind of way. Part of this probably has to do with the fact that I was speedreading parts during the middle, but I can't tell if Calder's deliberately trying to parallel Ignatz & Primavera with Tarquin & Dahlia. If the two books were unrelated, I'd say yes, but since Madame Kito and Mosquito are in both, I'm ... not really sure ..... what .... to .... think.

The idea in and of itself is interesting, but I don't really see what Cythera accomplishes that Dead Girls didn't. The good news is that it isn't as far out as Dead Boys or Dead Things; the bad news is that it is just so far out, period. I actually liked the idea of the Queer identity, etc, and the porn film ghosting, but the pedophilia seriously weirded me out so much. Everyone and their brother got raped, apparently. The thing that bemuses me is, I think, that I can see where Primavera in Dead Girls gets the personality from and, likewise, all of her successors in the rest of the trilogy and it actually comes across as rather brilliant commentary on the sexualized culture, etc. Cythera, not so much; I just didn't see the point of Dahlia, much less Tarquin's obsession with her. This isn't to say that I didn't find the first portion of the novel enjoyable; I just don't see what the rest of it was supposed to accomplish in a new and fresh way. :|

I don't understand what the point of Mosquito's narrative was, other than the shock value, and Madame Kito annoyed me because she felt like a shrew. Granted, she rather is one, but it feels odd to see her in exactly the same role she played in the Dead Things trilogy. The language is nice, but quite dense; plotwise, it's pretty static which I think lends to the problem as well.

I'm not sure how to feel about this book, to be honest; my threshold for weirdness is sufficiently low at this point that the concept of the novel doesn't bother me and I actually enjoyed the idea, but the execution feels pedophilic and intensely, intensely misogynist without any of the dark humor that balanced Dead Things out.

[Pat Sul · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is one of those books i love purely and simply because it confused the tits off of me.
cyberpunk meets philip k dick meets dystopian future.
story within a story within a story. echoes and ripples.
teaming with ideas and concepts. flowing purple prose, words i had never seen before, words i couldn't even pronounce.

it would have been a 10 star book if i had understood it.
complex, entertaining, thought-provoking.

this is the first time i have calder's work in ages. i must go back and read some of his other books.

if you like dense complicated stories and are a walking dictionary then this is the books for you.

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

junk crap, makes no sense, jumps around between characters and places. no plot, no point,

[Jason]

qawdqrasdzxczv

[Steve Clark]

Edition: paperback / softback