Cythera
Richard Calder
Orbit, paperback, 311pp, £5.99
Reviewed by David Alexander (1998)

Richard Calder’s ‘Dead’ trilogy was perhaps the most extraordinary of the many post-cyberpunk science fictions. A furious ‘n’ frenzied mix ‘n’ (mis)match of the usual cyber tropes with themes ‘n’ motifs blagged from the darker corners of the European surrealist tradition, de Sade and Bataille and their sexed-up fellow travellers, these dense and intense novels were deliriously and ambiguously positioned in the dim spaces where critical theory, pornography, postmodernism and sci-fi met. They were the ravings of both a madman and a genius, a fucked-up pomo geezer with a copy of Baudrillard’s Simulations in one hand and a sado-erotic porn mag in the other...whilst tucked into the pockets of his leather jacket, molotov cocktails, black matte dildoes and floppy disks containing downloads from The Black Plague website. These books were also, as if this needs to be said, quite dazzlingly brilliant.

Cythera is more or less in the same mould. A typically contemporary post-cyberpunky fiction which seeks to blur the boundaries between actuality ‘n’ virtuality, biology ‘n’ technology, the real ‘n’ the hyperreal, the novel comes across as yet another routine meditation on the post-human condition, all epistemological ‘n’ ontological doubt against a backdrop of television skies, neon-lit cities and hi-tech sex ‘n’ dance clubs.

At another, and perhaps more interesting level, however, Cythera broods darkly on contemporary regulatory discourses around childhood; the figure of the dangerous/endangered child which haunts the imagination of today’s politicians and moral entrepreneurs; that simultaneously angelic and demonic kid, blue-eyed and snot-nosed, innocently sinful, who must be regulated, controlled, socialised, properly educated, managed, administered, constantly surveilled and ordered.

As such, the novel posits a future where the figure of the (dangerously libidinal) child is caught in a Foucauldian panoptic of surveilliance and punishment, a disciplinary system constructed around concerns and anxieties about children’s access to the (virtual) worlds of sex and violence, worlds Calder implictly, if not explicitly equates with those of the imagination. As such, Cythera might be read as a kind of allegorical satire (or satirical allegory) of contemporary Britain (to which, apparently, the author has recently returned), a landscape regularly swept by ‘moral panics’, more like paroxsysms of hysteria, around children and the media (‘video nasties’, ‘video violence’, computer porn, etc.), panics which have led to the development of an almost baroque system of film and video censorship, one predicated almost entirely on fears for the psychological health and welfare of children. No surprise,then, that the villains of this piece are the Censors, psycho-puritans from Hell, obsessively policing the dreams and imagination of children and young people. A brilliant, sometimes savage novel.