Fantastic Metropolis

“E.M. Forster gave two cheers for democracy, but called Love the longed-for republic. Contemporary hedonism doesn’t have much time for love—we are intolerant of its language in politics, commerce, education and science. If I’m not much of a political animal—certainly not a party political one—then I’m a bit of a Marcusian when it comes to individual issues, especially issues of individual liberty. I would find myself in opposition to any creed that attempts to restrict or marginalize the expression of love, that is, desire, in speech, art, literature, and ultimately, thought. This, perhaps, makes me into something Richard Rorty calls a ‘romantic bourgeois liberal’: a believer in piecemeal reforms advancing economic justice, the freedoms people are able to enjoy, and the practical worth of thinking of others as like ourselves while remaining sceptical to political thought purporting to uncover hidden, systematic causes for injustice and exploitation.

“In terms of politics, the 1980s was a time when I was rather comfortably cocooned from the effects of Thatcherism, but the atmosphere of the 1970s is certainly present in my books—particularly the early books. The dangers of the Far Right are expressed in the Dead trilogy through the mad human supremacist party ‘The Human Front.’ Everything in the Dead trilogy is seen through the eyes of an adolescent boy, and this reflects the fact that I was summoning up a lot of material from my adolescence and teenage years.”

Having established that Richard Calder and I were teenagers in England in the same decade I feel obliged to ask to what extent the DIY ethos of Punk—the music, the fashions, the attitude—affected his worldview and his writing.

“Considerably. There’s something about genre fiction—particularly science fiction—that’s inherently not respectable. I like that. I’ve really only been interested in science fiction at two points in its development: the New Wave and Cyberpunk. Both ‘movements’ suggested SF could do anything and, at the same time, that a littérateur could get his or her hands dirty—in fact if they didn’t, you just knew they were doomed to live out their days in the ghetto of the bourgeois novel. I liked everything about the early days of punk, the self-assemblage of the music, the self-authoring quality of the artists, the fashions… Punk seemed to suggest the best way to play pop or rock music was, in some sense, not to play pop or rock music, just as I believe that the best way to write science fiction is not to write science fiction.”

The cyber element of Calder’s cyber-decadence seems to be driven by a feeling of apprehension leavened with a sense of possibility. So does his interest in technological mutation relate to a concern with the destructive effect our tools are having on the way we live and relate to each other? Or is it an aspect of his apparently obsessive interest in the notion of the plasticity of identity?

“I’m not really interested in futurology, and what social conscience I possess is rarely stirred by meditations upon the possibly adverse consequences of certain technologies. Susan Sontag characterised science fiction as a literature of disaster, and it’s disaster as literature that is my prime concern. For me, technology, when evoked, is there to flesh out a decimated landscape, or—in the ‘Dead’ trilogy, for example—to literally de-flesh and replace the natural with the artificial and thus aestheticise the world. I used nanotechnology in the ‘Dead’ trilogy originally because it seemed such a nice 21st-century interpretation of clockwork, that is, the mechanisms that animated the 18th automata that inspired the vampiric ‘dead girls.’

“As you suggest, technology, for me, does suggest other possibilities: the re-wiring of identity, a re-writing of time and space, and a re-working and perversion of reality—all of which occurs courtesy of the nanovirus ‘doll plague.’ I’m interested in the ‘plasticity of identity’ because, for one thing, none of us are whom we seem to be—we are all a collection of masks—and also because I feel that each fiction involving a fantasy quest should reveal, not merely the outward journey, but an inner one, too, leading to some kind of transformation, or resurrection, of the spirit.”