Dead Girls

In this impressive debut novel, the first volume of a projected trilogy, Calder joins the current band of fantasists (Kim Newman, Marc Laidlaw, Patrick McGrath et al.) who generally depict human beings striving to be human within a decadent, vicious society. Calder follows the exploits of expatriated English teenagers Ignatz Zwakh and Primavera Bobinksi through progressively more harrowing treacheries; these involve not only their adopted Thailand but also a resurgent U.S. government (on the brink of recovering the glory it lost sometime between now and the 2072 of the novel) as well as the English, depicted by Calder as naturally xenophobic. The teens fled England because Primavera is a human/nanotech hybrid known colloquially as ``Lilim,'' after Adam's first wife, Lilith. The Lilim ``weren't built around nucleic acids'' but do have a ``human-like consciousness.'' It is this quality that binds Ignatz and Primavera, whose relationship drives the narrative. Calder evokes his characters beautifully: ``Primavera was a doll now... a Lilim with the treacherous coal-black locks of an errant gypsy girl. Her eyes glowed like viridian isotopes. And her body was filled with the cold deliciousness of allure.'' Even in the decadence Calder limns in dense, highly imaginative prose (the most realistic representation in fantastic fiction of a decayed England since Newman's Bad Dreams), and even in seemingly the most heartless of characters, love, like the earth itself, abides. (June)