Richard Calder | |
|---|---|
 Calder in 2006 | |
| Born | 1956 London |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University of Sussex |
| Genre | Postcyberpunk science fiction |
Richard Calder (born 1956) is a British science fiction writer who lives and works in the East End of London. He previously spent over a decade in Thailand (1990–1997) and the Philippines (1999–2002).
Born in London, Calder began publishing stories in 1989, and first came to wider notice with the postcyberpunk novel Dead Girls (1992). Dead Girls was expanded into a trilogy; the other volumes are Dead Boys and Dead Things.
Since 1992, he has produced a further nine novels, and about twenty short stories. A theme running through his work (such as in 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.
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.[1]
In 2004 Dead Girls was under option to an Australian film production company. Calder was commissioned to draft a screenplay. When 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.[2] The graphic novel was originally serialised in Murky Depths.
