Gore Vidal said famously that long passages of *Gravity's Rainbow* require more effort to read than it apparently took Pynchon to compose - that verbal imagination had far overreached the restraining subtleties of craft and artifice, producing a congested, overwritten narrative whose exuberance is (simultaneously) its opacity. While Richard Calder's difficult tale does not always maintain the necessary balance between over-the-top yahoo invention and tight controlled craftsmanship (the elusive crux of postmodern artistry), his bold attempts to square the narrative circle (especially against the backdrop of mass-market SF) is often fascinating to watch, with important narratological lessons embedded therein. Ignatz's trespassing love for the wrathweary female assassin Primavera, coeval with the technocratic steppes of a Eurasian cyberiad, is told with genuine passion, yet throughout the reader can't escape the feeling that s/he's entered the realm of literary comic books, an introverted David Lynch fantasy-land where Calder is free to play out his fetishistic narrative constructs. I recommend the Dead Trilogy to younger writers as a moratorium against the Oxygen Debt of linguistic overindulgence, in contrast to the more tempered workmanship of, say, a Jack Womack, or a Neal Stephenson. As Vidal put it, "Energy and intelligence are not in balance, and the writer fails in his ambition to be a god of creation.... This is entropy with a vengeance."
