Daniel Kalder, author of STRANGE TELESCOPES, at the Texas Book Festival

Joe Gross, books editor at the Austin American Statesman, reports on Daniel Kalder's appearance at the Texas Book Festival in Austin this weekend: " In his 2009 book, Strange Telescopes: Following the Apocalypse from Moscow to Siberia, Daniel Kalder hung around with a Russian fellow who declared himself the Messiah and had the followers to prove it, a Russian guy with a surreal English accent who performed underground exorcisms and a guy who knows so much about the tunnels under Moscow that he consults with special forces. Kalder described this last guy as “completely barking mad” more so even that dude who said he was the Christ.

And yes, when Kalder talked about it Sunday at the Texas Book Festival, he absolutely made it sound as cool as it reads on the page. The Scottish-born, Austin-residing writer has knocked out a couple of books about the ten years he spent in Russia at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st. When asked what set him on his quest, Kalder said growing up in an “astonishingly boring small town” in Scotland, it seemed like Russia was an ideal spot with a lot to do and a lot to learn. “It was like a parallel universe,” Kalder said. “with all these different groups and ethnicities entombed inside this old empire.” Much of the 50-minute hour was taken up with discussions of Vissarion, a former cab driver who, many years ago, had revelation that he was the son of God and started preaching in front a St .Basil’s. Noting the country’s religious traditions, Kalder said that “Russia was chockablock with Christs around this time.A lot faded, he grew.” Kalder visited Vissarion at his compound in remote Serbia, determined not to write the same old cult story. “I found a lot of highly intelligent, highly educated followers,” he said, including former rocket scientists and astrophysicists. “A lot of these people had been dissidents (under Soviet Communism), rock musicians,” Kalder said. “But Vissarion had built this perfect totalitarian system and these dissidents embraced totalitarianism in a new form.” By the way, you want to start a cult, Russia’s not a bad place. “(Russia is so big, if God starts talking to you, you can seal yourself off and construct an alternative world,” Kalder said.

When someone asked about a common thread among the converted, Kalder said the conversions stories sounded like any other: “The same as people you know who converted to Christianity or Communism; they were dissatisfied with reality to a certain degree, but who isn’t? I am, that’s why I did this,” he said, gesturing to the book."

--

STRANGE TELESCOPES: Daniel Kalder's Anti-Tourism Crusade

Sam Jordison reviews Strange Telescopes in 3AM magazine: "Strange Telescopes is the second instalment in Daniel Kalder’s anti-tourism crusade. Anti-tourism, in case you haven’t been lucky enough to encounter it so far, is a philosophy of travel Kalder claims to have forged in the Shymkent Hotel, Shymkent, Kazakhstan, October 1999. In this auspicious place he also laid down a manifesto the first three points of which are:

1. “As the world has become smaller so its wonders have diminished. There is nothing amazing about the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, or the Pyramids of Egypt. They are as banal and familiar as the face of a Cornflakes Packet.
2. “Consequently the true unknown frontiers lie elsewhere.
3. “The duty of the traveller therefore is to open up new zones of experience. In our over explored world these must of necessity be wastelands, black holes, and grim urban blackspots: all the places which, ordinarily, people choose to avoid.”

The rest is just as interesting and provocative, the final point, especially so: “The anti-tourist loves truth, but he is also partial to lies. Especially his own.” It’s only natural that the man who came up with such a policy document writes good books. His first, Lost Cosmonaut, took him to some of the former USSR’s more obscure ’stans. Dark places on the map ruled by statue-hungry megalomaniacs and – surprisingly – Buddhists. The book was, to use the technical terminology, fucking awesome. The kind of book that makes anyone else (all right, me) with an eye on alternative travel writing and the beauty of ugliness, extremely jealous – but also keen to read more. As much as possible. So I’ve been looking forward to the follow up for a long time – and wasn’t disappointed. It also is fucking awesome. Kalder’s delight in encountering such strangeness is an easily shared pleasure. But he doesn’t just see madness, pointless endeavour and absurdity. He sees the suffering, struggling, yet always hopeful humans behind it. Yes, he laughs at the fools, but this is not a cruel book. He pities them too. The portraits he gives are affectionate and warm and often moving. These strange men and their strange longing for … more… wins Kalder’s sympathy and even admiration – and that of the reader in turn. As Kalder makes us see, these are important people. People who make the world more interesting. Just as this book does. "

Daniel Kalder, author of STRANGE TELESCOPES, Profiled in Austin American-Statesman

Daniel Kalder, author of Strange Telescopes, is profiled by Jeff Salamon in the Austin American-Statesman. Here's a brief excerpt:

"In 1996, Kalder left for Russia to work as an English tutor. He figured he'd stay a year or so, but he wound up falling in love with Moscow and lived there for a decade. "You just see this entire society where nothing's fixed; everything is broken down," he says. "Something is being born and no one knows what it is." The two books Kalder has written about the former Soviet Union, Lost Cosmonaut and Strange Telescopes, have vaguely science-fictional titles, and he speaks of the fallen empire in distinctly fantastical terms, calling it a "parallel reality" and a "shadow universe." So when Kalder decided to turn himself into a journalist, he didn't much resemble the traditional model of the foreign correspondent who spends a few years filing dispatches and then writes a sober-minded tome about his host country.

"I lived there for almost 10 years, and I don't recognize Russia in that writing," he says. "It tends to be very, very kind of ponderous, very tragic, very chin-stroking, almost pious."
By contrast, what Kalder saw in the wreckage of post-Soviet Russia was something at once funny, tragic and perverse: a wild variety of realities auditioning for the 21st century.

Strange Telescopes, which was released last month in the U.S., tells the story of four of Russia's fervent believers: Vadim Mikhailov, the self-declared leader of a supposed army of "Diggers" who live in a subterranean kingdom that lies beneath Moscow's streets; Edward, a young man who wants to revive the culture of exorcism that was once central to the Russian Orthodox Church; Nikolai Sutyagin, who tried to build the world's tallest wooden skyscraper; and the book's most compelling character, Vissarion Christ, a self-proclaimed messiah who has established a base for his religious movement in remote Siberia. Unlike the other three, Vissarion isn't a failure; he has 4,000 followers. "For me, he was the greatest dreamer of all, because I entered his dream," Kalder says of the weeks he spent among Vissarion's cult.

Daniel Kalder's STRANGE TELESCOPES Reviewed in Booklist

Daniel Kalder's provocative new travel book, Strange Telescopes, is reviewed in the current issue of Booklist: "In unusual travels in Russia, Kalder, who spent a decade in the country, explored four worlds decidedly beyond the normal. Each is defined by its character, two of them religious in nature, the other two resembling hobbies taken a little too far. In Arkhangelsk, Kalder pursued the builder of what reputedly is the world's tallest wooden house; in Moscow, he cajoled a tagalong episode with a man obsessed by the city's tunnels; in Ukraine, he attended an exorcism; and in Siberia immersed himself in a community of believers centered on a traffic cop turned self-proclaimed Son of God, with whom he eventually secured an audience. Declining to default to cynicism toward these people, Kalder ruminates on their self-willed separation from mainstream Russian life and is impressed by their determination to define their own realities, temporal or transcendent. Without surrendering observational acuity about the oddities of the four realms he visits, and including bemused commentary about Russian travel per se, Kalder's venture into the eccentric extends the boundaries or ordinary travelogue, surely much to the readers' satisfaction." - Booklist

Overlook Preview: Daniel Kalder's STRANGE TELESCOPES

Coming in May is one of the most unusual and arresting books ever published by Overlook, Daniel Kalder's Strange Telescopes: Following the Apocalypse from Moscow to Siberia. Booklist gives us a sneak preview: "In unusual travels in Russia, Kalder, who spent a decade in the country, explored four worlds decidedly beyond the normal. Each is defined by its character, two of them religious in nature, the other two resembling hobbies taken a little too far. In Arkhangelsk, Kalder pursued the builder of what reputedly is the world’s tallest wooden house; in Moscow, he cajoled a tagalong episode with a man obsessed by the city’s tunnels; in Ukraine, he attended an exorcism; and in Siberia immersed himself in a community of believers centered on a traffic-cop-turned-self-proclaimed-Son-of-God, with whom he eventually secured an audience. Declining to default to cynicism toward these people, Kalder ruminates on their self-willed separation from mainstream Russian life and is impressed by their determination to define their own realities, temporal or transcendent. Without surrendering observational acuity about the oddities of the four realms he visits, and including bemusing commentary about Russian travel per se, Kalder’s venture into the eccentric extends the boundaries of ordinary travelogue, surely much to many readers’ satisfaction."

Early Praise for Daniel Kalder's STRANGE TELESCOPES

Kirkus Reviews gives us a sneak peek at Daniel Kalder's Strange Telescopes: Following the Apocolypse from Moscow to Siberia: "Scottish writer Kalder (Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist) offers tales of weird, occult doings in the land of Rasputin. Unless you're a longtime reader of Outside—in which Erin Arvedlund did a more economical job of telling the same story—you might not know that the sewers of Moscow, Russia, are home to an odd tribe of postmodern bohemian intellectuals who, tired of the impossibility of utopias aboveground, are trying their hands at creating a paradise below. Some of the subterraneans are more normal than others, relatively speaking, but it's no easy matter to distinguish those who have lost their marbles and claim to work directly for Vladimir Putin via secret telephone from those who truly do work for Putin via secret telephone ("That connects me directly to the Ministry of Emergency Situations!"). Whatever their motivations and connections, the Diggers, as they're known, have made a wondrous city beneath the city, a world into which Kalder guides readers. Meanwhile, aboveground, he writes, psychics and clergy are doing a land-office business conducting exorcisms "with the same frequency that plumbers patched up the pipes in the crumbling tower blocks of the former Soviet Union." One such exorcist divides his time between the underground and the surface world, and Kalder accompanies him on his chases after Satan, "catastrophe surfing" in the quieter corners of the erstwhile Evil Empire. In Siberia, a former traffic cop has concocted a millenarian sci-fi cult that makes cousins such as Scientology look rational. According to them, God is "a light that doesn't burn, which is cold and white and tender and gentle." Naturally enough, subterraneans and exorcists figure in it. . . A hoot to read."