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. "

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."