Subdeb sighting ...

[Dave Monroe]

... finally getting around to Richard Calder's Cythera: A Novel (New
York: St. Martins, 1998), and, lo and behold, what do I read but ...

Framed by a proscenium of filigree and lewd entablature, the karaoke's
dancers jiggled and preened themselves before a jungle of mirrors:
girl-children clothed in mock eighteenth-century garb, peignoirs like
mantuas, slashed to reveal underpeignoirs of gossamer, breasts thrust
high by cone-shaped corsets, cleavages powdered as lead-white as their
high-piled pompadours.  Strobes pulsed, fluttering against them like
butterflies on heat, suffering cruel wounds as they kamikazied beneath
the poniards of glass slippers, lepidopterous juices spilling onto the
audience, staining the rococo playground of our fellow twenty-first
century rococoteers, mixing with the club's ambience of dead intimacy,
dead imagination.  I turned my back on the SUBDEB jigglers and
wigglers--those indicia of suprareality--and reconnoitred amongst the
roustabouts, men who liked a capital F in Fairyland as much as they
liked it in Fuck.... (25-6; emphasis added)

... 'zat the first instance of a Pynchonism entering the language
(purple-prosaic as it may be) at large?   A la Nabokov's "nymphet"?
Anyway, see also Calder's Dead Girls (and, beyond that, Dead Boys and
Dead Things), cybergoth, one (namely, me) might call 'em, and right up
my particular, peculiar alley in re: feminine automata et al. (again,
see Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song).   Wm. Gibson (author of
many, many jacket blurbs, plus  afew novels along the way) and Paul
DiFilippo (author of The Steampunk Trilogy, who I've been led to believe
might once have frequented this list himself) seem to like him just fine
as well ...