I have to admit to having had a deal of trouble writing a review for this book. Not the fault of the book, just that I felt I was not really getting to the crux of what this book was about. It's because it's an odd mix of ingredients brought together in a slightly surreal way.

As we start we encounter Madeleine Fell, a girl fast approaching womanhood in Victorian London during the summer of Jack the Ripper's murderous spree. But it is not in the fiercely repressive world she finds herself that Madeleine sees her future. Madeleine is a devotee of the ways of ancient Babylon and sees that city as her way out of the tight-structure of Victorian Society.

Now in the world in which she lives this is not the forlorn hope it would be in ours, as Babylon is still very much alive in a parallel realm.

I'd only read a couple of Richard Calder's short stories many years prior to my picking up this book – and they were intriguing, so much so that I have at least half a dozen of his other books in my collection that I have yet to find time to read. This is a situation I intend to remedy, for if this is a good indication of his style I have been missing a treat these past few years.

Calder builds his worlds wonderfully well, and in a way that even the most surreal of situation somehow seems totally believable and everyday. There are some books that try to merge together the real world and a surreal sub- or alternate world. Often this mixing proves sloppy and quite disappointing, but rest assured this is anything but.

My favourite writer of this kind of fiction is Paul Di Filippo. Well he has competition in Richard Calder, although Calder's fiction has a very strong English and in some ways mythic voice whereas Di Filippo's has a much stronger science-fictional content and a definite US-flavour.

This is not a book that is likely to appeal to anyone whose idea of science fiction is Star Wars, Star Trek and similar tales. Equally I can see this being enjoyed by people who are not sf readers, although if the usual prejudice against sf holds then unfortunately this is unlikely, why would non-sf readers stoop so low as to read incredibly well written sf when they can read a mediocre mainstream work. And much to their loss, they will have missed out on a fine book here.

Synopsis
Whitechapel, London. 1888. Madeleine Fell is dreaming of Babylon. Not the Victorian Babylon of London, but a second, Mesopotamian Babylon that exists in a parallel dimension, a world populated and ruled by Ishtar's sacred prostitutes that has of late gained ascendancy over our own.

In Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper is murdering Babylonian whores. And off-world, on Babylon itself, the men of the Black Order plot revolution - by instituting a ruthless program of gendercide. Unbeknown to her disapproving parents, Madeleine enters the Babylonian novitiate, her heart set upon travelling to the exotic, parallel world of her dreams, fearful, yet at the same time strangely excited, by the intimation that her demon lover awaits.

When Madeleine's parents discover what she has done, she escapes to Babylon with the help of her irrepressible friend and fellow novice, Cliticia. As the two adventuresses journey through a landscape of magnificently bizarre ruins towards the consummation of their amour fou and a concomitant disillusionment, they begin to understand that Babylon the Great, like London, is as much a city of the mind as a set of co-ordinates on a transdimensional map, and that they owe the Black Order, and even Jack the Ripper himself, a debt of complicity.