While technically a “novel,” Children of the Void is clearly based on the role-playing lives of an extraordinary group of six women who share between them 22 personae and inhabit an “all female world of glamor and discipline” which they call Aristasia (located in present-day London). The Aristasians see our age (inaugurated by the great cultural collapse of the 1960s) as unnatural and psychotic and have seceded from the outside world which they term “The Pit,” erecting their own “Iron Curtain” in order to create their own time-space regions such as Vintesse (the 1920s) and Novaria (the projected future).
The Aristasian girls are divided into two sexes: blonde (ultra-feminine) and brunette (feminine) and even the most casual social relations between the sexes often seem to necessitate corporal punishment such as canings or strappings which are detailed by Miss Snow with a simmering eroticism. In place of what Snow terms “The Void” (the entire post-’60s cultural milieu), the Aristasians inhabit their own lively social whirl of the Cinema Odeon, the Soda Fountain, and the Constant Nymph Club. Their flirtations and chastisements are interspersed with eloquent theoretical analyses of the state of the Pit, in which for example a home is described as “just a dormitory for consumers” and its depraved media manipulations of the “bongos” (pit-dwellers). Includes a glossary of the Aristasian language and an afterword specifically addressed to the “One Girl in a Thousand” who might be inspired to actually cross over the Iron Curtain into the glamorously strict world of Aristasia. SS

Publisher: Wildfire Club
Hardback: 192 pages
Illustrated