Reception
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt gave Kalki a mixed review,saying that while the story is initially entertaining, "an icy wind blows throughout the novel, and when all is said and done that wind has blasted the characters and plot of "Kalki" into just so many opinions. . . . By the end, it doesn't seem like fiction at all that we're reading, but just another clever dissertation by Gore Vidal."
Time critic R. Z. Sheppard took a more favorable view, finding the novel "an amusing, brittle tissue of truths culled largely from the journalistic sources Vidal enjoys satirizing." He described Kalki as "an apocalyptical extravaganza that craftily combines feminism, homosexuality, mysticism, science fiction, fiction science, the second law of thermodynamics, the first law of survival, high fashion and low animal cunning" and its plot as "diabolically clever."
Orson Scott Card, writing expressly from a genre perspective, faulted Vidal's narrator as "intensely boring," but praised the apocalyptic conclusion: "Kalki left me with the haunting feeling that there was something grateful about four billion people leaving life suddenly, without panic. without a chance to soil their last moments with repentance or greed."
Read more about this topic: Kalki (novel)
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