I think
it’s fair to say the name Paul Di Filippo is known to the majority of modern
science fiction and fantasy connoisseurs but by few readers from the genre’s
mainstream. Experimental stylistically, imaginatively
unlimited, in dialogue with genre, sophisticated presentation, and often ahead
of his time, there is a genre radar, and Di Filippo flies under it for most of
fandom. Exhibiting these talents is his
wild 1996 collection Ribofunk. As abstract as can be, it is the off the wall
science fiction written in dynamic prose that vacillates between poetic,
experimental, and straight-forward narratives to present a biopunked worldview
of the future.
Like
randomly hopping trains at every station, Ribofunk
is a loosely connected series of stories that are definitely going somewhere
but the destination is not important.
It’s the view along the way that counts for Di Filippo. Characters and settings not the main
linkages, the possibilities of human/animal biology coupled with neuroscience
are the ideas cohering the collection.
And the possibilities are untamed.
“Little Worker” is the story of a human-imal servant, gene spliced sex
toys, a prime minister, and southern rebels—bizarreness that works its way to a
satisfactory ending. “One Night in
Television City” is that of a city boy who goes looking for drugs one
night. Getting what he wants, it takes
him to the highest of highs. But how to
get down? “McGregor”, which is Beatrix
Potter’s tale of Peter Rabbit flipped on its head, spun in circles, then
induced into a round or two of cartwheels is the story of how Peter looks for
revenge on the farmer. Along with the
three blind mice and Flopsy, he works to free the other barnyard animals from
the farmer. With Peter puffing cigs and
hanging a leary eye on Flopsy, this is not the children’s story you remember.
And
‘facile’ does not begin to describe the stories linguistically. ‘Lyrically gymnastic’ seems a better
descriptor, as seen in the following apparent homage to A Clockwork Orange:
“ Just a few short
hours ago it was six o’clock on a Saturday night like any other, and I was
sitting in a metamilk bar called the Slak Shak, feeling sorry for myself for a
number of good and sufficient reasons. I was down so low there wasn’t an
angstrom’s worth of difference between me and a microbe. You see, I had no
sleeve, I had no set, I had no eft. Chances were I wasn’t gonna get any of ’em
anytime soon, either. The prospect was enough to make me wanna float away on
whatever latest toxic corewipe the Shak was offering.
I asked the table
for the barlist. It was all the usual bugjuice and horsesweat, except for a new
item called Needlestrength-Nine. I ordered a dose, and it came in a cup of cold
frothy milk sprinkled with cinnamon. I downed it all in two gulps, the whole
nasty mess of transporter proteins and neurotropins, a stew of long-chain
molecules that were some konky biobrujo’s idea of blister-packed heaven.
All it did was
make me feel like I had a cavity behind my eyes filled with shuttle-fuel. My
personal sitspecs still looked as lousy as a rat’s shaved ass.” (1)
And the
linguistic gymnastics extend in varying forms to other stories. Told partially in prosaic rhyme (yes, prosaic
rhyme), “Big Eater” is the story of a young man with family problems who saves
Chicago from destruction at the hands of—well, you’ll have to read for
yourself. Nearly a romp in Alice in Wonderland, it’s to be enjoyed
for language more than plotting. One of
the more sobering stories in the collection (perhaps the only one), “Brain
Wars” also has its share of imaginative patois.
A future soldier in a Short War, after being hit by a neuro-chem bomb,
proceeds to suffer from numerous iterations of brain ailments as army doctors try
to correct what was damaged. Memory loss, missing nouns, dyslexia—it turns out
letters home to mom from the front lines can have more to report than ‘same
shit, different day’ . “Streetlife” is
the story of another human-imal biocreature, this time sent on a drug delivery
thorugh the ‘libertarian quarter’ of the city.
It’s fair to say he has the night of his life at the hands of others but
gets his in the end.
Stuck in
the middle of Ribofunk is a trio of
stories featuring the same private eye.
“The Boot” tells the story of a commission wherein a woman requests to
have her data-stealing husband given the boot—yes, like a car with too many
parking tickets, but less metal.
“Blankie” is an investigation into an improbably homicidal blanket and
the baby it killed. And “The Bad Splice”
is the story of a lab creation gone wrong.
The three stories’ aims are simple from a plot point of view, but go a
long way toward laying down the slightly more complex, common backdrop to the
collection: the near infinite limits of biomodification. It’s a bonus that with the light noir
atmosphere, Di Filippo continues creating witty neologisms.
If there’s
any dark side to the collection, it’s that Di Filippo never truly digs into the
material. Superficially there is a smorgasbord
of imagery and linguistic play, and even suggestions as to the deeper
implications of biotech advances and possibilities in the human and animal arena. But at a deeper level, none of the moral,
personal, or social aspects are engaged with significantly or
meaningfully. “Up the Lazy River”, the
collection’s environmental story, is a very interesting look at how cells,
molecules, etc. may be altered unnaturally to provide a certain result—and
indeed Di Filippo splashes images on the mind’s eye—but the idea is not taken
further. “Cockfight” is the story of a
team of toxic waste cleaners for hire.
Working internationally, when one of them gets in trouble at a strip
club, all hell breaks loose, but no further comments on class are made, the imagery
enough. Teen pregnancy? Drug use?
Hanging out with the wrong crowd?
Piff-paff. In “Afterschool
Special “ Di Filippo proves teenagers of the future could have even more
worrying concerns then any parent today could ever dream of. The story of a teen who wants to get
‘spiked’, it’s kind of like body piercing, but not exactly... “Distributed Mind” is the final story in the
collection. Attempting to be the “big
reveal”, i.e. what all the biomods mean, it is the meta-story content-wise, but
given the bizarreness of all the collection as a whole, has difficulty having impact
as such.
In the
end, Ribofunk, is a widly imagined
collection of vignettes on a future where biotech is as malleable as info
currently is. Bizarre the only word to
describe the scenes and scenarios imagined, readers should expect stories that
work within a range of standard genre to absurdism, Weird, and at times even
what seems a parody of cyberpunk itself.
Linguistically, Di Filippo writes up not down to his readers. (This, in my opinion, is one of the key
reasons he is on the outside looking in to mainstream genre readers). If you do not possess an imaginative mind for
making whip-snap relationships between signs and signifiers in a futuristic
world, the collection may not be for you.
Di Filippo spoon feeds nothing.
Conversations are a buzz of futuristic slang and contextualized
neologisms. A baton Charles Stross would
later take and run full tilt with, Ribofunk is
madly inventive. Yet it retains a drop of humanism, and for this bears more in
common with James Patrick Kelly, Bruce Sterling, Walter Jon Williams, or
Michael Swanwick.
One may wish Di Filippo had dug a little further into his story
material, but as it stands, there may be more than enough to stand on. Before the term ‘biopunk’ ever reached the
mainstream, it was brewing in Di Filippo’s uncanny mind, and Ribofunk is that collection.
Published
between 1989 and 1996, the following is the table of contents for the
collection:
One Night
in Television City
Little
Worker
Cockfight
Big Eater
The Boot
Blankie
The Bad
Splice
McGregor
Brain Wars
Streetlife
Afterschool
Special
Up the
Lazy River
Distributed
Mind
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