Margaret
Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Harlan
Ellison’s “The Deathbird”, Rick Moody’s The
Four Fingers of Death, Philip K. Dick’s VALIS,
C.M. Kornbluth’s “MS Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie”, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, Jeff
VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen—on
and on goes the list of works interacting with the idea of fiction while being
fiction. Each with their own vector to
how speculative fiction might be meta’d, none to date, however, have engaged
with the spectrum of the genre’s roots in the same fashion as Paul Di Filippo’s
1998 collection Lost Pages. Kafka as super hero, PKD as a paranoid
hardware salesman, Dr. Strangelove and his souped up Cadillac—and many other
pieces of speculative fiction’s history flash through this collection of short
stories that transcend the page and touch upon the real world. Chris Brown calling Di Filippo “Mixmaster of
the Cranial Museum”, Lost Pages is an
exemplary text.
Fiction
about fiction a potentially pretentious undertaking, Lost Pages is anything but.
Di Filippo as knowledgeable of the genre’s history as he is a part of
it, the collection is wholly in respectful yet mischievous dialogue with the field.
Bouncing amongst a variety of touch points, the stories play with the lives and
works of known science fiction authors, by turns intelligently, interestingly,
poignantly, and always enjoyably. Rather
than merely inverting norms or switching out simple aspects of history, Di
Filippo engages with the writers, their works, and their biographies to produce
complex stories with more than one level of conception. Thus, it’s best to get the caveat out of the
way: if you are interested in reading Di Filippo but have little knowledge of
science fiction beyond the past decade, don’t waste your time. Lost
Pages is for the genre connoisseur.
(There are other good places to delve into Di Filippo for the
unsaturated—aka non sf nerd—e.g. Ribofunk,
The Steampunk Trilogy, and Cosmocopia.)
Setting
the tone for the collection, things kick off with a fictional, tongue-in-cheek
essay detailing how Star Trek killed
science fiction. Just when the genre was
soaring on the literary heights of the New Wave, along came Captain Dirk and
his bevy of poor episode writers—pissing in the genre punch, as it were, sf
falling into disgrace thereafter. What
follows are nine stories exploring differing points in science fiction’s
history from alternate perspectives. “Mairzy Doats” features a pulp writer
named Carter Burrows hired by President Heinlein to do some work on the
moon. Burrows, however, has the rug
pulled out form under his feet—just like many fans of Heinlein’s early work
when encountering his later novels. “The
Happy Valley at the End of the World” takes the real life aviatory exploits of
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and mixes them into an H.G. Wells vision. A young Jimmy Ballard flies wingman, but the
ending is a subtle touch of The Little
Prince. In “Anne”, Anne Frank escapes
her fate in Amsterdam and becomes a Hollywood movie star, “The Wizard of Oz”
one of her starring roles.
Likewise
incorporating musical interests of the past, “Instability” (penned with Rudy
Rucker) sees Neil Young and Jack Kerouac have a madhouse run-in with Dr.
Strangelove (portrayed by von Neumann), cannabis, Cadillacs, and yes, an atomic
bomb. “Linda and Phil” dips into the
stormy relationship of Linda Ronstadt and Philip K. Dick—paranoia the hanging
chad. Oh, and there’s a strange little
girl wielding a laser-shooting rubber ducky…
Di Filippo
seeming at odds with himself, one of the stories tries to work out the value
(or lack thereof) of pulp vs. literary speculative fiction. “The Jackdaw’s Last Case” puts Kakfa in a
superman role (complete with a “Lois Lane”), battling his own inner demons as
well as the Black Beetle (who else?).
Everyone knows that J. Campbell was the editor of the sf magazine Astounding, yes? Di Filippo plays with the first initial,
transforming John into Joseph, making the renowned mythologist, editor. Joseph applying the power of myth and the
hero’s tale for good in the world, the result is a light-hearted story with
profound undertones. The most powerful
work in the collection saved for last, “Alice, Alfie, Ted, and the Aliens” is a
semi-schizoid take on James Tiptree Jr.’s real identity, with Alfred Bester,
Ursula Le Guin, Theodore Sturgeon, and yes, aliens weaving in and out of her
tale.
In the
end, Lost Pages is a collection of
short stories humorously, intelligently, and fittingly interacting with many
key waypoints in the spectrum of speculative fiction’s history. Di Filippo playing with the pieces beyond a
mere game, the alternate intersections produce layers of meaning rather than
just one. Interactive in other ways, Di
Filippo artfully switches between modes of diction. Fully metafiction, readers who do not have at
least a passing knowledge of writers Burroughs to Heinlein, Bester to Dick,
Ballard to Kafka, Le Guin to Sheldon/Tiptree will probably fall flat. But the genre connoisseur will read with a
smile playing perpetually at the corners of the mouth in appreciation of Di
Filippo’s raw insight.
Table of
contents for Lost Pages:
“Introduction:
‘What Killed Science Fiction?’” (by Di Filippo)
“The
Jackdaw's Last Case”
“Anne”
“The Happy
Valley at the End of the World”
“Mairzy
Doats”
“Campbell's
World”
“Instability”
(with Rudy Rucker)
“World
Wars III”
“Linda and
Phil”
“Alice,
Alfie, Ted, and the Aliens”
No comments:
Post a Comment