Paul Di Filippo knows as well as anyone that science fiction doesn't have to be serious to be good. His first book, The Steampunk Trilogy, was a likably daffy romp through a skewed Victorian era, in which a mutant newt stands in for the Queen herself, and lovers Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson carom through time to double-date with Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath. If the prose was a bit breathless, and the characters distinguishable only by their phonetically rendered accents, it didn't matter; the point was mad invention. In his new collection, Ribofunk, Di Filippo tries for a little more and achieves much less. This book is frivolous and joyless at once.
The stories here take place on a future Earth dominated by biotechnology ("ribofunk," as in "ribosome"). Characters sport genetic add-ons ranging from lizard ruffs to reflective skin; animal-human splices, grown in vats, make up a new serf class; semi-intelligent rivers carry cargo downstream and up. For all this, the landscape will be relatively familiar to sci-fi readers. We're in the conventionally "gritty" version of the 21st century, with its colorful street gangs, its novel drugs and virtual sex, its osmosing nation-states, and its predictably syncretic argot (corporations are "gembaitches" and "essays," pretty girls "xinggan"; computers are shipped from "the Bangalore macqui of Segasoft-TogaiMagic").
Distracting implausibilities abound. "Hitting planck-bottom," as idiomatic English? Having made it 75 years without denting the public culture, Max Planck and his constant (which expresses the relationship between the energy and the frequency of photons), seem profoundly unlikely to stage a comeback now. Likewise "crick" and "watson" as generic terms for DNA jockeys; double likewise "clear as hubble." Throughout the book are inventions that seem geared more to gee-whiz value than practicality, like the box that, pressed to the victim's neck, burrows through to his spinal cord, takes control of his nervous system, and causes him to strangle himself. Why not just stop the heart? Why not just use a knife?
More than anything else, Ribofunk reads like a series of comic books. Of the 13 stories, eight conclude with fights -- each of which the hero seems for a moment assured of losing, but wins. Five stories, "Big Eater," "The Boot," "Blankie," "The Bad Splice," and "Up the Lazy River," have almost exactly the same story line: the protagonist discovers a plot to (respectively) flood Chicago, steal a valuable piece of chemical "software," kill lots of children, poison Boston, and sabotage an intelligent river; he follows a lead, which (except in "The Bad Splice") conveys him immediately to the villain, whom he then fights and to whom he seems assured of losing, as above, but is rescued (except in "The Boot") by the timely and unsubtly foreshadowed intervention of (respectively) a friendly mutant manatee, a friendly mutant bulldog, his girlfriend, and a friendly computer sidekick. These stories may have succeeded in magazines, but Di Filippo should have known better than to put them in one place.
Much of the enjoyment of sci-fi lies in exploring the unexpected consequences of a simple change in the world. Di Filippo has an inexhaustible talent for intriguing premises: he's got so many, in fact, that as soon as he's laid one out, he deploys a brief lecture about its ramifications and then moves on to the next. The hurried, unenthusiastic feeling that results is, finally, Ribofunk's fatal deficiency. I found myself wanting to get things over with as much as the author seemed to.
In "Afterschool Special," two characters travel on an organic "slidewalk," whose tiny microvilli carry passengers along. "Did you ever download any reductionist paradigm fiction where the author tried to imagine a system like this and came up with miles of rubber belts on rollers?" one asks the other. "Those ancients --" the companion thinks, "where were their heads at?!" The ancient fiction in question, one presumes, is Robert Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll." I haven't seen that story since I was a teenager, and I had to ask a friend what the title was -- but I remember those rubber belts, because Heinlein spends a whole story explaining, in cranky detail, what life is like when the roads roll. I don't think I'll remember very much about Ribofunk.
The one story that is memorable is "Distributed Mind," which features a creepy world-eating microbe and a surprise ending that's an actual surprise. This story is also among the most recent. The failures of Ribofunk prove only that Di Filippo was a bad writer six years ago, when the worst of the work here was written. On the evidence of "Distributed Mind" and The Steampunk Trilogy, there are better books ahead.
