The Newsletter of
The Council for the Literature of the Fantastic
Volume 1, Number 4 (1997)
Click HERE to return to the table of contents.

Ribofunk by Paul DiFilippo.

reviewed by Jeff Foster.
Copyright © 1996, Jeff Foster

One of the most difficult tasks for the writer of science fiction is making the world of the future relevant to the reader of the present. The world presented in a work of science fiction (or any genre, for that matter) can be weird, horrific, original, but it cannot be so far removed from our own experiences as to be completely foreign and meaningless. In Ribofunk, a collection of biotech short stories, Paul DiFilippo manages to depict for us a world that is indeed original, but he does not (for the most part) lose us in the obscure traps of his imagination.

Ribofunk constructs a future which is a combination ofBlade Runner,Star Wars, and the melodramatic sci-fi movies of the fifties. Some of the better stories in this collection are "The Boot," about the theft of a "trope that allows stochastic reasoning, insight into the dynamics of chaos," by a skunk of a husband with a gambling problem; "Afterschool Special," in which rebellious children get spikes driven into their skulls; and "McGregor," a twisting together of the Peter Rabbit story with Orwell's Animal Farm.

DiFilippo is at his best when he allows himself to have fun with his plots, voices, and dialogue. Perhaps this is why I liked the three aforementioned stories so much. "The Boot," a parody of the dime-store detective novels, contains witty dialogue and an array of intriguingly fanciful futuristic concepts. DiFilippo avoids heavy philosophizing; instead, he has a good time, which allows him to produce a clever and fun detective story. He lets dialogue develop his characters; thus, we get the sense that the characters are more natural and fully rounded.

"Afterschool Special" is an equally fine story, but for a different reason. In this piece, DiFilippo presents young characters who wish to "get spiked," which is the future version of body piercing. These characters are as vulnerable to peer pressure as the teenagers of today. And their parents (or parental units) are as revolted at the spikes as today's parents seem to be about such bodily mutilations as lip and eyebrow piercing. This is the beauty of the story: it is relevant and realistic while at the same time it is bizarre and imaginative. Just like the afternoon specials we remember as kids, DiFilippo's "Afternoon Special" tells the story of awkward teens confronting their own rebellious natures and the pressures of their friends (and enemies). But unlike these television shows, DiFilippo's story doesn't conclude with an obnoxiously sappy ending. Instead, Arnie, the young female narrator, brags that once her parents got over the spike-through- the-head ordeal, "there wasn't much resistance from the poohs [parents] a month later, when I pleaded one last time for tits." Now that's an afterschool special I could sit through.

Finally, there's "McGregor." This is a story built on colorful and wild characterization. From the beginning, we know that something screwy's going on: We see Peter Rabbit sitting on a rock smoking a cigarette. He's plotting to release his furry and feathered friends from evil McGregor's farm, which is actually a tourist attraction. Kind of like a Sturbridge Village, but with mice in jackets instead of fine arts majors dressed like blacksmiths. The story allows DiFilippo to play around with the fable genre while also injecting his own biogenetic inventions. "McGregor" should remind the reader of Orwell's Animal Farm : there is an obvious satirical element laced with a sense of oppression and doom. DiFilippo, like Orwell, allows himself much creativity in the characterization of the animals. And to DiFilippo's credit, he lets his characters determine their own fates, rather than allowing his own sense of the proper ending to dictate the actions of his characters.

One of the problems with DiFilippo's book is the saturation of the narrative with neologisms. While the biotech/biogenetic future will surely involve new words and phrases, DiFilippo sometimes goes overboard. Remember "Mad Libs," those inane party games where you are asked to provide words to fill in the blanks of an insultingly idiotic scenario? ("Give me a plural noun." "Intestines.") Well, sometimes Ribofunk reads like a biogenetic Mad Lib:

"I had a paralymphatic system from Olympus Biotech that would aggressively react to micro- and nano-invaders. My arteries were reinforced with CuraTech's neo-goretex, my bones threaded with Innovir's stonefiber. My heart had an onboard Hemazyne assist, as did my lungs. I had Agouron hyperflexure in my fingers, increased haptic and proprioceptive sensitivity,and certain wetware enhancements from BioCryst not available to the general public ("The Bad Splice")."

While the fabrication of company names and the use of physiological terminology is certainly necessary in a work likeRibofunk, such lingo can cause the reader to become bogged down, thus interfering with steady flow of the narrative. Sometimes it seems as though DiFilippo is just trying to coin new words to see if they'll catch on. (Hey, maybe they will.)

Where DiFilippo also loses his otherwise entertaining and original voice is when he becomes self-consciously moral and didactic. In "Big Eater," a young girl defends her friends, the Roaches, to her mother:

"'Say it! Roaches are bugs! Well, you're not insulting me by saying that. Bugs are glorious! They're not our inferiors, they're our superiors! Bugs were here long before mammals, and they'll be here long after we kill ourselves off! I'm proud to be a roach!'"

Basically, this could be a promotional piece for any politically correct organization. Just insert words like "Native Americans" or "African Americans" or even "baby seals."

In "Cockfight," we see more of this blatant, forced moralizing, when Lew, the narrator, and Tamarind, his lady friend, discuss an "inferior" being, the "splice."

Lew says,

"To me, the splices looked about 50 percent chimp, 40 percent lemur, and 10 percent human. But I coulda been off by a few percent either way."

"I sure do dislike those splices," said Tamarind.

"Thank heavens we got laws keeping them down." Lew responds, "Hey, Tam, you ever feel weird about the splices and your heritage and all? I mean, like maybe they hold the same position now that your folks did, a couple of centuries ago?"

To which, she replies: "Shit, no. They aren't human, after all, are they? And that makes all the difference."

Lew answers:

"Well, I guess in a way the splices make it possible for an old redneck like me to be buddies with a gal of color like yourself and mostways not think twice about it."

While this type of thinly-veiled sanctimonious self-promotion doesn't flood Ribofunk, it does appear enough to distract the reader.

All in all, Ribofunk is a highly original vision of a world defined by the laws of biotechnology. The social problems of today remain in the future: racism, drug addiction, class struggle, juvenile delinquency, pollution. They merely take different forms. And we take different forms. Some of us are human, some of us are beast, some of us are robot. And some of us are combinations of all three. I have no doubt that many of DiFilippo's predictions for the future will come true. I just hope that I'm not still around to see them. Unless I have a large stack of virtual reality tapes to escape once in a while.