CYBER NOODLE SOUP number 2

Paul Di Filippo: The Fried Dough Interview

CNS checked in with Paul Di Filippo recently. He has a new book out, The SteamPunk Trilogy, which will fry your brain cells and double you over with laughter at the same time. Think of it as Charles Dickens on acid or H.P. Lovecraft goes dingo. And much more in the pipeline, as you'll read. This interview was conducted via E-mail in October/November 1995. Paul always signs off as follows: Motto of the Pronoids..."There is such a thing as a free lunch!"

How is The SteamPunk Trilogy doing?

TST has nearly sold out its hardcover edition of 5000 copies: not bad for a first book of three novellas by an author unknown to the unwashed masses of Danielle Steel readers. Four Walls generally sells mass-market paperback rights, but no one yet has snapped them up, so 4W8W themselves might be releasing the paperbound version in '96.

Next out is Fractal Paisleys, right? Will it include any of your nonfiction?

My collection Fractal Paisleys (all fiction, by the way) has been postponed till '97. In Spring of 1996, 4W8W will release Ribofunk, collected stories from the past six years conforming to my initially tongue-in-cheek then increasingly serious Ribofunk Manifesto. There will be two new stories in the collection: "Blankie," and "The Bad Splice".

Will there be an updated "Ribofunk Manifesto" to reflect this new seriousness?

I actually wrote a 1000-word essay entitled "Ribofunk 1995" at the behest of Mark Frauenfelder, who wished to include it in his new Happy Mutant Handbook. But much to my chagrin, he deemed it too serious for inclusion! Guess I've lost that gonzo touch. So, it's now supposed to run in Luis Ortiz's NonStop. But when the next issue is due out is uncertain. It might actually turn out to be pretty good timing for the book’s appearance.

What's the status of Fuzzy Dice?

Fuzzy Dice, written with the assistance of a grant from the RI State Council on the Arts, is currently making the rounds of prospective publishers. (4W8W felt booked up with DiFilippoania.) Its subtitle, by the way, is "An Ontological Daytrip".

How did this RI State Council of the Fine Arts come about?

My fellow Providencian, Dan Pearlman, writer, friend and professor at the University of Rhode Island, who knows about such things, convinced me to apply for a grant last year. I thought I had no chance, when much to my surprise, it came through. My submission as token of my writing ability was the story "Anne," from SF Age, in which the alternate history Anne Frank ends up in Hollywood. Guess someone at RISCA is open-minded!

What else is in the works? I'm feeling pulled like the fabled donkey between two equally attractive projects: A Mouthful of Tongues, an erotic fantasy, and The Philosopher's Star, the tale of Bishop Berkeley in space. Hard to say which I'll do first, but I expect to do both-- if I live long enough!

"Bishop Berkeley in space"? Really?

Yes, indeed, Berkeley in space. It occurred to me that the Bishop's "esse est percipi" dovetails neatly with quantum physics, you see. And the fact that he spent a couple of years in my own state's Newport makes researching and verisimilitude a snap. At least until I get to the interstellar part!

What became of Ciphers and Joe's Liver? They were tentatively scheduled in 1991.

Ciphers remains an ongoing project on Andy Watson's overstuffed desk. Maybe in 1996, with luck. The book is now ten years old (revised last in 1994) but still, I think, might blow away the readers. Joe's Liver was handed off to Steve Brown of SF Eye to publish in his projected line of books. (John Shirley's City Come A-Walkin’ was supposed to be first.) And you know how active he's been lately!

"Cyberpunk" -- is it still a viable genre or is it doomed to be little more than a marketing niche or a fashion statement?

Cyberpunk as a "signifier" seems dead as "disco". While one might enjoy old or new "disco" music, the word itself seems hopelessly dated and entangled in too many bad connotations to be taken seriously. Same with c-p. Witness the Cyberpunk Handbook by RU Sirius and crowd for a laughable example. Only the spirit of c-p, mutating like an AIDS virus, will survive. What it will be called is up for grabs.

The "punk" part seems truly dead but the "cyber" part is alive and well. Corporate America is turning in its grey flannel suit and strapping on cybergear fashions. Can anything liberating be expected to emerge from this? Will "cybercapitalism" be any different from the smokestack variety?

Indeed, the computer revolution sweeps on apace, without our fictional roadmaps. The most heartening thing I see about cybercapitalism is the "give away" phenomenon as embodied by Netscape and others. Although I ask myself, is even this kind of corporate conquest through altruism any different than the old maxim, "Give away the razors and, and sell the blades"?

The zine scene seems increasingly pedestrian. What do you think? Is it possible to produce anything subversive today -- a book, a film, a zine? Or must we wait for the coming GOP nightfall?

In my famously unpublished novel Ciphers, I have a riff about the impossibility of true subversion in the postmodern scene. The novel itself, however, is an attempt to prove the possibility of same, with whatever tangible results. (Its "unpublishability" being proof...?) Lots of good zines continue to appear, but barring some kind of descent into a PKD 'Fifties simulacrum era, they will continue to fail to "shock".

Can you elaborate on that "impossibility of subversion"? By "true subversion" I suppose I mean anything that arouses cries of blasphemy and subversion from the silent majority: the good old "villagers try to burn down the mad scientist's castle" response. We saw a little bit of this with Mapplethorpe's photos and Serrano's "Piss Christ." This kind of antagonism from those who subscribe to the dominant paradigm seems harder and harder to arouse. Subversion, by the way, need not offer anything constructive in the way of alternatives, but is intent simply on exposing and undermining power structures.

Did you see Johnny Mnemonic? What did you think of it?

Unfortunately, haven't caught an SF flick since The Flintstones. Ha-ha!

Really? You weren't curious to see it after all the hype?

I think my expectations for SF cinema had hit a new low recently after so many fabulous flops. When JM opened, I was probably at my weekly Italian Film Festival watching a Fellini or Rossellini flick.

SF movies are inevitably disappointing -- the cyber variety especially so. Even the PKD- themed films look doomed to be silly shoot-em-ups. People like Scott and Verhoeven direct when what is really needed is someone like Antonioni or Costa-Gavras.

In the Pynchon online discussion group, we had a big go-round over which director(s) could film Gravity's Rainbow, and the resulting consensus was surprisingly similar to yours: that only true auteurs could do justice to any work of genius. Some cynic asked why we would necessarily want to see a perfectly good book transformed into cinema, and that remains an issue. But even working from an original script, a director such as Altman or Jarmusch is going to start from a more principled position and bring more insight to the project.

I read about your participation in "The First American Philip K. Dick Convention". Was there ever a second one?

The first PKD convention was the brainchild of my friend Paul Tumey, in conjunction with David Hartwell and others, and was hosted by a Cambridge, Massachusetts, bookstore. Paul switched jobs, and I don't think his new store is amenable to such shenanigans. So until we have a new venue and some new impetus, I doubt we'll see a second PKD extravaganza.

What's your take on the whole PKD renaissance? Why now? What's feeding it?

I suppose the easy answer to the question of Dick's renewed or expanding popularity would be that the more our world becomes PKD-like, the more of a response he summons up. But I think there's also an obvious trendiness/critical-mass component. When genre labels such as "transgressive" are invented and marketed, there happens a kind of backfilling operation where older writers are swept up and co-opted into the snowball of cultural movements. I think PKD is probably experiencing this. And, lastly, maybe within the field, there's guilt from neglecting him that expresses itself in tributes, parodies, etc.

What do you think about K. W. Jeter doing a sequel to Do Androids Dream/Bladerunner?

Everybody's gotta eat. Spin recently asked various illuminati, including J.G. Ballard, to speculate on how the "End of the World" might come about. How would you have replied?

Without seeing JGB's response, let me add my 2 cents. The climax to my upcoming Ribofunk volume is a story called "Distributed Mind" which originally ran in Interzone. In it, I postulated the good old grey-goo demise of life on Earth, with a few twists. Of course, since the grey goo itself was living, that wasn't really the end of Life, but only Life As We Know It. We should probably distinguish between the two. If we want to talk about an actual end to the incredibly tenacious phenomenon known as Life, then we would have to postulate something suitably cosmic: black hole entering the Earth's core, passage into a non-Einstinian portion of the universe, etc. Although to look at a story like Leiber's "A Pail of Air" is to be heartened (perhaps falsely) that even such a calamity would not necessarily be fatal.

You recently wrote that we could have scoped out the current world situation by paying closer attention to those old Ace Doubles. Which Ace Doubles should we be reading to get a clue for 1996?

Off the top of my head, how about This Fortress World by James Gunn b/w The 13th Immortal by Silverberg, for a fix on isolationism and mutation. The Houses of Iszm b/w Son of the Tree, and The Dragon Masters b/w The Last Castle, all by Jack Vance, for a look at Ribofunk futures. And finally, Mack Reynolds's Border, Breed Nor Birth b/w Blackman's Burden for a Caucasian take on race/religion problems?

So who are the pronoids, anyway, and what's with the free lunch?

As I understand it, the zippie/raver/crusty/deadhead types embrace a generous view of the universe which might be described as pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. "Everyone -- or at least some people -- are out to do me good. There are forces of light at work. Manna happens." I rather fancy this outlook myself: a sense that the universe was made for man, and vice versa. I suppose you could work in the Gaia hypothesis and the anthropic principle of cosmology also into this philosophy. The "free lunch" might be seen as some forthcoming nanotech revolution -- of perhaps just the gift of life itself.