his loosely defined theme collection, gathering 11 mostly longish stories by one of the best short-story writers working in SF, focuses on the workplace: not just fantasies that start in an office and move on from there, but tales spun from the ethics and compromises of working for a living. Among the many highlights:
"Kid Charlemagne" is a passionate near-future noir about a nightclub owner who observes the deadly romance between a nightclub singer and a femme significantly more fatale than she looks. Murder and vengeance follow a scheme to smuggle the illegal narcotic estheticine, which makes everything seem beautiful ... the point being the terrible price of failing to recognize true beauty when we see it.
"Conspiracy of Noise" is about a slacker hired by the United Illuminating Company to deliver messages that make the media-soaked modern world even more chaotic and confusing than it already is. Surrounded by fellow employees with serious communication problems, confronted on all sides by the anarchy he’s caused, our hero soon finds he cannot quit.
"Skintwister" and "Fleshflowers" follow the ethical dilemmas of Doctor Strode, a professional biosculptor who makes his living performing psychokinetic cosmetic surgery. Strode profits from his work without really believing in it, which causes changes of another kind when he finds himself the target of professional sabotage by the vengeful sister of a woman he failed to save.
"The Boredom Factory" sends its Kafkaesque protagonist P. to a company determined to torment its growing workforce with the most stultifying tasks imaginable. P. keeps the job because of the high salary, but pays for it with the damage done to his soul.
The collection also includes "Agents," "Harlem Nova," "Karuna, Inc.", "SUITS," "The Mill" and the spectacular "Spondulix."
Stories best read while employed
There’s no easier way to say it: Di Filippo is inspired. He produces off-center, eccentric tales so overflowing with bizarre detail that the plot, and the point, sometimes emerge despite themselves; they meld the seeming contradictions of hope and cynicism with an imagination that pushes past the boundaries of the merely wild into the realm of the unsettlingly manic. His tales tend toward the long, and sometimes seem to meander around aimlessly before the narrative thread emerges, but the path, and the reason for taking it, are always visible in retrospect, the journey itself infinitely more interesting for how bumpy it seemed to be along the way.
Take the two best stories in the book, "Spondulix" and "Karuna, Inc." Di Filippo himself says, in the introductions, that they seem like companion pieces, and their similarities are obvious indeed when they’re read together. Both involve neighborhood food joints (one a deli, one a coffeehouse) and a gang of eccentrics who use them to effect a form of social justice. Both take their time getting started, treating us instead to long digressions with no obvious connection to the main plot (in one, the main character’s love for a high-diving horse, in the other, a rumination on how and why the heroine’s bulldog came to be colored yellow—and believe me when I say that I could have chosen any of a dozen other bizarre details in either case.)
Both have touching love stories, both are joyously written, both confront their protagonists with a small mob of vividly eccentric supporting characters, and both argue for the importance of rocking the boat whenever possible. They’re both filled with surreal descriptions and eminently quotable lines. They even have much the same tone, at least for a while. But they're completely different. "Spondulix" is a satirical farce about free sandwich coupons that become the basis of a new underground economy, and the no less manic "Karuna, Inc." turns out to be, among many other things, a horror story about idealism brutalized by the bottom-line mentality of a corporate culture determined to flense itself of all compassion for humanity.
Were these the only two stories in the collection, it would still qualify as visionary. Add "SUITS," "The Boredom Factory" and any of the volume’s other treasures, and it's impossible to see this as anything less than one of the best single-author retrospectives of the year.
