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Ribofunk
Burning chromosomes
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Ribofunk
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By Paul Di Filippo
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Avon Eos
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$3.99/$3.99 Canada
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Paperback, Oct. 1998
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ISBN 0-030-73076-6
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Review by Curt Wohleber
 aul Di Filippo's 21st century doesn't belong to jacked-in console cowboys careening through cyberspace. In Ribofunk, a collection of 11 stories published between 1989 and 1995, gene-splicers and chromosome-cookers rule--but the Protein Police are watching, and some of the splicers' creations have serious attitude problems. The feline terrorist Krazy Kat wants to overthrow the human race, and he's a pussycat compared to the mysterious, globe-engulfing Panplasmadaemonium.
In Ribofunk, the line between human and animal, the natural and the artificial, is blurred and stirred (Di Filippo has a penchant for rhymes). Biotechnology has created a slave caste of transgenic creatures--mixtures of human, animal and synthetic genes. Their human masters, meanwhile, mutate their minds and bodies, acquiring animated tattoos, armored exoskeletons and souped-up brains.
In a trio of Raymond Chandler-esque mysteries, a tough-as-chitin private detective joins the Protein Police after the death of his partner, a transgenic hamster. He investigates a genetically engineered "Blankie" that can be programmed to engulf and crush sleeping infants. On the trail of the notorious Krazy Kat, he meets a group of conservationists who preserve a curious selection of endangered species--the microbes responsible for syphilis, leprosy and smallpox--by infecting themselves with them.
In the later stories, the world grows stranger and the stakes get higher. Life, whether based on silicon or DNA, is complex, chaotic and wondrously adaptable. Technology becomes evolution on fast-forward, and not even the ever-vigilant Protein Police can hope to keep up.
Watch out for dripping lysozymes
Ribofunk's 11 stories are gathered chronologically, in roughly the same order that they were written. This lets readers appreciate Ribofunk as an episodic chronicle of the future. On the other hand, the book opens with clunkers like "One Night in Television City" and "Cockfight," which read like outtakes from William Gibson's Burning Chrome.
Happily, Di Filippo hits his stride in stories such as "Big Eater" and "The Boot." Di Filippo may not be the virtuoso wordsmith that Gibson is, but he's a stronger storyteller, and a master of what the early cyberpunks called "crammed prose," a stroboscopic, high-baud stream of technical and pop-culture references, rhymes, puns and futuristic slang. The salvos of information overload include esoteric references to molecular biology, the International Monetary Fund, H.P. Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos," and the theories of controversial British scientist Rupert Sheldrake. Sometimes Di Filippo goes overboard, as when a character, "her voice dripping lysozymes," casts a gaze "as slitted and mean as that of a Secret Service pantherine confronted with a suspicious character feinting at the World Bank Managing Director." Oh yeah.
These stories will make readers laugh, shudder and think, "Cool!" But some readers might wish the stories weren't all so, well, funky. Di Filippo changes chords now and again, as in "MacGregor," a macabre hybrid of Mother Goose and Orwell's Animal Farm, but Ribofunk's characters seldom doff their figurative mirrorshades long enough to display real human emotions. Di Filippo's gene-splicers and chromo-cookers seem capable of creating just about anything, except a heart.
I'm hoping Santa brings me a gene-splicing kit this Christmas.
-- Curt
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A Scientific Romance
Lost love, plague and global warming--there goes the neighborhood
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A Scientific Romance
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By Ronald Wright
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Vintage Canada
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$17.95 Canada
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Trade Paperback, 1998
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ISBN 0-67-697107-5
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Review by Nalo Hopkinson
 avid Lambert is a man adrift. Orphaned at the age of 11, he possesses a useless Ph.D. in "industrial archaeology with a head of theoretical steam," and he's sidelined in a job as curator of a British museum of pre-Great War travel machines. The woman he loves, Anita, has abandoned him, and he's been estranged from his best friend Bird since the two of them fought over her.
Surrounded by outdated machines, mourning for family, love and friends, Lambert is already trapped in history when he discovers that the time machine in H.G. Wells' 1895 novel of the same name was actually real. It was built by a woman Wells was having an affair with, a scientist named Tatiana Cherenkova. Lambert learns that Tatiana is still in the time machine, scheduled to arrive in the United Kingdom on Jan. 1, 2000.
Lambert locates Tatiana's flat and is there when the time machine materializes--minus Tatiana, though her still-warm clothing is inside. Lambert sets out to discover where Tatiana has gone. In the middle of his investigation he learns that Anita has just died from a mutated form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease). She has transmitted the disease to him, and he is already showing symptoms of lethal brain degeneration. In the emotional upheaval caused by his diagnosis, Lambert gets into the time machine and travels 500 years into Earth's future, hoping that by then there will be a cure for his illness and that he will find Tatiana.
The British Isles in the 2500's are very different from the United Kingdom he left. Lambert treks all over the vastly changed spaces, writing a diary to Anita and Bird and trying to figure out how the land and the people can have altered so drastically. The answers to those questions turn out to be a wry, chilling commentary on the future that humans are creating.
The history of SF points to its future
Canadian author Ronald Wright's A Scientific Romance is an elegant reference to the late Victorian era, when all novels were called "romances." The word meant a literary confection of the imagination, which is also a suitable description for this novel.
David Lambert is appealingly flawed, a man of theory trying ruefully to be a man of action. He makes an intensely literary hero who lives more in the past than the present. His sense of fairness affects his every decision, even what reading matter to take into the future: "The classics were an obvious choice, but how to define them? ... Only chestnuts are available on CD, and the Western canon seemed most likely to survive without my help. ... Perhaps my duty was to neglected works and lesser breeds--mediaeval romances, alliterative verse, Australian petroglyphs, Peruvian quipus, Meroitic stelae, Polynesian star maps, almost anything by Anon."
Irony drives this novel. When captured by latter-day Scots, Lambert baffles them by quoting Shakespeare's Macbeth. He composes verses about his captors for the dead Anita. He is often intoxicated and consumed by both regret and remorse. He's snide. He gets lonely. He gets sunburned. The food gives him diarrhea.
Through it all, Wright has a sure hand and the ability to turn a phrase so that his future feels lived-in and real. Mad cow disease has jumped from bovines to humans, tropical houseplants go spectacularly native, and lawn grass becomes a metaphor for rampant human consumption. To say too much more would be to deny readers their own experience of a well-conceived confection, a romance in the old sense of the word.
Ronald Wright's A Scientific Romance, a literary treasure, was a Canadian bestseller that deservedly won the David Higham Prize for fiction. It sets high standards for Canadian SF.
-- Nalo
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