An Interview with Paul Di Filippo

(Appeared originally in Rogue, AOL)

[I recently had the good fortune to conduct an interview with Paul Di Filippo, the author of RIBOFUNK (reviewed this week in Rogue). My review of his previous book, THE STEAMPUNK TRILOGY, is also available in the Print listbox. By all appearances, Paul stays up late and works on about a million things at once. Somewhere in there, he found some time to talk with me about ribofunk, cyberpunk, biotech, and science fiction.--Jeffrey Fisher (RgeNexus6)]

Jeffrey Fisher: Could you explain briefly what "ribofunk" is?

Paul Di Filippo: "Ribofunk" is a neologism of my coining, utilizing the "ribo" from "ribosome" and the musicological notion of "funk". Just like cyberpunk, it separates into subject matter plus style. Biology dealt with in a manner that seeks to convey the messy, organic, confusing, thrilling thing called Life.

JF: Ribofunk has a very positive feel to it, in contrast to cyberpunk, for example. Are you in fact optimistic about the biotechnologies you're writing about?

PDF: Biotech offers both immense positive potential, and immense possible disasters. But I find it more hopeful than cybernetics insofar as it addresses both mind and body, while cybernetics only addresses the mind. I think that the average citizen will be more instinctively open to biological adaptations than to strictly inorganic prostheses, virtual realities, etc. (Although conservatives and fundamentalists might be _more_ repelled by them! For instance, a fundamentalist might have no compunctions about using a computer to spread his message, but would probably be repulsed by the notion of baptizing transgenic splices!) In portraying a future that works and in which some actual bad trends of our own time have been reversed (pollution cleared up, extinct species reanimated), I was trying to envision a world I wouldn't mind living in!

JF: You raise several interesting and complicated issues. What do you mean when you say that cybernetics addresses only the mind, particularly considering prostheses and virtual realities? Is it that cybernetics doesn't so much address the body as reject it as obsolete?

PDF: If we utilize the original definition of cybernetics--the study of control systems--then it obviously encompasses much if not all of biology, since organic creatures are stuffed with various feedback loops, control systems, etc. However, through sheer historical force, cybernetics has come to stand in the public mind as strictly the study of _electronic or digital or mechanical_ control systems. To the average person, the thermostat on your livingroom wall is cybernetic, but the trigger of changing daylight that sets off animal migrations is not. Another indication of this way of thinking is that a "cyborg" only becomes one when _mechanical_ parts are added to a human body, whereas in the original definition, we're all "CYBernetic ORGanisms" to begin with. So if I oppose "cyberpunk" to "ribofunk" then I'm just trying to emphasize that organic control systems--which have had millions of years to evolve into sophistication--have more potential than the relatively primitive silicon and prosthetic systems which mankind has been messing with for a few decades.

JF: You're certainly right to point up the breadth of cybernetics in its original conception, and the de facto narrowing that has occurred in the popular imagination. I'm still curious about the mind/body distinction, though. Can you bring your return to ur-cybernetics back around to this aspect of the difference between cyberpunk and ribofunk?

PDF: The main difference between cyberpunk and ribofunk is the classic difference between top-down and bottom-up approach. Cyberpunk seeks to graft artificially contrived structures, whether software or hardware, onto the existing organism, whereas ribofunk wants to accentuate, heighten, supplement and extend pre-existing biological structures already honed by years of evolution. Also, cyberpunk is part of the old reductionist paradigm (shortened to "reed-pair" in RIBOFUNK), while ribofunk is--or tries to be--holistic. A cyborg is simply the sum of its parts. A splice or modified human is a synergistic, sometimes unpredictably different whole. So it's not so much a mind/body controversy as a part versus whole approach.

JF: When you say, "biological adaptations," it seems almost a euphemism for genetic engineering, which already has conservatives up in arms. Why do you think people will be more amenable to one way of tinkering with nature than the other?

PDF: Genetic engineering does indeed scare conservatives--it seems almost everything does! But what I was trying to get at was that the average person of moderate sensibilities might respond better to, say, a genetically engineered dog (the homey and familiar) than to a domestic robot (the cold and strange).

JF: So would that make _Planet of the Apes_ a sort of ribofunk _Terminator_? Will Krazy Kat lead the _Battle for the Planet of the Splices_?

PDF: I'm not up to speed on all the APES films, having seen only the first one once long ago. But it is quite possible to scan backwards now that I've dared to slap a (possibly reductionist!) label on ribofunk, and absorb all kinds of strange ancestors into the domain!

JF: What new biotechnologies - ribotechnologies? - intrigue you the most?

PDF: In one of my Ribofunk broadsides, I said, "Let a thousand Prozacs bloom!" The whole area of altered brain chemistries is fascinating to me. New senses--pressure-sensitive lateral lines such as sharks possess, for example--would be neat too!

JF: One of the most intriguing things for me in the stories was the whole idea of "amino acid cocktails." Not to make it sound sinister, but it's a very seductive possibility - like Case leaving his body behind in NEUROMANCER. It also brings to mind Timothy Leary's rebirth under the cyberpunk/Mondo 2000 aegis.

PDF: RIBOFUNK the book and ribofunk the concept are certainly not completely sunny, and there are a lot of sinister bits in the book and the philosophy behind it. The brainwashing potential of powerful and accurate and tailorable smart drugs are truly awesome, and perhaps slighted a bit in my book.

JF: A couple of years ago, you said you still identified with the cyberpunk movement, mostly for lack of anything more compelling. Would you still say that? That is, do you think of ribofunk as still within the cyberpunk movement, or do you see it as going off in a different direction? Is there even anything left of cyberpunk?

PDF: Insofar as Ribofunk wants to move from contemporary realities and trends in a daring, imaginative way in order to project a believable, fully thought-out future, then it does indeed flow out of cyberpunk. Unfortunately, cyberpunk these days seems to be reduced to a marketing phrase. But what I still honor is the initial impulse behind the movement to shake things up and reimagine SF. So all writers who still hew to those goals, whatever their various styles and concerns, might still call themselves "punks" of any sort!

JF: Where is SF today? What do you feel are some of the strengths and weaknesses of the field? What would you like to see happen in or to SF in the next five or ten years?

PDF: Reading a lot of new books for my review column in _Asimov's_, I have come to believe that there is just as much--if not more--fine SF being written today than at any time in the past. I could name dozens and dozens of active writers today, young and old, doing excellent, honorable work. The trouble today is that the correspondingly large mass of dreck nearly drowns them out. But today SF offers so many options, that nearly any author or reader can find a niche. Whether author and reader can connect or whether an author can survive is another matter. What I would like to see is simply a diminishment of hack work and some integrity and discernment on the part of publishers, who should be broadening the taste of their audience, not pandering to their vices.

JF: In the "Ribofunk Manifesto," you mention Wells, Sterling and Bear specifically as precursors of ribofunk, but who or what has most influenced your writing?

PDF: I think it's true that most of a writer's basic patterns are laid down in their childhood years, by the reading they did then. Luckily, I grew up in one of SF's Golden Ages, the Sixties, and so I imprinted on Aldiss and Ballard, Disch and Delany, Silverberg and Ellison, Zelazny and LeGuin. All wonderful models for pushing the limits of SF. Then, in college, I remedied my deficits in mainstream literature and got to learn a lot from reading everybody from Whitman to Pynchon, Faulkner to Burroughs. In short, there's nobody I won't learn (or steal!) from! I owe them all!

JF: The SF writers you mention are or were all highly literate writers, well-read outside the field. Is this perhaps what's missing in the "large mass of dreck"?

PDF: It seems to me that a writer's natural talents are enhanced by two methods: reading a lot and living a lot. The reading aspect hones your style and adds to a writer's narrative bag of tricks, whereas the living gives him or her something to say and a knowledge of how people and society and nature work. What's missing in the mass of bad writing is any sense that, one, the author has bothered to study his craft and, two, the author has witnessed or experienced much that he or she can share. It can't _all_ come out of your limited brain!

JF: Can you tell us anything about the upcoming novel? What's the idea? What should we expect? Do you have any other interesting projects looming?

PDF: I am trying to interest a publisher now in my latest novel-length manuscript called _Fuzzy Dice_. Its subtitle is "An Ontological Daytrip", and it's kind of a Rudy-Ruckerish romp across various twisted universes. I'd like to tackle another kind of steampunkish work starring the philosopher Bishop Berkeley, to be called _The Philosopher's Star_. And then there's this Ribofunk novel called _Strange Oases_. Boy, I should live so long!

(c) 1996 Jeffrey Fisher

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