"Everything’s zen? I don’t think so!" -- Paul Di Filippo
CYBER NOODLE SOUP
NO.10CYBER NOODLE SOUP
is published from time to time, usually whenever we have a couple of pages of material. For copies send an SASE or The Usual to: Clark PO Box 2761 St. Paul, MN 55102. Back issues are on the Net at www.subsitu.com/cns/
Paul Di Filippo is no stranger to the readers of CNS. We’ve unabashedly promoted Paul’s work from our earliest incarnation. And with good cause. Books like The Steampunk Trilogy, Ribofunk and Fractal Paisleys are mind-blowing examples of what contemporary science fiction should aspire to accomplish. To begin one of his short stories is to step on an out-of-control roller coaster of imagination. Last year Cambrian Publications and Permeable Press jointly published Paul’s first novel, Ciphers. And, man, you won’t believe what you read!
Billed as "A Post-Shannon Rock-n-Roll Mystery," Ciphers follows Cy Prothero, overeducated, underemployed record store clerk, in a desperate search for his missing girlfriend, Ruby Tuesday, who vanished while working as a temp for the top-secret Wu Laboratories. He’s joined in his quest by the beautiful Polly Peptide -- who’s looking for her missing boyfriend, Augie Augenblick. Augie dropped out of sight shortly after handing Cy a defective CD. Are the disappearances connected? What sinister forces are involved and do they have anything to do with a series of enigmatic billboards popping up all over Boston or the mysterious Chinese coin Cy finds? Before long the pair stumble into the secret conspiracy which has shaped the direction of the 20th century towards some transcendental goal. Toward the end, Cy will have a conversation with his own mitochondria. And all with that distinctive Di Filippo style. Here’s Paddy O’Phidian, sole survivor of the Gnostic order of Saint Draco and head lieutenant of the sinister Dr. Wu, trying to figure out why everything has gone wrong:
It was not something the Gaelic Gnostic was particularly proud of, this covert wetwork. He had never boasted about his part in the dismantling of this failed experiment. Nobody would have understood....
But the Doctor had explained it all to him in such a convincing way, that he had consented, however reluctantly.
"I have unleashed forces, " whispered Wu over the Heaviside-equation-smoothed telephone connection, round about ‘67, "which I cannot properly channel. I thought all the pieces were in place, but I miscalculated. The world is tearing itself apart. Humanity is not ready for mass enlightenment, egalitarian illumination. Dabbling in zen without discipline produces only sickness. Remember: If you drink a bowl of water with a needle floating in it, the needle will stick in your throat, unless you know it is there. Let me redundantly restate myself: Humanity is as ready as they will ever be, but the vehicle of their satori is not perfected. All the drugs are lacking something; they are all temporary and artificial, even pixeldrine. I must rethink this matter for a couple of decades. Meanwhile, we need to restore the quotidian, put out some inhibitory signals. The Jewel-Mind Mirror must be veiled, the worms must continue to wallow in the mud a while longer. We must be cruel to be kind. If lust and violence taste so sweet, is what they want, then we’ll give it to them."
If your head is a bucket of water, Ciphers is a grapefruit-sized chunk of metallic sodium fastballed in. It contains pretty much every rock ‘n roll lyric you’ve ever heard and every possible legend involving snakes and dragons mankind ever dreamed. It’s a crash course in cellular biology and a primer on communications theory. Within its pages you’ll find a whole galaxy of exotic drugs, a continuous porn flick of industrial-strength hard-core sex, heroes, villains, lunatics, secret agents, mercenaries, narcs, jujus and gurus. The action begins on the front cover with the mysterious naked woman and her snake and doesn’t let up. You have never read a book like Ciphers. Quick! Head down to your local bookstore and demand a copy. Or head to the publisher’s webpage at http://www.cambrianpubs.com
We caught up with Paul in December 1998....
THE CIPHERS INTERVIEW
What was the genesis of CIPHERS? When did you begin writing and with what concepts in mind?
The kernel of CIPHERS was a simple, albeit almost hallucinatory visual image that never made it into the actual book: in the open hatch of an airplane high above an ocean seascape, two men fought for possession of a reel of magnetic tape. At a critical juncture, the tape escaped their clutches, unspooling as it fell, the enigmatically vital data on it lost forever. I made a stab at this story, titling it "The Cipher of the Serpent and the Rose". None of this abortive material ended up in the final version, however, once a larger imaginative vision overtook the early conception.
How many revisions/drafts did you do? How do the first and the last drafts differ, if they do differ?
The first draft of CIPHERS was completed on 10/7/86, and that manuscript was approximately 100K words. There was no "Chapter 00000000" and the opening line was my magnificently climax-delayed sentence now found as the first line in "Chapter 00000001". When Andy Watson expressed interest in publishing CIPHERS circa 1993, I went back and added about another 50K words, and updated the action to occur in 1993. (I was always concerned to make CIPHERS as contemporary as possible. This was my only book to date where I felt utterly connected to the zeitgeist.) During this second go-round, I had to update a lot of the tech talk. In 1986, audio CDs were still cutting-edge! The main narrative remained intact from one draft to another: only oddments of conspiracy evidence and some subplots were added. Finally, in galley form in 1996/7, I inserted some additional lately released song lyrics.
Were the rock lyrics always part of the plan?
My notion of "sampling" pop music, inserting appropriate lyrics as found dialogue and description and commentary, was inherent from the start. Some of the samples were heavily contrived, planned well in advance; others were aleatory. As I wrote, I listened consistently to my local radio stations, and from time to time a song utterly appropriate to the passage I was working on would be played just in time for inclusion! The curious thing I've come to realize is that despite my using up so many great "classic" songs, the whole book could be rewritten with a completely different yet effective "soundtrack"! That's how rich pop music is!
I take it that getting CIPHERS published was rather difficult?
The first-draft manuscript of CIPHERS circulated to dozens of editors and agents who all dropped it as if it were a tarantula come alive in their laps. Most honest in his response was agent Richard Curtis, who said, "I suspect that this book will one day be regarded as a classic, but it's too far in the infrared end of the spectrum for me to handle." In the end, only the courage and excitement of Andy Watson and Brian Clark let CIPHERS come alive.
What bothered the editors and agents about the book? The sex?
I never received a truly straight answer about any hypothetical impediments to the publication of CIPHERS from anyone. Most rejections followed the model of the one from David Hartwell. After my query letter, he eagerly asked me to send the book to him. Three days later, the manuscript came back with a note saying he couldn't even read it--never mind comment on it--because he had mysteriously run out of time! Yeah, right. Actually, I suspect the "sampling" issue frightened more people than the sex. Imagine the battle with ASCAP that looms for any bigtime publisher of CIPHERS!
You must have suspected that CIPHERS would be a hard sell to many publishers. Did it become a labor of love then to keep adding to it and updating the action? Was it fun to write?
All that kept me going after the initial wave of rejections was the conviction that I had a handle on something vital and real, a "reading frame" for the world that made esthetic sense. And of course the sheer pleasure of the writing helped. I vowed in CIPHERS to try for Kerouackian freedom from self-censorship, and the experience was illuminating and instructive. Also, I generally laugh at my own funny stuff, cry at my own sad passages, and get aroused by the naughty bits. So in that sense, I'm my own truest audience. I don't recall much input from anyone other than Andy Watson, and his bits were helpfully minimal. CIPHERS is a true case of spontaneous self-generation!
Was there one particular source for the snake lore? And how do you research a work like CIPHERS in the first place?
Various works of mythological study provided a lot of the snake lore. Joseph Campbell, Frazer, and the usual suspects. One book I cite in the novel, SERPENT WORSHIP by James Ferguson, is real, and was an early inspiration. As for the mass of conspiracy data, I simply used the technique of SF writer Charles Harness, who once said that he compiled a novel simply by inserting every single idea he had for two years into it! My pocket notebooks from the period of CIPHERS composition contain jottings from any number of sources intended for the novel. When it came time to begin writing, I transcribed these scattered notes onto loose sheets of paper in some kind of rough order. As I inserted each tidbit, I'd cross it off the list. And here's an example of my predictive powers: the actual Planet Records in Boston--the store where my protagonist Cyril works and which is destroyed in the novel--recently burned down in a mysterious fire!
CIPHERS' history of the Sixties, as witnessed by the hapless Emmett Demesne, is especially hilarious. These chapters seem to me to be particularly vivid. CIPHERS is not science fiction but Emmett’s odyssey from San Francisco to the Serpent Mounds of Ohio seem to me the most "science fictional" section of the book. Can you speak for a moment on the effect of the Sixties on you as a writer, on the writing of CIPHERS and, maybe, on how it impacted upon science fiction?
As witnessed by the ongoing Clinton impeachment, the Sixties are the buried subtext of all current culture. Never truly digested, that decade remains an obdurate lump in the stomach of the body politic. I have tried in my personal life to be faithful to my own youthful visions and experiences from that period, mutatis mutandis, and to apply the enthusiasm and optimism and wackiness of that period to my writing. SF as a genre has perhaps internalized the lessons of that decade--mainly as embodied in the writings of the New Wave --better than the culture at large in some respects. How could we ever go back to a pre-Ballardian, pre-Dickian state of being? Even the most willfully naive space opera has to acknowledge the lessons of Vietnam.
On page 137 Cy ruminates on what constitutes the "Fringe" these days and how the bourgeois just plain refuse to be shocked anymore. (see below) In an earlier interview we talked about whether or not subversion was even possible in these Spectacular times. You thought that perhaps CIPHERS might still be able to shake people up. Given all that has happened in the last year (Monicagate, etc.) do you still feel that possibility exists? Can ANYTHING be called "fringe" in 1999?
I think that notions of fringe have been "individualized," just like so much of our fragmented culture. Every person is the center of a worldview now. Your fringe is someone else's center. You might share your particular fringe/center arrangement with a certain number of other people, but the culture as a whole cannot sustain a majority view any longer of what's central and what's "out there." As Abe Lincoln might have said, "You can scandalize some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but never all of the people all of the time."
Who’s the Snake Lady on the front cover - and did you have to all the way to the Czech Republic to find her?
Prior to the publication of CIPHERS, Andy Watson had a pre-internet correspondence established with Czech photographer Vaclav Kriz. Kriz wanted to produce an image for an American book cover, and Andy described what he wanted for CIPHERS. The lovely model remains anonymous to me down to this day. I speculate she was a Prague art student desperate for hard currency, and I bless her snakey heart for posing so bravely.
LOST PAGES and WOULD IT KILL YOU TO SMILE are both out this year. JOE"S LIVER has been delayed -- is that correct? What comes next?
JOE'S LIVER, my contemporary comedy a la J. P. Donleavy, is due out in March '99 from Cambrian. After that, Andy has plans to publish SPONDULIX, the novel-length version of my novella from SF AGE. Beyond this point, however, nothing is slated, and the reception in my crystal ball is full of noise!
You mentioned a possible sequel to CIPHERS with the working title of DAKINIS. What does "dakinis" mean and what would such a sequel cover?
The term "dakini" is from Tibetan religious practice, and refers to a celestial female spirit (or an enlightened mortal one, I think). I'm imagining a book populated solely with female characters. Not that the world of my imagining would have no males--the venue would probably be our very own present--but that the focus would be almost exclusively on the women of the novel, with men offstage. I also envision a dual-track plot, one track occurring around the beginning of our century, the other, as mentioned, in the present. Other details are very hazy. I was going to call this book THE DAKINI'S BIKINI, but opted for the single plural noun instead. Can't get too silly after all, can we?
Anything you would like to add?
I never get asked who I owe thanks too. You, Patrick. John Oakes at Four Walls Eight Windows. Andy Watson and Brian Clark at Cambrian/Permeable. Magazine editors galore, especially Scott Edelman. And anybody else who has to deal with my on a non-virtual level! Please know that any stories I produce would be nonexistent without your help!
* Cy is reading a conspiracy zine called Laocoon, written by Hyman Numinoso. It contains articles such as "The Trilateral Commission and Ozzy Osborne: Who’s the Puppet, Who’s the Master?" Numinoso sees "the hand of nefarious, Fu-Manchu-type operators behind every innocent Chernobyl meltdown or Exxon Valdez spill or minor Bhopal-grade catastrophe or Siege of Sarajevo NATO-inaction. According to Numinoso, one can detect and/or predict the schemes of these various cabals through interpreting pop lyrics." He’s clearly out on the fringe, which leads Cy to wonder:
And what exactly does constitute the fringe nowadays, in these overly eclectic and standardless times? Cults, the underground, the far extremes of left and right -- they used to be so easy to identify. (Why, Cy, that old fart, even remembers when one could confidently call Rolling Stone an underground rag!) When there was an inflexible mainstream to stand in opposition to, underground information used to be easy to spot. Reproduced in small quantities, under-funded, espousing philosophies guaranteed to piss off the middle class -- These were once the hallmarks of cultish media and thoughts. But today the real underground seems dead. "Cult" is now defined as a movie costing a couple of million at least and playing in scores of Alan-Condor-owned theaters around the country. So much for limits on small and cheap. As for shocking the bourgeois -- Well, the goddamn bourgeois just wont play the game anymore. They consume everything mindlessly, without discrimination or shock, positively wallowing in information overload.
Novels: secretaries and housewives swallow like so many bonbons graphic sex scenes that one would have merited Supreme Court decisions, and college students doze through the printed subversive rantings of ancient leftists.
Movies: VCRs turn everything into television, allowing Mom ‘n’ Pop to spend their weekends watching either porno flicks once confined to Times Square strokehouses or French anti-movies that once played only Cambridge Art Pits.
Painting: Eric Fischl’s scenes of implicit bestiality and David Salle’s split-beaver shots hang in the MFA.
Music: ah, here’s the saddest case of all the arts, shure enuff. Rock ‘n’ Roll, the great unwashed devil, is now The Nation’s Music, used to hawk cars and food and clothes. How dreadfully sad....
And even if a piece of insanity like Laocoon does represent some real subterranean impulses, it’s still co-optable. Give the guy a grant and a word-processor, and, before long, he’ll be right up there with The New York Review of Books....
