CYBER NOODLE SOUP is published from time to time, usually whenever we have a couple of pages of material. For copies send an SASE to: Clark PO Box 2761 St. Paul, MN 55102.This material originally appeared in INTERFERENCE ON THE BRAIN SCREEN #4. Copies are $3.00 or trade to the snail mail address above.
Time to check in with Paul Di Filippo again. Paul's new collection, Ribofunk, is out and anyone reading this ought to go immediately down to your local cool bookstore and BUY it right now. It will seriously alter your reality in a completely legal and healthy way. Trust me: no drug can compete with a big hit of ribofunk. And another book is in the pipeline. Paul was interviewed in the November issue of Wired which even I think is pretty damn cool. And his portrait there ought to make us all a bit nervous. Note, especially, the fingernails. Does he really look like that? How much alteration of the picture took place? Or was it, you know, just a typical Kodak moment? Most of this interview took place by e-mail in late January and early February, 1997. A portion of it appeared in CNS #6.
PDF: As far as I know, Leary in the end abandoned his Alcor acolytes and opted for total body cremation. But let's assume that future tech can reconstruct his personality from Sheldrakean morphic fields, or raise him up out of the Bohmian implicate order. Then I think he would function as any past personality would function in an out-of-his-natural-time situation: as a yardstick for how a culture has changed from some arbitrary baseline. I often play a similar game in my head, sometimes trying to imagine how Whitman or Twain would react to a modern sight. Phil Farmer got off some these same kicks of course in his RIVERWORLD books.
CNS: How did the WIRED interview come about?
PDF: A writer named Jeff Fisher first approached me online to interview me for an e-zine. I guess I wasn't too intractable or inarticulate, since he then decided to try to parlay the piece into a WIRED appearance. We spoke by phone for nearly two hours, and Jeff boiled it down to what finally appeared--a miracle of condensation without sacrificing intelligibility.
CNS: What did Deborah think of your "portrait" -- does she look nervously over her shoulder at you during a full moon?
PDF: My long-suffering mate Deborah Newton was not appalled by the transformation of me into a moon-baying humanoid-animal hybrid, although she did opine, "You know, not everyone is going to understand this picture, or why you like it." I had a straight portrait taken at a Boston studio of WIRED's choice, which was then fed-exed to NY City for manipulation. The issue appeared on the stands just in time for Halloween!
CNS: You also appeared on HOTWIRED , the e-version of the magazine?
PDF: I never actually managed to appear on HOTWIRED, despite my advertised presence. Their server ate my browser and spit it out (an updating of "My karma just ran over your dogma.")
CNS: What is the history of the Ribofunk essays? I saw the early version in bOING bOING #2 in 1990, then it began to show up in various other zines.
PDF: The original Ribofunk essay was originally done on a whim as something of a spoof, and circulated thru the mails as a one-page broadside. (In the mists of memory, I seem to recall that I had just ended the 12-issue run of my zine ASTRAL AVENUE and was suffering from mail-deprivation.) Anyhow, it was picked up by bOING-bOING and others, and I began to be seduced by my own propaganda: what the CIA refers to as "blowback."
CNS: The original essay was rather light-hearted, poking fun at cyberpunk and punk rock, listing slogans ("Put a Crick in your dick!"). Ribofunk 1997 has a different tone It seems intended not simply to amuse but to argue and convince. What accounts for the change?
PDF: Upon consideration, I decided that one could actually write some semi-serious SF stories of merit according to the precepts outlined in my manifesto. After a few years of doing so, I was thoroughly self-brainwashed to the point of considering my own ideas (which had originated half in jest) as worthy of some more earnest outpourings, hence RIBOFUNK 1997 and its more cajoling tone.
CNS: Reading the new version, I'm reminded strongly of your old essays against horror fiction ("Brief Contra Horror") in SF GUIDE. Ribofunk offers an antidote to what you called "the bogus, destructive, unhealthy warped life-vision" that is horror fiction's hallmarks. Modern horror fiction is grounded in a revulsion of the body; Ribofunk celebrates the body. Is this, then, the continuation of an old argument?
PDF: Indeed, my feelings for the worst of horror literature have not changed a whit since those essays in Charles Platt's zine (though "moral" horror such as Graham Joyce writes seems to me a valid proposition), and insofar as I can only write what I personally endorse, then Ribofunk is some kind of antithesis to horror.
CNS: Current horror fiction is dominated by the theme of vampires. Why are the undead thriving in the late 1990s?
PDF: Vampires seem to be in vogue for two symbolic reasons nowadays: they have indiscriminate sex and drink blood without worry (blood = AIDS), thus doing what we cannot. And as our own rulers become--or are perceived to be--more "vampiric" in nature, then we love to read about their stand-ins taking a stake thru the heart. Pay attention, Senators and Presidents and Juntas everywhere!
CNS: Vampires cheat death, too. That is high on the agenda of the Extropians and other brain downloaders. I wonder if their rejection of the body as mere meat is a variation of horror fiction's same attitude. Certainly Ribofunk is critical of the desire to "abandon the wet body for silicon simulation."
PDF: Besides the whole meat/no meat issue, it now occurs to me that Vampires also represent the Dead Hand of History. At the end of the twentieth century, we feel squashed under our own heritage, wrapped in chains of nostalgia and retro-fashions. Vampires might represent this. They might also represent a kind of SF motif: the necessity for long-range planning if one is to survive!
CNS: Turning from Ribofunk the essay to RIBOFUNK the book -- how is the collection doing? Certainly it received very favorable reviews.
PDF: No hard sales figures yet on Ribofunk, but Avon has just picked up the paperback rights, so I'm happy!
CNS: Just a coincidence that the book was released around the same time as THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU based on H.G. Wells' ur-ribofunk text?
PDF: I wish I had been savvy enough to somehow capitalize on the remake of MOREAU. But maybe being associated with such a fast-disappearing bomb wouldn't have been so smart after all!
CNS: Do you plan more ribofunk stories?
PDF: would like to do a Ribofunk novel to be entitled STRANGE OASES, set around the end time of the current story-cycle.
CNS: Andy Watson announced that CIPHERS would be published "soon." That book has been many years in the pipeline. How does it feel to have it finally see the light of day?
PDF: CIPHERS, begun in 1985, last revised in 1993, has moved from prophecy to journalism, yet still, upon my recent proofing of galleys, stands up well, I believe, in the way I originally conceived it: as the "sequel" to GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. Our whole postmodern plight is laid out on a dissecting table and entertainingly flayed. I await the world's contumely.
CNS: At one point you were considering two projects: an "erotic fantasy" or "a tale of Bishop Berkeley in space." Have you begun work on either, or has something else come along?
PDF: Both projects remain uncommitted to paper as of yet, since I've been wrapped up for several months with reviews and writing five entries for David Pringle's upcoming ST. JAMES GUIDE TO HORROR WRITERS. I tend to think I'll start the erotic dark fantasy first, since at least I have a title: A MOUTHFUL OF TONGUES. I'd like to keep it short--40-60K words--since I think an erotic narrative begins to pall at longer lengths. Delany's TIDES OF LUST, recently reissued by Masquerade as EQUINOX, remains a model uppermost in my thoughts.
CNS: GUIDE TO HORROR WRITERS? What is that all about?
PDF: St James Press is an imprint of Gale Research, a firm that specializes in reference volumes on literary matters, purchased mostly by libraries. Recently, they have issued encyclopedias on SF and Fantasy writers. I worked on the latter with David Pringle, and he invited me back in on the third, the Guide to Horror Writers. Presented with a list of names to choose from (most of which were terra incognita to me), I picked five: Scott Bradfield, Ian McEwan, Alasdair Gray, Russell Kirk and Lucius Shepard (and please don't ask me why the latter wasn't in either of the previous two volumes). Then, I basically sat my butt down and read everything available by these five men, all to run out essays running 1000 to 1500 words long. The elephant of reading brought forth a mouse of writing, but I feel I can't do justice to these entries any other way. God--for my Fantasy Guide entry on A. A. Milne, I even read his autobiography and his son's, the former Christopher Robin!
CNS: Do you see any cross-fertilization between SF and horror?
PDF: K W Jeter seems the obvious candidate to experiment with The Marriage of Horror and SF. John Shirley once expressed interest in the possibility. And Robert Holdstock flirts with the merger too. Perhaps Bear's BLOOD MUSIC already is that unholy hybrid!
CNS: You annual reports in NEBULA AWARD WINNERS always showed an enormous amount of reading. Do you have a sense of where science fiction is going these days?
PDF: When I get into a reviewing groove, I can actually deal with a book of average length in a 24-hour period: read it from 6PM to midnight, then write about it the next morning, recover, and start the whole process up again. In the NY TIMES obit for Diana Trilling recently, it was mentioned that she once reviewed a novel a day for six years! Doubt if I could match that, as I usually crash after a month of this routine, and long to get back to fiction. In any case, as Brian Aldiss told me when I first began the ASIMOV'S column, steady reviewing conferred the perk of pontificating at length about the field, even years after you had stopped reviewing! So let me just say that my take on SF is that--putting aside all the media crap--divisions seem to be hardening. Humanists hang out with humanists, hard SF'ers with hard SF'ers, c-punks with c-punks, gonzos with gonzos, trilogists with trilogists, etc. This seems stultifying. What if we saw a collaboration between, say, Greg Egan and Jonathan Lethem? Something new and exciting might be born. The small press seems admirably suited for any and all experiments along these lines. Their books always get greeted with confusion by shelf-stockers at bookstores anyhow, so why not use that confusion for fruitful purposes?
CNS: These divisions in the market place...what is driving that? Marketing policies? The authors themsleves?
PDF: I'm sure both marketing constraints and a human desire to form cliques and in-groups both play a part in the segregation of various sub-genres. My friend, writer Dan Pearlman, would like to use "The Literature of the Fantastic" as an umbrella to shade everyone from Borges to Edgar Rice Burroughs, and this doesn't seem such a bad idea. I suppose that as Greg Benford has it, intense cloistered feedback among like-minded individuals is what produces evolutionary meme advances. But what about exogamy for a change?
CNS: Interesting that Benford should say that. In biology "intense cloistered feedback" (incest?) leads to sterility and death. Are SF writers moving into hostile camps and sniping at each other?
PDF: Collegiality among SF authors definitely flourishes, but I believe only in the sense that all doctors probably enjoy a sense of cameraderie ("No layman knows what we go through, etc."), but they (the doctors) also subdivide into specialists who harbor disdain for each other: "Oh, him, he's just a dentist!" Try, "Oh, he writes military SF!" or "Oh, she just writes fantasy!" Not to misquote Benford, here's from his afterword to FOUNDATION FEAR: "Genres are constrained conversations. Constraint is essential, defining the rules and assumptions open to an author."
CNS: From the outside there always seemed to be a lot of collegiality amongst writers. Is that less true today?
PDF: In an exchange of letters, Barry Malzberg and I have been nostalgically lamenting the olden days of SF, when practically all its practitioners and readers knew each other. But a retreat to such a time seems impossible, and we are going to have to figure out how to accomodate both "fringe" and "core" readers and writers without diluting the texts. No easy answers to this one.
CNS: SF is a major market for film right now. -- INDEPENDENCE DAY, 12 MONKEYS, SCREAMERS, god-only-knows how many direct to video titles and, of course, the re-issued STAR WARS trilogy being released in a few days. Has all of this been good for science fiction?
PDF: The explosion of SF cinema seems to have helped no one but Hollywood and its ecology of screenwriters, agents, etc. And as a viewer, I am dismayed. For every 12 MONKEYS, there are a dozen NUTTY PROFESSORS. When print SF began to get popular, the cry from fans was "Put SF back in the gutter where it belongs!" Now it should be something like "Get SF off the screens and back in your cortex where it belongs!"
CNS: Charles Platt recently said, "The science fiction audience is already too large. That's why science fiction is so mediocre. I'd like to see it go back to being a specialized form of addiction afflicting a priviliged minority." What do you think? Too large? Too mediocre?
PDF: While "small is beautiful," it seems unlikely that the audience for SF can be shrunk by any other means than fractioning off into separate camps. Whether such a splitting would strengthen or weaken the peculiar values that once ruled SF remains in doubt. I would, in my most optimistic moments, like to believe that the audience can be educated up to the old levels of knowledge and taste that once dominated the "Golden Age."
CNS: Given that the "present" is already weirder than any imagined future, what can SF even write about anymore? What expectations can it legitimately raise? What dreams can it still call forth?
PDF: I too have the feeling that at the more-or-less 100-year mark of modern genre SF (using Wells's THE TIME MACHINE as our starting point rather than, say, FRANKENSTEIN), we have somehow attained a critical mass of wordage that is both pregnant with possibility for a new birth and also stifling in its sheer tonnage. Surveying even just the mountaintops of speculative fiction, never mind the less brilliant slopes and the stagnant valleys, we are almost forced to say: "It's all been done, every last ore deposit has been stripmined and refined. Every possible change has been rung, every speculation endlessly permutated. And somehow all the glorious fantasies, however meticulous or freeform, now seem somehow irrelevant. Where they came close to reality, reality was better (ie, computers) and where they strayed farthest from reality (ie, starflight), reality let us down. Maybe it was a marriage doomed from the start. But in any case, where do we go after the divorce?" But wait--weren't we saying all this just prior to the New Wave, and then again, just prior to cyberpunk? All it takes is one visionary to remake the whole field. But what shape would that new field take? I can't guess, except to say that somehow, reading this new kind of SF, you would intuitively sense that it contained inside it everything that had gone before, and was using that base as a launchpad. Just as no painter today has to reinvent perspective or Abstract Expressionism, so the SF of the future will somehow use all the SF that has gone before it merely as a tool!
CNS: It's taken a long time, but in 1997 you will have three hardcover books in print. Does it feel like you've crossed some sort of threshold in terms of recognition and marketability?
PDF: At the present time, after 15 years of attempted freelance survival, I am as broke as I've ever been, somewhat baffled about what to turn my hand to next, and disbelieving of all good fortune. Such is my definition of my own "success."