| Ciphers Review by Fiona Kelleghan | |||||||||||||||||||||
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For Nova Express magazine, No. 16, Winter/Spring 1998 "Who can presume to say what the war wants," Thomas Pynchon murmurs in Gravity's Rainbow, "so vast and aloof it is ... so absentee." In his rollicking, razzle-dazzling novel, Ciphers, Paul Di Filippo presents a wonderful successor to that least-read must-read work. Here, the hidden hand, seemingly everywhere and nowhere, is that of one Doctor Wu, a shadowy entity whose high-tech corporation, Wu Labs, traffics on the cutting edge of biology and physics. Sound familiar? Don't be fooled. Ciphers is a writhing rock-and-roll formation that has been shaped by the gush and swirl of many genre fictions now foundering in cliche, but it rears above the tide with unforgettable energy. Conspicuously named protagonist Cy Prothero is alerted via an obscure phone call, a puzzling letter, and a mysterious videotape that his girlfriend, Ruby Tuesday, may have been kidnapped by Wu Labs. He is joined by longtime friend Polly Peptide, whose boyfriend has also disappeared shortly after giving Cy a mysterious compact disc that cannot be played on a conventional audio player. Cy and Polly team up to find their lovers, though before long they are Burning Down the House in a torrid affair. As they track down various bizarre associates and victims of Wu, soon to realize that they must also discover the Doctor's motives behind a century-spanning conspiracy to ... master space and time? fulfill a sinister program of genetic engineering? take over the CD industry? ... They pursue hint after clue in a madcap investigation that will leave you laughing out loud. The novel's net is tangled with schemes and subplots, and immersed in Pynchonesque floods of factual detail. Several threads detail the life stories of love-goddess Melusine of the Mekong, Benin's Information Minister Claude Lollolo, powerful Wu Labs captain Paddy O'Phidian, and Treasury Department agent Emmett "Eminent" Demesne, who measures paranoia in "mega-Hoovers." The punningly-named cast includes Philippe (and his uncle "M. T.") deClosets, Roi Aubisson, Ferdie Lantz, Homer "Homo" Faber, Anna Condor and Lao Cohen. Information theorist Claude Shannon shows up (see the subtitle), as does General MacArthur — Di Filippo fans know already his flair for absurd alternate history. Maxwell's Demon itself makes a licentious appearance. Not just your average pursue-the-McGuffin story, this is a lusty encyclopedia of communication theory and cybernetics, numbers and nucleic acids, war and woman's mojo, sex and snakes: a tour through the highways and byways of the twentieth century and the human nervous system. As Cy complains, "It's not a conspiracy of silence, it's a conspiracy of noise!" The delight of the book lies in Di Filippo's kooky kinetic style. He springs into radical departures from the narrative to offer, for example, the listings in Cy's TV Guide, a "two-track" history of the 1960s, and a rewrite of the Monty Python Dead Parrot Sketch. Nor does Di Filippo neglect to forge an excerpt from Charles Babbage's autobiography and to provide the script from a figmental film version of the Popol Vuh. The text carries its own soundtrack, for nearly every sentence assimilates rock-n-roll lyrics, titles, or band names. The most notable of these knight moves occurs halfway through the text, when Di Filippo challenges his fellow authors to start "MESSIN' WITH THE CODE." He declares it "every honest writer's responsibility" to utilize "puns, rebuses, riddles, ciphers, enigmas, puzzles, distractions, red-herrings, sleight-of-hand, anagrams, acrostics, skewed orthography (phunny spellink), KRaZy KApITAlIZatioN, unorthodox punc(tu...a)tion?!!, veiled hints, parody, cryptic allusions, said-bookisms (he ejaculated), authorial interjections (see what I mean?), repetitious catch-phrases, the mixture of different modes such as poetry and prose, and the conflation of reality and fantasy. ... If you're really daring, you can even fool with the Metastatements that govern Messing!" (He omits here, but indulges everywhere, in alchemical alliterations.) Di Filippo then consigns all conventional texts to the "LAND OF DEAD GENRES," where they will drift dispiritedly into entropy. It's funny and, of course, in deadly earnest. Who will meet his challenge? Will his novel persuade his SF colleagues to take some chances, to push and pummel their next text into unthinkable shapes? Of course not. Nor would we want a body of Di Filippo imitators. What will happen, of course, is that it will stand as a bizarre outcropping amid a flood of fantasy trilogies unaware that they are sloshing around a graveyard of dead genres, and Di Filippo will remain sans pareil. Fiona Kelleghan is Librarian at the University of Miami, Florida. Her work has appeared in Science Fiction Studies and The New York Review of Science Fiction, and she is currently compiling bibliographies on the works of Alfred Bester, Mike Resnick, and Jonathan Lethem. |