| Ciphers Review by Paul J. McAuley | |||||||||||||||
|
From the pages of Interzone [Volume 128, February 1998, published by David Pringle, Brighton, England]. Like many of his short stories, Paul Di Filippo's first novel, Ciphers (Cambrian Publications/Permeable Press, $16.95), brilliantly evokes the USA's counter-culture, where the wild fringes of sf and other pulp genres, rock 'n' roll, comix and conspiracy theory promiscuously miscegenate. This big, baggy novel alternates a kind of post-Pynchon secret history of the 20th century with a free-wheeling contemporary narrative in which a slacker record-store clerk, Cy Prothero, searches for his lost girlfriend, who was working for the mysterious Wu Laboratories. Cy falls in with his girlfriend's best friend Polly, who is looking for her disappeared boyfriend, and pretty soon they're embroiled with each other and with a worldwide conspiracy which aims to achieve enlightenment and total control of time and information. Like all conspiracy theories, Ciphers invokes a paranoid semiosis by which everything is connected to everything else, thus rendering all connections equally valid or equally meaningless. But Di Filippo turns this failing into a game, its playful rearrangement of the meaning of recent history revolving around a conflation of information theory and molecular biology (the latter, in about the only serious thesis of the novel, is held to be a branch of information theory; our DNA is a cipher of ourselves, or maybe vice versa). Peppered with snatches from rock lyrics (sometimes seamlessly, sometimes not: so it goes), it is by turns sexy, hectic, penetrating, daft, infuriating and funny. Although its ending completely unravels, as if Di Filippo could not work out or could not be bothered to work out how to round up all the hares he set in motion, at the same time it sends up the genre it pretends to inhabit. As Cy complains, "It's not even a proper conspiracy! There's no stealth, there's no ideology, there's no attempt at secrecy, there's no organization! There's not even any obvious damn goals! A million schemes just seem to be at cross-purposes with the other half! It's not mechanistic, it's — it's organic! It's a big funky soup!" Sometimes overcooked, and with perhaps too many ingredients stirred into the mix, Di Filippo's soup may be an acquired taste, but if you're familiar with his dense and deft short stories, you will know that it is also addictive. Paul J. McAuley began writing in 1984, with the story "Wagon, Passing" in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. He has gone on to produce the novels Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), Of the Fall (1989), Eternal Light (1991), Red Dust (1993), Pasquale's Angel (1994), Fairyland (1996; Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award), and his most recent, Child of the River (1997), the first book in the Confluence series. He was schooled as a biologist. John Clute says, "[T]he very substantial Eternal Light ... exemplifies McAuley's control over the instruments of 1990s Hard SF."
|