Ribofunk

Ribofunk: A book I would never have chosen to read, but once started could not put down. Paul Di Filippo creates a mosaic of short stories leading you through the lives of Earth's future inhabitants. Each short story, running about 20 pages in length, shares a single event through the eyes of one. While some stories are told by the same individual, most are of different status, kind and reason. The first story, One Night in Television City throws you head first into the life of Dez. The world he describes is one of a bad 80s music video gone awry, his friend "equipped with a few strands of grafted fiberoptics in his brown hair, an imipolex vest that bubbled constantly life some kinda slime mold, a pair of parchment pants, and a dozen jelly-bracelets on his left forearm." Quite a few stories incorporated the villain and their-time Robin Hood transgenic Krazy Kat. Krazy Kat fights for freedom of splices, the future slaves of man-kind. These splices are created by recombining genes of multiple chosen animals. The animals are chosen on the basis of the owners needs, whether for protection, service, or pleasure. In the story Streetlife, a splice named Coney while on a knowingly dangerous mission for his master admits, “Why were splices ever created? Their life was only endless suffering, all at human behest. Wouldn’t it have been better to remain a dumb brute than to be granted just enough feeling and intelligence to realize how miserable one’s situation was? It was almost enough to make a loyal splice side with that mad transgenic, Krazy Kat.” While others, like in the story The Bad Splice protested that “The transgenics are property, plain and simple, just like baseline milk cows or sheep.” The hardest part for me to grasp was the language. Every paragraph was full of foreign words I had to sound out, items I only guessed I understood. Common metaphors and idioms were crafted for their time, sentences that would not make sense if used today. Such things as "I could see it clear as M31 in the hubblescope," or "proud as a ten-year-old who knocked up the neighborhood widow." It made me realize how much metaphors are defined by their era. Even more specifically, how language is. Words uttered by those of the past are at times incomprehensible to us, while words we shout today are foreign to our grandparents. It would be only fitting that this far in the future, language would have mutated, evolved, into something far form normal to us. I feel with a greater understanding, or interest in science fiction, there would have been some terms that would not have been so unattainable to me. But I also found it quite brilliant Di Flippo’s ability to mesh cellular biology within the text. Using terms such as dermis, polymer and flagella he incorporated on a microcellular level, the area’s involved with the future mutations to both human and animal kind. These mutations seen in splices, kibes, and trope induced humans fill every page. There are no longer the humans we see today, but only modified “for the better.” The story Disturbed Mind, explains a man’s hardships with being raised Viridian, being “birthed the old-fashioned baseline way. Neither Incyte Yoot Chutes nor splice hostmothers or even the redoubtable Possum cultivator were acceptable…he hadn’t spoke his first words till after a whole six weeks of strictly neohomeopathic trope dosing,” a time table that seems outrageous to us. It seems that this increase in technology has increased the rate of maturity. With the power of science, aging is not longer a natural process but one that can be induced, with humans having sex at 11, and reaching adulthood in their early teens. It seems that with technology, nothing is a natural process. Everything is modified. But then again, we found the idea of evolution to be initially preposterous. Maybe these advances in technology are our evolutionary path. But will they lead to our prosperity or to our demise.