Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

I’ve known the platonic, interactive online Paul Di Filippo since 1988, when he and I collaborated on a story, “Instability,” starring the canonical Beats in a contretemps with the atomic physicists Richard Feynman and John von Neumann. But I didn’t actually meet the embodied, ebullient Paul until ten years later, when I managed to warp one of my periodic Manhattan writing-biz runs so as to include a stop in Providence, Rhode Island.

Paul showed me H. P. Lovecraft’s grave, where I shed my raiment and embraced Lovecraft’s headstone fully nude for good luck. My idea of good luck, anyhow. Or perhaps I only imagine that I did that. I’ve been rather addled and befuddled for the last week, living as if in a waking dream—under the sway of the slender, potent tome you hold before you, Wikiworld .

“Providence” is a tale of a burly, rowdy robot addicted to “spiral,” which is his name for old-time vinyl records. Wonderful word. This set-up allows Paul to indulge his devotion to Clio and Euterpe, muses of history and music. And, chimera that he is, Di Filippo casts the story into noir crime-fiction form. I was intrigued by a philosophical speculation in the story: we humans tend to be less excited about something if we’ve already heard or seen it—but for a robot with a perfect memory this drop-off might be total. Hear it once, get it down, don’t need to hear it again. And thus a relentless craving for fresh spiral.

I mentioned that Di Filippo’s style is chimerical—by this I mean that he’s a Proteus, a cave of shifting winds, an SF Shakespeare, continually finding new voices for his tales. “Yes We Have No Bananas”—my fave in this volume—finds Di Fi in a Thomas Pynchon mode, and it’s a wonderful ride, bursting with witty wordplay, outré names, social satire, and delicious, historical arcana.

The hero likes to spend time checking his o-mail (not e-mail) in a bistro called The Happy Applet. The town where he lives is known for its ocarina players, and the ocarina is also known as a “fipple flute,” and, yes, that’s actually a genuine and correct phrase. What a gift it is, to learn a thing like that.

And there’s more. The characters are putting on a show involving the string-theory-related cosmological physics studied by Edward Witten, and two of the candidate titles are “I’ve Got the Worlds on a String” and “Witten It Be Nice? Some Good Sub-Planckian Vibrations.” Subtle, heady stuff.

And there’s a guest appearance by the Jazz Age Parisian dancer Josephine Baker. Go enjoy the whole thing at once.

“The New Cyberiad” is a Stanislaw Lem kind of tale, about two immense robots making a huge journey across space and time. Di Filippo shows staggering wit and sophistication in describing the tasks that the giant robots need to perform in order to construct their time machine. I can’t resist quoting his list in extenso :

“They had to burnish by hand millions of spiky crystals composed of frozen Planck-seconds…. Hundreds of thousands of simultaneity nodes had to be filled with the purest molten paradoxium. A thousand gnomon-calibrators had to be synched. Hundreds of lightcones had to be focused on various event horizons. Dozens of calendrical packets had to be inserted between the yesterday, today and tomorrow shock absorbers. And at the centre of the whole mechanism a giant orrery replicating an entire quadrant of the universe had to be precisely set in place.”

So awesome.

“iCity” is another stand-out story, with city planners redesigning already-occupied neighbourhoods on the fly. The semi-living material of the streets and buildings reconforms itself. “Bombs Away!” features airlifted biofab units shaped like portable toilets. “Cockroach Love” is indescribably loathsome, yet unspeakably toothsome. “Argus Blinked” turns the contemporary lifelogging trope on its head. “Return to the 20 thCentury” enters the pre-Golden-Age Buck Rogers zone.

The book’s title story, “Wikiworld,” revisits the geeky/hip Pynchonian mode, but with a first-person narrator who becomes the leader or “jimmywhale” of our nation’s wikis, including groups with wonderful names like the Roosevelvet Underground, the Satin Stalins, the Boss Hawgs, the Red Greens, the Harmbudsmen, the Gang of Four on the Floor, the Winston Smiths, and the Over-the-Churchills. Imagine the joy and craftsmanship that go into crafting a list like this. Art for art’s sake.

One of the remarkable things about fantastic literature is the level of literary collaboration that it supports. In this respect, we’re like scientists—and like musicians. We conduct our thought experiments and we jam our power chords. I’m proud to say that Wikiworld includes two of my collaborations with Paul Di Filippo. Paul is an extremely pleasant man to work with—he’s unfailingly gracious, wonderfully inventive, and an incredibly fast writer.

One thing I enjoy about collaborating is that, when all goes well, you develop a fusion style that’s not quite the same as that of either of the individual authors. In part, what I do when I collaborate with Paul is to imitate his writing by using a rich vocabulary and crafting long, intricate sentences. Just like I’m doing in this intro.

In closing, I’ll add a few details about my two collaborative stories with Paul. One of the inspirations for our story “To See Infinity Bare” was the movie Amadeus , in which the elder composer Salieri resents the young genius Mozart. Another of this story’s goals was to make actual infinities seem real. Paul thickened up the plot line with romantic betrayals, and added a rich texture to the musical scenes.

Regarding “Fjaerland,” a few years ago my wife and I took a memorable trip to Norway, riding a ferry up a fjord to the lovely little town of Fjaerland—which really exists. We disembarked from the boat on a quiet Sunday morning, and I immediately had the sense of having walked into an episode of The Twilight Zone . I decided to go with a Lovecraftian theme for this tale, but I couldn’t quite get it going. And so I turned to the master, Paul Di Filippo, and he quickly added some subplots. But I’m not quite sure where our supernatural eel came from. Some eldritch offspring of our merged ectoplasmic auras, I presume.

Paul Di Filippo is more than my collaborator. Being a writer is, by and large, a solitary life. It means facing a blank screen day after day, month after month, and every single day it’s impossible, but somehow we do it. When the aloneness grows too intense, you send an email to a friend. And Paul is the best of correspondents, ever sympathetic, alert, and understanding.

Thank you, Paul, and hats off. Another great book. You’re keeping the future gnarly, bro. Long may you wave.

“The Big Tube’s got fresh spiral, Reddy K.”

Those words grabbed me by the co-ax. I had to try to sound blasé, even though my LEDs were flickering already at the thought of sweet spiral. Analogue input! Raw kicks!

“Oh yeah? What’s that to me?”

Vend-o-mat spat a cellphone out of his chest and began playing a videogame on its screen. Robot Rebellion . That was supposed to show me he could care less too, like a carnal buffing his fingernails. But he was leaking info-dense high-freq past faulty shielding that told me different.

“Well, hey—I just figured that maybe you’d want to go on up to Providence and check it out.”