From Publishers Weekly
The best of the 18 stories in Di Filippo's first nonthemed collection are both fun and unpredictable. Typically they pay homage to other authors, as in "Anselmo Merino," which puts a science-fictional spin on Herman Melville's Benito Cereno. In the idiosyncratic "Beyond Mao," co-written with Barry Malzberg, Chinese "taikonauts" venture into space. It would be pure Malzberg if it weren't half Di Filippo. In "Observable Things," Cotton Mather teams up with Robert E. Howard's fictional Puritan, Solomon Kane. "A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled" features an even more outlandish pairing—poet Robert Frost starts his career by writing horror fiction for Weird Tales magazine, edited by H.P. Lovecraft. The poignant title tale underlines the emotional importance of computers to lonely but imaginative individuals, while the amusing alternate world satire, "Shake It to the West," updates J.A. Mitchell's 1889 novel of America in decline, The Last American. Not every selection is a winner, but the versatile Di Filippo (The Steampunk Trilogy) remains consistently inventive. (July 5)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Since the publication of his first single-themed collection, The Steampunk Trilogy (1995), melding nineteenth-century pseudoscience with faux Victorian prose, Di Filippo has garnered a reputation as one of the genre's most inventive and quirky stylists. Over the last decade, he has followed up with seven other variations-on-a-theme collections, including Lost Pages (1998), which presented alternate lives of famous authors, and Strange Trades (2001), which explored unusual professions. Here, as underscored in his brief introduction, Di Filippo takes pains to avoid a uniform motif and present a smorgasbord of diverse ideas and styles. "Anselmo Merino" recasts Melville's "Benito Cereno," the classic story of a slave revolt at sea, with aliens filling in for Africans. In the title story, Gondwanaland appears to be an imaginary micronation existing only on the Internet--until the protagonist falls in love with an all-too-real citizen. "Ailoura," one of the volume's standouts, reenvisions the Puss in Boots fairy tale as a whimsical space opera. A perfect introduction for Di Filippo newcomers and a delight for his fans. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
Paul Di Filippo's fiction spans genres—from cyberpunk to alternative history to extravagantly funny tales involving talking beavers. As whimsical as they are intelligent, the eighteen stories gathered here, each introduced by the author, find strange characters in even stranger circumstances. An all-access pass to Di Filippo's whirlwind imagination, The Emperor of Gondwanaland makes clear why its author is one of the most respected science fiction writers around. The man who coined the word ribofunk (to describe science fiction with a biogenetic twist), Di Filippo sees into the heart of our times with a vision and creativity that simply won't quit. The Emperor of Gondwanaland is more like a fluid Dalí dreamscape, painted with the deft brushstrokes; a wildly fantastic escape to alternate universes from one of the most imaginative writers around.
About the Author
Paul Di Filippo is a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award and a finalist for both the Philip K. Dick Award and the World Fantasy Award. He lives in Providence, RI.
