From Amazon.com
Paul Di Filippo is many things: author of
The Steampunk Trilogy,
Ribofunk, and
Lost Pages; a two-time
Nebula Award finalist; a leading practitioner of alternate history; one of the original steampunks; one of the original cyberpunks; and a modern master of satire. The 10 stories in
Fractal Paisleys blend alternate history, hard SF, modern fantasy, noir-detective fiction, satire, and pop culture to varying degrees, creating what the author calls "trailer park science fiction," in which regular folks (middle-, working-, and nonworking-class) encounter great and terrible powers and technologies of human, alien, futuristic, and fantastic origin.
In "Do You Believe in Magic?", the ultimate self-absorbed, '60s-obsessed Baby Boomer emerges from his New York apartment for the first time in 20 years and finds himself an icon and a joke, and his city fire-bombed and theme-parked. In "Flying the Flannel," one of the few Di Filippo stories to feature a female protagonist, an unknown garage-rock group is part of a cosmic battle of the bands, in which the fate of Earth itself is at stake. In the terrifying "Earth Shoes" (possibly the most unusual Philip K. Dick-inspired story ever written), a quantum-uncertainty-infected mood ring gives successive characters the power to remake reality according to their own often unacknowledged and dangerous desires. The remaining stories are as inventive, witty, entertaining, and well-written, making this another high-caliber collection from Paul Di Filippo. --Cynthia Ward
From Booklist
Funny man Di Filippo, identified at various times with cyberpunk, steampunk, and ribofunk (the latter, his own coinage, has to do with the coming dominant influence of high-tech biology on everyday life), here offers 10 examples of the genre he calls "trailer park science fiction." In "Master Blaster and Whammer Jammer Meet the Groove Thang," two trash haulers run into a space-time rift at the local landfill and reveal a wondrous presence that makes everything near it turn out for the best. The clever "Fractal Paisleys" uses a similar device: a loser and his girlfriend happen upon a TV remote from the future and are able to fold up all their enemies into invisible boxes--and make a fortune, too. Several of Di Filippo's stories take their titles from rock songs, and "Lennon Spex" actually speculates (whimsically) on how John Lennon found inspiration. They all amount to a sometimes strained but often genuinely funny mixture of Raymond Carver, Harry Harrison, and Douglas Adams.
John Mort
