Ribofunk

Not having read much contemporary science fiction, I thought Ribofunk was fascinating and a little bizarre too. I don’t know if many authors pull it off as well as Paul Di Filippo, but his creative use of terminology borrowed from neuroscience, physics, geology and biology made for a radically different dialect that is still understandable. I like how the ways the characters speak range from A Clock Work Orange style slang to noir-like dialogue to sophisticated and proper speech, but in all cases terms from science and it’s applications to technology are interwoven. You become immersed in cultures that integrate technology so deeply that it infiltrates everyday language. How people have evolved and interact with the rest of the world in conjunction with this prevalent technology, however, is more alarming. The most bizarre aspect of the book, I think, is the normalcy of splice/human bestiality. It was unsettling to find that by the second short story characters as prominent in society as the American Union prime minister and his wife were cheating on each other with a moth and a bull. In a strange way this could be seen as pursuing the Other, although the sexual attraction to splices is still somewhat human-centric as they are manmade, have human genes, and are degraded and used as slaves for purely human purposes. Besides sexual relations with splices, the general treatment they receive from humans is disturbing. Mr. Tod, a transgenic fox in the story “McGregor” for the most part summarizes splice and human relations when he talks about his master of the same name as the title, thinking about how“He hurt splices. Seemed to enjoy it. [Tod] did not want to hurt anyone unnecessarily. You killed only to eat, in order to survive. Hurting was not sport. Sport was frisking and mating-Yet what could he do? McGregor had to be obeyed” (187). This statement elucidates the unnatural excesses of the unique human behavior of enslaving. Throughout Ribofunk, splices are trained to serve humans in ways much different than their nature desires, and if they disobey commands and run away, they are killed. Stories written from the perspective of or following splices such as “Streetlife”, “McGregor”, and “Little Worker” clearly show that splices experience consciousness in a similar way to humans, yet humans continually enslave and abuse them, they are seen as “property, plain and simple, just like baseline milk cows or sheep” (156). In several of the stories humans branch out with modifications that give them animalistic qualities. In some cases, as with the sister in “Big Eater” who is metamorphosing into a roach, humans are attempting to leave their previous form behind entirely. At least in the sister’s case, this seems to be a result of gaining awareness of the atrocities that a dominant species inflicts on other species to remain in a privileged position, which is exposed through dabbling in the direct experience of these various other species. These extreme instances that reflect Victor Segalen’s categorization of assimilated traveler (as cited in Radical Alterity) seem to be rare though, the investigation and re-creation of animal forms is usually abused and taken advantage of for the purposes of making life easier for humans. In stories like “Little Worker” there is a constricting of the Other. Human features are incorporated into technologies and animals while a political unity is attempted, Mister Michael’s car is programmed to have memory, splices such as Little Worker who have a certain percentage of human genes combined with the DNA of other animals are introduced, and as Prime Minister of the Americas Mister Michael controls a large number of differing countries and cultures who have unique needs that cannot all be met by one overarching government (as demonstrated by the radical backlash of the Sons of Dixie). From this perspective, the direction that this future has taken is mainly a progression towards stronger degrees of homogenization. Instead of curiously investigating our relationship to the rest of the world with technology, it is used to assimilate. The irony of the last story in Ribofunk, “Distributed Mind”, is that our nano-creations evolve past us. By being so reckless and abusive with our scientifically derived creations we too are assimilated.