The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Ciphers by Paul Di FilippoLance Olsen
Paul Di Filippo. Ciphers. Permeable Press, 1997. 541 pp. Paper: $16.95.
Cyril Prothero, a fragile-minded but really lovable schlemiel and clerk at Planet Records in Boston, comes across a zincless-middled penny minted in Arizona and then a barcode on a CD that invades his body with a flood of unwanted information when he touches it
. . . which is the beginning of some High Weirdness, but nothing compared to when poor Cyril returns home and finds his lady love, Ruby Tuesday, suddenly MIA after leaving a cryptic message she’s in some kind of major trouble . . . which narrative slowly begins to web with a plethora of even face-slackeningly stranger ones (assault butterflies, bugger-happy holy men, fiendish garden hoses . . .) by means of various spoofy-if-nebulous conspiracies involving snake goddesses, secret gnostic sects, a virus that leads those infected to spiritual enlightenment, and a mysterious international conglomerate called Wu Labs run by a mysterious three-thousand-year-plus-old guy in hot pursuit of immortality and omniscience. The result is a brilliant tour de force for Paul Di Filippo, founder and quite possibly sole member of the ribofunk movement. Nothing works in a straight line in it . . . or, to employ one of the shaping Shannonesque metaphors from it: continual noise has been pumped into this informational system. Consequently, reading Ciphers is more like reading the humongous, hyper, freewheeling, encyclopedic-minded and hep-voiced first-and-favorite-phase Pynchon of V., The Crying, and Gravity’s Rainbow than any other writer I know. Its cartoonishly delightful characters, silly lyrics, cockamamie names, hilarious situations, ribald imagination, and breakneck speed add up to a tremendously successful act of literary affirmation. [Lance Olsen]