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Strange Trades
by Paul Di Filippo
(Golden Gryphon Press, £21.50, hardcover, 342 pages, 1 November 2001;
ISBN: 1930846053.)
Paul Di Filippo plies a strange trade. He writes science  fiction
short stories. Lots of them. Weird ones. Funny ones. Postmodern
funky ones. Cutting-edge punky ones. Engaged and thoughtful ones. In
his fifth collection, Strange Trades, he turns his speculative
savoir faire towards the realm of work. These 12 stories all revolve
around the jobs people hold in the author's imagined futures.
These jobs include nightclub singer, sandwich shop owner, messenger,
government security agent, member of the Urban Conservation Corps, ethical
entrepreneur, office worker, telekinetic surgeon, factory slave in a
feudal economy, and, in "The Boredom Factory", the ultimate meaningless
cog in a post-industrial, production-obsessed society. Some of these
jobs may sound familiar, but in Di Filippo's imaginative hands, they
lead anywhere but to the expected.
The collection is anchored by three novellas. Some may find "The Mill"
more accessible, but it struck me as overly long and bland, the only
story here bereft of Di Filippo's sparkling voice. However, the other
two, "Spondulix" and "Karuna, Inc.", like most stories of this collection,
are cognitive assaults in the true Di Filippo manner.
Di Filippo takes particular delight in offering fictions that challenge
the consensus view of reality. Strange Trades is less exuberant
in its use of this tactic than the author's previous books, but perhaps
this only enhances its subversive potential. Certainly, the clash between
mainstream economic forces and counter-hegemonic subcultures in many
stories here -- "Spondulix", "Conspiracy of Noise", "Agents", "Harlem
Nova", "Karuna, Inc." -- allows Di Filippo to present his radical ideas
in a familiar context -- if then only to pull the rug out from under
readers' feet and play mischievously with narrative expectations and
social order.
Originally published, in slightly different form,
in The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 1 December 2001.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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