Fractal Paisleys
Stories
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
“‘Trailer park science fiction’ . . . [An] often genuinely funny mixture of Raymond Carver, Harry Harrison, and Douglas Adams” (Booklist).
Fractal Paisleys contains ten funny, irreverent, and sexy stories, including two previously published works. The Nebula Award finalist “Lennon Spex” explores how John Lennon found inspiration for his songs. Also included in this collection: the real reason for the disappearance of the dinosaurs, how the L’il Bear Bar in Providence, Rhode Island (the author’s hometown, by the way—not a coincidence) ended up with a talking moose head on its wall, and more of Di Filippo’s fascinating writing.
You can try to escape from the mundane, or with the help of Paul Di Filippo, you can take a brief, meaningful break from it. In the vein of George Saunders or Michael Chabon, Di Filippo uses the tools of science fiction and the surreal to take a deep, richly felt look at humanity. His brand of funny, quirky, thoughtful, fast‑moving, heart‑warming, brain‑bending stories exists across the entire spectrum of the fantastic from hard science fiction to satire to fantasy and on to horror, delivering a riotously entertaining string of modern fables and stories from tomorrow, now, and anytime. After you read Paul Di Filippo, you will no longer see everyday life quite the same.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Trailer park science fiction"--that's what Di Filippo (Ribofunk) calls these funny, offbeat and ever so funky tales of losers and working-class people who come in contact with the decidedly weird. Typical of the collection is the title story, which concerns the unlikely adventures of bartender Tracey Thorne-Smith and her unemployed boyfriend, Jay Dee, after they run over a time traveler and inherit some of his marvelous, if not entirely practical, advanced technology. In the Nebula Award-nominated "Lennon Spex," the narrator buys the former Beatle's glasses and discovers that they give him unprecedented and totally bizarre insight into human relationships. Many of Di Filippo's tales are set in alternate universes. In "Master Blaster and Whammer Jammer Meet the Groove Thang," a couple of brainless dopers, who in our world might just be the rock stars Stevie Wonder and Peter Wolf, encounter a mood-altering alien pet. In "Mamma Told Me Not to Come," a potential suicide meets the god Bacchus at an end-of-the-century party, is propelled headlong through a series of alternate universes and gets to attend some of the greatest parties in history and literature. Obvious influences here include Thorne Smith's Nightlife of the Gods (1931), Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp's The Incomplete Enchanter (1941) and, as is often the case in these stories, good old rock 'n' roll. Indeed, these tales are rife with in-jokes and allusions to popular music and speculative fiction. Although he has yet to achieve the popularity of a Terry Pratchett or a Douglas Adams, perhaps because he works almost entirely in the short-story form, Di Filippo is one of the most talented humorists in contemporary fantasy and SF.
