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


From Kirkus Reviews
Ten tales, 198997, including two previously unpublished, in this second collection, following Ribofunk (1996). The same-ish, claustrophobic backdrop, with its heavy emphasis on rock music, its generally '60s ambiance, and mingled jive/good-ol'-boy approach, doesn't disguise the slenderness of many of the ideas here. Best of the bunch: a wishing machine from the future (the title piece); a hermit music reviewer who emerges from his apartment to find that New York's Village has become a Disney theme park; pop icon John Lennon's spectacles affording a view into another dimension; the god Bacchus's endless party; and the one real standout, a murder mystery romp involving Rupert Sheldrake's morphic fields. The remainder, less consequentially, offer: a quantum creature that radiates feel-good emotions; a birdlike alien that kidnaps a rock band; and an intelligent computer from the future that fails to prevent the death of Kurt Cobain. Weakest of all are the previously unpublished entries: a magic ring influences US political trends and a race of imps live secretly among humans. Di Filippo is often adept at twanging the heartstrings of nostalgia, but his brand of humor too often manifests itself as no more than a glassy grin. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Paul Di Filippo's wryly humorous and biting, satiric short stories have been popping up here and there for years, and now you can read a good selection of his best in one first-rate collection. Includes two original stories and several that are hard to find.
—Don D'Ammassa

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Ten funky science fiction stories by the widely acclaimed author of Steampunk and Ribofunk. Irreverent, funny and sexy - samples of what Di Filippo calls "trailer park science fiction" - Fractal Paisleys explains the real reason for the disappearance of the dinosaurs, how John Lennon found inspiration, how the L'il Bear Bar in Providence, R.I., ended up with a talking moose head on its wall, why Republicans ruled the U.S. for an unbroken twelve years and many more secrets of life. The stories are united by Di Filippo's fascination with the infinite variety of alternate worlds: "what-if" scenarios that place an ordinary Joe or Jane in command of the forces that power the universe. Invariably, the results are ... unexpected, to say the least. Fractal Paisleys includes two never-before-published tales: the other stories were published in such science fiction standbys as Amazing Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Interzone.

FROM THE CRITICS

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. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

Ten tales, 198997, including two previously unpublished, in this second collection, following Ribofunk (1996). The same-ish, claustrophobic backdrop, with its heavy emphasis on rock music, its generally '60s ambiance, and mingled jive/good-ol'-boy approach, doesn't disguise the slenderness of many of the ideas here. Best of the bunch: a wishing machine from the future (the title piece); a hermit music reviewer who emerges from his apartment to find that New York's Village has become a Disney theme park; pop icon John Lennon's spectacles affording a view into another dimension; the god Bacchus's endless party; and the one real standout, a murder mystery romp involving Rupert Sheldrake's morphic fields. The remainder, less consequentially, offer: a quantum creature that radiates feel-good emotions; a birdlike alien that kidnaps a rock band; and an intelligent computer from the future that fails to prevent the death of Kurt Cobain. Weakest of all are the previously unpublished entries: a magic ring influences US political trends and a race of imps live secretly among humans.

Di Filippo is often adept at twanging the heartstrings of nostalgia, but his brand of humor too often manifests itself as no more than a glassy grin.