Introduction
by Robert Silverberg
Anyone who calls a story “The Emperor of Gondwanaland,” as Paul Di Filippo did some years back, is going to be a hero of mine forever. Gondwanaland is one of my favorite places on this planet—one that I long to visit, but never will, because it hasn’t existed for hundreds of millions of years. It is the name geologists give to the primordial continent that once stretched far across the Southern Hemisphere until vast subterranean forces compelled it to split apart, forming what now are South America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. I love simplicity, perhaps because there has been so little of it in my own busy life, and I think it would be wondrously simple if we had one great Gondwanaland down there instead of all those messy little continents and sub-continents. So I applauded when I saw the bumper sticker, “Reunite Gondwanaland,” on a passing car in the very political-minded town where I live, and one of my own stories, set in the extremely unrecent past, was called “Christmas in Gondwanaland.” That Paul Di Filippo would write a Gondwanaland story, and even make it the title story of a collection of his work, met with my heartiest approval. And here, now, we have the latest Di Filippo story collection, another cause for rejoicing.
Providence-based Paul Di Filippo has been a subtle, shifty, subversive presence in science fiction now since the mid-1980s. (Though the start of his career dates from a story published in 1977.) In a host of short stories and a dozen or so of novels he has toyed with genre conventions, not only standing them on their heads but deftly rotating them through six or seven dimensions, resulting in a body of work that is challenging, stimulating, and vastly entertaining. There’s nobody else like him in the field: Sui generis is the right term for him. Yet for all his subversive habits he has remained, beneath all the playfulness, faithful to the set of concepts and attitudes that constitute true science fiction. He fools around a lot, yes, but he writes the real stuff nevertheless.
Here he is now with a new collection of his work—eleven stories, one of them published here for the first time, the others drawn from a wide assortment of venues. Three of them come from the classic Big Three of science-fiction magazines, Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Another appeared in the venerable British scientific magazine, Nature. But the rest saw their first publication in such widely (and wildly) varied sources as The Monkey’s Other Paw, Clockwork Fables, and The College Hill Independent. He does get around. All of them will repay your reading time. But I note three in particular that caught my fancy. “Adventures in Cognitive Homogamy: A Love Story,” for one, a story that begins with a deliberately overloaded paragraph that is not so much a narrative hook as it is a narrative bludgeon. Of course Di Filippo knows better than to begin a story with a single intricate sentence about a dozen lines long, and that’s the whole point of his doing it. But once the tongue is out of his cheek he goes on to tell a story that does indeed explore the consequences of its extrapolative premise in a way that would satisfy any old-fashioned purist.
He does it again in “Chasing the Queen of Sassi,” which opens with another of his outrageously overstuffed narrative hooks, and wanders in the most astonishingly discursive directions before finding its way home to the precisely proper place. And then there is “Desperadoes of the Badlands,” a story of such frenetic inventiveness that it leaves one gasping—and cheering.
Sui generis, I called him, which is my fancy way of saying that he’s one of a kind. He is our ambassador from Gondwanaland. Read him. Honor him. Cherish his work.
—Robert Silverberg
July, 2016