Paul Di Filippo is pushing science fiction into the biological realm - preparing us for the gene-spliced landscapes of the future.
__ In the 1980s, cyberpunk changed the face of science fiction, bringing a sleek, streetwise technosensibility to a genre exhausted by space operas. But Paul Di Filippo, himself a first-wave cyberpunk, thinks the movement has ignored the biological in its bias toward gadgets. He'd like to rectify cyberpunk's omission with a healthy dose of amino acids. Di Filippo calls his emerging science fiction subgenre "ribofunk." With the publication of Ribofunk, a collection of his short stories, Di Filippo may be in a position to help alter the sci-fi landscape once again - and with it, how we think about where biotech is taking us as a species.
__ By Jeffrey Fisher
Wired: What is ribofunk?
Di Filippo:
It's a neologism of my own inventing that I hope spreads like a memetic virus through the intellectual community. *Ribo *comes from the word ribosome, which I use as shorthand for all biology, and *funk *indicates a stylistic component derived most obviously from funk music. The funk style - a hot skittery style in contrast to the more laid-back, cerebral style that you might find in some cyberpunk - ties in naturally with the whole biological revolution. Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it's a very small percentage of the total. That's been changing in the last few years.
What around you suggested ribofunk?
The advent of AIDS circa 1980 has really forced medicine and biology to take enormous steps just for sheer survival. The same way war propels hard technology, AIDS has created wartime conditions in the field of biology that will have all sorts of spin-offs. There's a whole host of new tools, but what's more important is new attitudes that are making biology assume a place in the center of our attention that it never quite had before. I'm thinking of two guys in the armed services who refused to donate DNA samples because they felt it may lead to self-incrimination somewhere down the line. Or I just read about an inherited disorder prevalent among people of Jewish ethnicity. All these parents pooled their money and hired a team of biologists to track down the gene so they can test for potential carriers.
That kind of awareness of the amount of information contained in living organisms is now penetrating down to a grassroots level that wasn't evident two decades ago.
What impact is biotech going to have on evolution?
Humanity has bypassed the usual evolutionary constraints long before now. Disasters don't kill us off as effectively as they once did. But we may be embarking on a whole new level of directed evolution.
What values do we take into that decisionmaking?
I think humanity is not wise enough to know what genotype or somatype is going to be the most successful or the most fit - simply because we're not fully in control of our environment. You could engineer a human to survive the greenhouse effect because you think that's what's going to happen, and then all of a sudden the glaciers are creeping down on you. So what we should be encouraging is a kind of chaotic, wildly creative assortment of genotypes and somatypes. And I think that's going to happen naturally. I don't think there'll ever be any impetus toward monoculture; we'll see diversity become more rampant.
Aren't we likely to see restrictions on altering human genes or on mixing human and animal genes?
Those are going to be the abortion wars of the next century. But posit this scenario: scientists announce that sharks possess the secret to preventing cancer - all it takes is the insertion of certain shark genes into a fetus and your baby will never have cancer. How long do you think even Jerry Falwell is going to stand up against that? As soon as one potential benefit is demonstrated to everyone's satisfaction, it will open the floodgates. Something like that comes out, and down go the barriers of strictly philosophical or ideological objections to the mixing of genes.
So what happens to the concept of the human species at that point? Or even of species?
The genetic alphabet doesn't have any particular meaning until you put together certain combinations of letters. When you assemble the components of the genetic alphabet in one fashion, it's a full human; when you put them together another way, you end up with a half-dog, half-human. It becomes a big soup of genes.
Are normal people going to be able to handle that?
We've been talking about these sorts of questions with artificial intelligence for a while. But the biologi-cal revolution is at once more alluring and more off-putting than the cybernetic revolution. Everybody can relate to familiar animals - dogs, cats, whatever. By grafting intelligence or even human features on them, you engender a whole host of emotional responses you don't get with robots. Especially if they think and talk, they're in a twilight zone where you don't know what your response should be: Are they humans? Subhumans? Dumb animals are very alluring, but when they approach our own emotional and intellectual capacity, they will become very disturbing.
