1992 - Ribofunk: The Manifesto - Paul Di Filippo

Texto

Gregor Mendel Died for Your Sins!

Free James Brown!

Listen to Your Mitochondria!

WHY RIBO?

Cybernetics was a dead science when cyberpunk SF was born, a cul-de-sac without living practitioners. Furthermore, the "cyber" prefix has been irreparably debased by overuse, in vehicles ranging from comic books to bad movies. The tag now stands for nothing in the public mind but computer hacking and fanciful cyborgs such as Robocop. And Weiner's actual texts do not provide enough fruitful metaphors for constructing a systematic worldview.

WHY FUNK?

Punk was a dead music when cyberpunk SF was born, a cul-de-sac albeit with living practitioners who just hadn't gotten the message yet. The music's nihilistic, chiliastic worldview had already culminated in its only possible end: self-extinction.

WHAT IS RIBOFUNK THEN?

Ribofunk is speculative fiction which acknowledges, is informed by and illustrates the tenet that the next revolution--the only one that really matters--will be in the field of biology. To paraphrase Pope, ribofunk holds that: "The proper study of mankind is life." Forget physics and chemistry; they are only tools to probe living matter. Computers? Merely simulators and modelers for life. The cell is King! Consider the following:

PORTENTS

AIDS is causing an intense and unprecedented investigation of cellular mechanics which is bound to have myriad by-products.

The mapping of the human genome is already underway.

Legal obstacles to copyrighting living animals and organic substances are falling daily.

The ecological nightmare unfolding around us--greenhouse effect, oil spills, toxic wastes--can only be solved by biological means. You cannot replace a rain forest with an oxygen-manufacturing factory. You cannot mop up spilled hydrocarbons and PCB's, but you can degrade them organically.

Humans are greedy for life-extension. Any promising developments in this direction will soon snowball.

One of the prime purposes of nanotechnology is bodily repairs, augmentations and modifications.

There are over a hundred naturally occurring neurotransmitters, and we only have a rudimentary idea of what a few of them do.

Where does the funk come in? In the style. Ribofunk must be as sensual as sex, as unsparing in sweat, cum, bile and lymph as the the body is prolific in these substances. Moreover, it must possess the same blind imperatives as the body. Crushed and crippled, the body persists, while many times the mind succumbs. We have gone as far as intellectuality can take us. We need a fiction as urgent as hunger or a hard-on. Hot, not cool.

PRECURSORS

Like every kind of SF, ribofunk can be traced back to Wells, specifically The Island of Dr. Moreau. From there we follow it through Huxley's "The Tissue Culture King," onward through some of David H. Keller's stories, into Knight's biological SF ("Natural State"), and perhaps Pohl and Kornbluth's "Gravy Planet" (chicken tissue culture). From there it's a leap to the novels of T.J. Bass and Varley. Finally, a temporary culmination in Bear's Blood Music and Sterling's Schismatrix.

This is the barest outline. Once exposed, the vein gleams brightly. Our goal must be to smelt and refine the crude ore, to craft a speculative fiction which does not pretend that homo sapiens will even still look the same fifty years from now.

We must be as widespread as ubiquitin, forging a philosophy that ties all organisms from yeast to man into a renewed great chain of being.

SLOGANS

What good is a movement without a slogan?

Here are a few:

- DNA to others as you would have them DNA to you.

- Anatomy is destiny--but anatomy is malleable.

- Gregor Mendel died for your sins.

- Redraw your MAP2

- Strobe your lobes.

- Match it, batch it, latch it.

- Snap the gap.

- Axe your axons.

Contexto

La fecha de su primera aparición no está clara. El manifesto está incluído en la segunda edición de 1993 Gareth Branwyn, Peter B. Sugarman (eds.) de Beyond Cyberpunk! A Do It Yourself Guide to the Future. Louisa, VA: The Computer Lab. (a HyperCard application. https://web.archive.org/web/20220226190214/http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/Manifestos/Ribofunk.html

En una entrevista con Marshall Payne para The Fix Di Filippo comenta:

"During the waning days of cyberpunk, I half-jokingly tried to predict the next big movement in SF. I took the prefix “ribo” from the cellular component ribosomes and the musical genre of “funk” and mashed them together, positing hot, passionate, sweaty fiction about speculative biology. I xeroxed a broadside touting this alleged genre and circulated it by mail, and it also appeared in a couple of fanzines.

Having done so, I began to believe my own humorous propaganda, seeing actual story potential therein, and begin to write stories that tried to live up to my prescription. Futuristic stories where the biological sciences are paramount, where human form is mutable, and human-animal hybrids form an underclass.

The movement as such never really materialized, but plenty of writers have seen similar potential in the themes and topics of ribofunk, even if by reinventing my particular wheel. I’d mention Peter Watts, Linda Nagata, and Mark Budz among others." https://web.archive.org/web/20151020204659/http://paul-di-filippo.com/%E2%80%9Can-interview-with-paul-di-filippo%E2%80%9C-the-fix/

En un post subido a Theinferior4 el autor comapartió en 2009 una foto de la primera edición del manifiesto que fue "Xeroxed, folded twice, mailed to about 100 people on the ASTRAL AVENUE fanzine mailing list. Gareth Branwyn reprinted it in 1993, so maybe 1992 originally." https://web.archive.org/web/20220226190855/https://theinferior4.livejournal.com/1112371.html

En todo caso, el manifiesto se vincula con el surgimiento del Proyecto Genoma Humano que se desarrolló de 1990 a 2003. https://web.archive.org/web/20220214224640/https://web.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/index.shtml

En 1996 Di Filippo publicó una colección de historias cortas bajo es el título Ribofunk. Ese mismo año la revista Wired publicó una entrevista y un artículo dedicados al libro y al manifiesto:

- Rudy Rucker (1996, 1 de mayo). Ribofunk Manifesto. Wired. https://web.archive.org/web/20220226192330/https://www.wired.com/1996/05/ribofunk-manifesto/

- Jeffrey Fisher (1996, 1 de noviembre). Ribofunk. Wired. https://web.archive.org/web/20220226192502/https://www.wired.com/1996/11/ribopunk/