A Year in the Linear City | ||||||||
Paul Di Filippo | ||||||||
PS Publishing, 80 pages | ||||||||
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A review by William Thompson
While just one continuous urban ribbon whose end no one known has determined, the Linear City is broken up into
individual Boroughs of a hundred blocks each, though separated only by a single Cross Street, each having their
own government, culture and, depending upon distance, language and speech. The main protagonists of
A Year in the Linear City
are residents of Gritsavage: a writer and his friends and family. Spanning the period of a single year, divided
into chapters representing the four seasons and the passage of a second Seasonsun, whose orbit is annual rather
than the diurnal Daysun's, the narrative follows the events in the life of Diego Patchen, an author of
Cosmogonic (CF) Fiction. Patronized by the more popular and financially successful advocates of quotidian
fiction, such as Yale Drumgoole, Paul Di Filippo uses the polarities of the two aesthetic approaches to poke fun at
speculative and mainstream fiction, and the arguments as to their relative merits, as well as to explore more
serious aspects of writing, such as the relationship between style and content. Additionally, the author on
several occasions cleverly inverts reality and the notion of what is speculative, having Diego postulate, in a
world run by ingeniators who repair what exists a priori rather than create, stories whose themes envision the
development of remote communication using cables, or alternate visions of life after death absent of a Pompatic
cosmology, and uncannily similar to our own search for something after. In the process, Di Filippo thrust
some pointed barbs at both organized religion as well as its New Age counterparts.
As always, this story is punctuated by the author's vivid and lush prose, as well as his inventive imagination and
a singular if unfully fleshed cast of characters. In terms of composition, narrative description and
voice, Di Filippo is well nigh masterful. The world and society he creates is captivating, and easily carried
along by the beauty of his prose and moments of sheer inventive delight. However, in the end this work fails to
entirely satisfy, once separated from its rich language and imaginative flights of fancy, seeming to offer
little of real substance beyond an outline or a sketch, if you will, of a realm and characters that appear to
beg for much fuller exposition. One is left wondering what was the point to this narrative, beyond its exercise
in imagination? For some this may prove enough, but I was left wishing for more, some glimpse of content
beyond a scattering of insights, or invention for its own sake.
It has been suggested to me that this is meant as an intentional slice of life, a merging of the Cosmogonic and
quotidian elements debated within the text. While I can perceive the compositional purpose behind this marriage,
the verity necessary to effectively complete the combination is partially absent in the author's
characterizations, many of the players and events dealt with too singularly and summarily to achieve the
credibility required, the brevity of a novella's format perhaps not serving the author as well as had been
intended. And even had the effort proved successful, by itself this alone would not adequately substantiate
this excursion of imagination.
Despite its obvious merits, for a story that suggests more than mere tale-spinning, I prefer a bit more meat on the bone.
William Thompson is a writer of speculative fiction. In addition to his writing, he is pursuing masters degrees in information science as well as history at Indiana University. |
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