Return to Mark/Space
Born 29 October 1954 in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, United States. Scorpio.
"Paul Di Filippo is a newly published writer whose body of work is still small. Yet his work is already attracting attention for its ambitious scope and weirdly visionary imagery." --Bruce Sterling (in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology , 1986).
"Paul Di Filippo was born thirteen days after Elvis Presley's television debut, and he lives in Providence, Rhode Island. His short stories have been published in magazines such as Fantasy and Science Fiction and Amazing , and anthologies such as Synergy and Universe . He writes book reviews for The Washington Post and ass-kicking non-fiction for magazines such as Science Fiction Eye and New Pathways . His first novel, Ciphers , was published in America in 1991." [publisher's bumpf]
"Nefarious business sometimes takes us to the shrouded decaying northern city -- Lovecraftopolis -- where Paul di Filippo...lives and struggles for fame and power. One symptom of this insensate hunger for 'influence' and wealth was his fanzine Astral Avenues (which has recently been revived as a column in New Pathways ). The title comes from his practice of spying on famous writers while travelling in his astral or 'etheric' body, then blackmailing them by threatening to reveal their peccadillos. Some of the dirt slips into print, and it makes for fun reading." -- (in Semiotext(e) SF 14 , 1989).
"This happened in Lincoln, Rhode Island, the then-semi-rural town where I lived for thirteen years. (Rhode Island is my native state.)
"I had been reading genre SF since 1965, and all kinds of associated typically juvenile material even longer (Tom Swift and cohorts). Somehow I just assumed that SF was what I would write. At the time, I had a huge distrust of and disdain for mimetic writing, which I thought of as all vaguely 'autobiographical' and hence impoverished in imaginative terms. I realize now that this reaction was really fear of dealing with many of the elements of quotidian life, the standard adolescent neurosis that fuels so much of fandom. (Can I somehow redeem myself by saying that I now champion such masters of 'autobiographical fiction' as Thomas Wolfe the Elder, Henry Miller, Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac?)
"Looking for a romantic place in which to compose my first magnum opus, I settled on Hawaii: it was far-off and tropical, but you didn't need a passport to get there, and people spoke English. (I was only seventeen , after all, for God's sake!)
"I packed a duffle: the bottom three-quarters was paperbacks, the top quarter clothes. My carry-on luggage was a Sears manual typewriter--Sixties mod green; I still have it--which my sympathetic and indulgent parents had bought me.
"Off I went, money from my summer job to tide me over till I found work or made my fortune.
"I lasted in Honolulu for a couple of months.
"Of course, I didn't write a word, outside of letters home.
"I laid on the beach, biked over the island, climbed around inside Diamond Head, and stared at my typewriter, which sat on the card table in my one-room apartment. I found I didn't have a word to say.
"Well, all right. So it goes. Can't get too excited about it, what with the lazy sun filtering thru the palm fronds, yeah.... But something still told me that one day I'd somehow become a writer.
"When my savings ran out, I used the return half of my ticket, moved in back home, and enrolled in a state college, Fall '73, English major. I began discovering the pleasures of all the kinds of fiction I had abjured. Wrote for the college paper. Met my life's mate, Deborah Newton (in 1976), switched to part-time status to prolong my stay, moved out of my folks'. Then, in 1979, still without a degree, chucked it all and split with Deb for Europe.
"I seem to be able to save enough money at any one stretch of employment for only about two months of vagabondage. That's how long we kicked around Europe. When I got back, Fall '79, I lucked into a federal job-training slot for computer programming. In a couple of months, I found myself stuck in my first 'real job': COBAL programmer at RI Blue Cross, deadliest of tight-assed bureaucracies.
"Oh, yes: somewhere along the way I had sold an Op-Ed piece to The New York Times and a short parody to UnEarth magazine. But I still didn't consider myself a writer.
"By July '82, I was totally disgusted with my job and myself. Two and a half years of doughnuts and claims-processing had left me fat and flaccid-brained. Realizing that a drastic move was called for, I quit RIBC. Deb joined me in the freelance free-fire zone, leaving her job as theater costume crafter to set up as knitwear designer (a successful career at which she's worked ever since).
"Over the next three years--at first full-time, then, after my savings ran out once more and I had to hold down a variety of jobs, part-time--I produced approximately 500,000 words of fiction, not one of which sold. (Thank God, too! It's all moldering deservedly in several boxes in my basement. Scholars, phone quick for a viewing appointment, as I'm always on the verge of throwing it out.)
"I have no idea why I persisted like this. Some vague intuition that I was getting better, burning off the dross. And I guess I was.
"In 1985, I sold, first, 'Rescuing Andy' to Ted Klein at Twilight Zone and, shortly thereafter, 'Stone Lives' to Ed Ferman at F&SF . These two editors bear all responsibility for loosing me on the field. Over the past six years, sporadic short story sales--now numbering over forty--have bolstered me in my attempts to teach myself how to really write.
"In 1995, I became the last of the Mirrorshades-annointed cyberpunks to achieve book publication with The Steampunk Trilogy .
"I believe it was Hokusai--'The Old Man Gone Mad With Painting'--who said, at age ninety or thereabouts, 'I've been painting now for sixty years, and if I only had another thirty years or so, I might get the hang of it!'
"That's pretty much how I feel.
"Oh, yes: I'm six feet tall, a Scorpio, enjoy country walks, body-surfing and swimming, and pasta carbonara. My car is a '82 Cressida called Cressie. My favorite defunct musical group is Steely Dan. In another life I aspire to have been Hank Thoreau." --Paul Di Filippo (in a personal letter, 10 January 1997).
"Paul Di Filippo's stories and reviews have appeared in many science fiction and fantasy publications, including Mirrorshades , Fantasy and Science Fiction , Amazing , Semiotext(e) , Interzone , the New York Times , and the Washington Post . A two-time finalist for the Nebula Award, Di Filippo is the author of The Steampunk Trilogy . He lives in Providence, Rhode Island." [publisher's bumpf, Ribofunk , US hbk, 1996]
"In 1972, at the age of seventeen, having just graduated from high school, where I had discovered a certain talent for writing humorous essays for the school paper--essays in a Yippie vein, which nearly caused me to get expelled, especially when the principal factored in the 'crime' of helping to distribute an underground paper produced on a mimeo stolen (unknown by me at the time) from one of the town's elementary schools--I determined to become a writer.
Paul Di Filippo On Line
(links page... Italian language)
|
|
|
Return to Mark/Space