Ribofunk by Paul Di Filippo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Somewhere in my hindbrain, I remember reading some early Paul Di Filippo in some SF mags, and, among others like Greg Bear and more, my imagination soared with with I called Biopunk fiction. You know, biology-science heavy imagination, usually flying with wild worldbuilding.

Think Farscape or any subsequent soup of hard-SF focused on much more than simple gene-splicing, going full ribosome hacking, all kinds of animals blending with human genomes, and the weird-ass kind of society that would support -- or exploit -- such a thing.

Ribofunk is one of the best of this sub-genre. This particular collection of short stories are pretty damn amazing. The sentence-level writing is super rich with science-made-common bio terms, and in one particular story, written in RHYME, if you can possibly believe it, was particularly brilliant.

The nineties were particularly great for bio-punk. I don't know why it kinda went away, but I wish I could see so much more of it. I think of Speaker for the Dead, Child Garden, even Darwin's Radio. These kinds of stories are really fascinating to me and have seemed to disappear from the SFnal imagination. Alas. I wish there were so much more.

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