Ribofunk at 30 years

Paul Di Filippo published *Ribofunk* in 1996, the same year Dolly the sheep was cloned, and the timing now reads as prophetic rather than playful. While cyberpunk was still mesmerized by the screen — jacking in, cyberspace, the chrome and neon of silicon — Di Filippo argued the real disruption would be squishy, wet, and alive: splice-jobs, proteiform organisms, transgenic street drugs, ecology as operating system. Thirty years later, the gap has closed in uncomfortable ways: CRISPR babies exist, xenotransplantation is in clinical trials, and synthetic biology startups talk exactly like his fictional biotech corps. What keeps the book from being a simple forecasting win is its tonal wager — that biological futures would feel *funky*, improvisational, closer to a DJ set than a server farm. Compare the Ganymedean life-form wired into Dick's Ampek F-a2 recorder in *The Simulacra*, or Elizabeth's aural archaeology in Rita Indiana's *Tentacle* — sampling, looping, weaving alien sources into new flesh — and you see Di Filippo's real insight: biotech doesn't replace culture, it *remixes* it, the way ribosomes remix amino acids, the way a turntable remixes vinyl. The "-funk" was never decorative. It was the thesis.