This style is akin to the “eyeball kicks” so enamored of the cyberpunks, among whom Di Filippo is sometimes taxonomized by association. But cyberpunk’s eyeball kicks were intended as the colorful gelatin capsule around a payload of cognitive dissonance, a Trojan horse concealing mind-expanding new ideas about human relationships as mediated by information technology; in Di Filippo, by contrast, the dazzling cascades of technical nomenclature perform a superficially contemporary science-fictionality that fails to disguise the unexamined narrative clichés of the Golden Age that lie beneath. The cyberpunks – whether successfully or not – set out to subvert and undermine (and ultimately replace) their predecessors, but Di Filippo simply dresses the plot-shapes of older men in trendier clothes.

A Genre in Crisis: On Paul Di Filippo’s “Wikiworld”