A MOUTHFUL OF TONGUES: HER TOTIPOTENT TROPICANALIA [Hardcover]

Paul Di Filippo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 29, 2005

In his new novel, A Mouthful of Tongues, Paul Di Filippo, cult author of Ciphers, The Steampunk Trilogy, and Ribofunk, makes his boldest fictional statement yet. Writing in the tradition of Kathy Acker and Samuel R. Delany, but with a subversive brio all his own, Di Filippo here imagines a true erotic revolution, a crusade of the libido that will topple a corrupt and jaded future world order, and possibly much besides . . . Kerry Hackett is just another corporate pawn in the urban cauldron of 2015, besieged on all sides by those who would possess and exploit her. Driven to desperation, she undergoes a mysterious transformation into an alchemical goddess, wanderer of the timelines. In a magnificently evoked parallel Brazil, a place of seedy splendor and charismatic lusts, Kerry, or that which she has become, tests her carnal arsenal on targets deserving and undeserving; but the attention of a more powerful agency has been attracted, and a yet stranger metamorphosis awaits. A tale of heartbreak, revenge, and liberation, written in Paul Di Filippo's most fantastically effervescent prose, A Mouthful of Tongues is a work of science fiction which crosses boundaries and breaks taboos with brilliant savage abandon. It can only add to its author's rapidly growing following, and will shake the world of speculative fiction to its very foundations. "Out of a rich impasto of language, a story that is sensual, sexual, and hot takes shape around one of the most engaging heroines since Southern and Hoffenberg's Candy." --Samuel R. Delany "Sacred sin, that's Di Filippo's force here. We have participated in a transpersonal act that lifts our consciousness above the situational polarities of morality and into the psyche's unknown, where objective energetic processes fuse dream and matter--and make us us. A ruthless fantasy of aggressive sexuality and archaic intentions." --A. A. Attanasio

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It's 2015 and armed National Guard patrols stalk the urban jungles of a North America dominated by a security-obsessed, corporate-governmental complex in this apparently sincere effort to prove that the phrase "erotic SF" is not an oxymoron. Life, for most, is a plague of shortages and disease. After meeting with devastating sexual brutality, secretary Kerry Hackett intentionally merges with a parabiologically engineered entity composed entirely of totipotent cells the benthic. Super-human, super-sexualized and super-morphic, this amalgam of woman and benthic, who looks like a normal woman, is immediately off to the tropics of Brazil. There the "She Beast" comes fully into her powers through a series of fantastic (and graphic) sexual encounters. She can generate autonomous tongues (and other organs) as well as modify her gender, shape and appearance and do the same for others. For all her godlike powers and kinky empowerment, however, this new monster verges on the pulp-era SF female, a sexually voracious man-eater to whom men ecstatically succumb with lots of slime involved. Di Filippo (Ciphers; Ribofunk) transgresses and subverts enough to push SF to its brink, but outside of genre he is nowhere near the erotic edge. His truly wondrous wordcraft a lush and sometimes playful use of language is reason enough to admire this short, possibly satiric novel.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Di Filippo's most ambitious work and his most successful... boldly confident...powerfully shocking and perversely inventive." -- Locus Online, May 21, 2002

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: Wildside Press (September 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1587155060
• ISBN-13: 978-1587155062
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,576,301 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Grand Erotic Science Fiction Tale From Di Filippo, July 31, 2003

By 

John Kwok (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A MOUTHFUL OF TONGUES: HER TOTIPOTENT TROPICANALIA (Hardcover)

Paul Di Filippo is highly regarded by his fellow science fiction writers; one of the finest practitioners of the subgenre popularly known as "steampunk". Here he steals a few pages from Delaney and Dick, crafting a splendidly well written erotic near future fantasy that is as well told as any from these other great science fiction writers. It is one of the finest erotic tales in science fiction I have come across, rich in the magical realism that I found prevalent in works such as those by Borges and cyberpunk fiction writer Lucius Shepherd. Di Filippo is as skillful a stylist as William Gibson in "A Mouthful Tongues", and has created female characters as memorable as any of Gibson's. Yet please note that this may not be a fine book for everyone since some may be disturbed by the intense erotic content prevalent through much of the novel.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Surely, there must be a point..., September 2, 2008

By 

Anastasia (Staten Island, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A MOUTHFUL OF TONGUES: HER TOTIPOTENT TROPICANALIA (Hardcover)

Kerry is an average girl -- working as an assistant/secretary in a biotechnology job, supporting her boyfriend ill with something like AIDS, getting hit on by her boss -- when she releases the benthic, a top-secret project at her firm. The benthic is a force of living energy, with a magical ability to transmute any matter it touches. Given shape by Kerry's emotions at the time of the release, the benthic travels to Bahia, a tropical resort island, where its sexual hunger rampages uncontrolleable and unstoppable.

Delany has "Hogg," and Di Filippo has "A Mouthful of Tongues." The explicit sexual content comprises all of the book, resting in a thin frame of a story as summarized above. It's impossible to open a random page and not be in the middle of something explicit.

Given that I'd started reading this as a science fiction and not an erotic book, I was disappointed that there wasn't more explanation and elaboration. What is the benthic? (My little description above is pure conjecture.) What drove it, why was it so hungry, and what did it want? To what original purpose was it designed, and on what scientific or at least philosophical principles? Was it erotic in nature, destruction and creation, kindness and cruelty - all expressed through sex, or was that only one possible expression? How did it reason? I also would have liked to read more about the near-future world Di Filippo briefly sketched (80% of the book takes place in a tropical jungle).

Perhaps it was the author's intention to leave these questions to us. The writing and the prose are excellent, but the overall impression is less than satisfying.