A MOUTHFUL OF TONGUES: HER TOTIPOTENT TROPICANALIA (Hardcover)

~ Paul Di Filippo (Author)

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.com Sales Rank: #2,358,368 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 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 (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

2 of 2 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

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.