Paul Di Filippo
Cosmocopia

Paul Di Filippo is a visionary author equipped with a vivid imagination and, at the same time, irony, capable of brilliant developments within the plots of his stories, which have relevant or even fundamental philosophical content. To do this, he does not compromise, and after embarking on a path that we can define and recognize with those typical traits of the absurd or the surreal, he follows it to the end without fear and with great determination and the awareness of someone who knows in what waters he is navigating and how to reach the end of the story.

This 2008 novel, recently published by Urania and titled “Cosmocopia,” could be defined as a true cosmic work, a hallucinated compendium of a humanistic philosophy text and a work of literature poised between the visions of Aldous Huxley and a sci-fi narrative that at times blends with a fantastical setting, while still maintaining a certain grotesque character that at times may even disturb the less prepared reader who is more frightened by everything that seems inexplicable. At the same time, the same work can be perfectly representative of the conceptual world of the author. Di Filippo sets his stories mostly in an unspecified time: this isn't particularly relevant, and in this case, for example, we are in a near dystopian future, but Di Filippo also focuses his attention on the individual (in this specific case: on the individual) characters he uses as instrumental gateways to the universe.

That the protagonist of his story is a great painter (Frank Lazorg) now aged and forced into a state of almost total infirmity after being struck by a stroke is clearly a choice with strong symbolic meaning. Lazorg's best times seem to be past: he rejects this condition and considers himself still an unsurpassed and unsurpassable master, but at the same time, he can no longer paint. In theory, he could, but it's as if he lacks that verve, that emotional drive, constrained by the grayness of his recluse life. But after taking a mysterious hallucinogenic drug (a powder obtained from the “escarabajo psicodélico,” an insect found only in Santa Lucia in Central America), Frank will rediscover his verve and uncontrolled creativity and, at the same time, will fall prey to an insane madness that will lead him to commit an irreparable crime and open, in a sort of reverse parthenogenesis rite, an actual door through the "Cosmocopia": only after experiencing incredible adventures through its different “layers” and in which he will reassess the very concept of creation up to its most primordial forms, will he rise to its peak, thus completing in a circular fashion that long and perhaps infinite concentric journey of life from the origins to conception and back to man.

Conceptually relatable to a great and fundamental film like Ken Russell's “Altered States,” “Cosmocopia” is a text laden with symbolic meanings and food for thought. At the same time adventurous and fascinating, the novel is a true masterpiece of this author who shapes his story as if he himself were a sort of creator, steering the reader in this kind of spiral cosmos to the top and then back. A small step for man, a giant leap for humanity.