Suburb of the Paranoiac-Critical Writer: Afternoon on the Outskirts of the Orion Arm (2005)
Moving towards the locus solus
he observed the lingering homophobia of the town and the disapproval
of McKendrick’s fluid flow. Mathematicians are reasonably sure
that the equation (which is written in the terse but information-dense
notation of “vector calculus”) describes how fluids behave.
Nature is thus failing to prevent the conflict between the Arab-dominated
Khartoum government and the African Muslim rebel forces.
Alfredo looks closer to seven than 13
Dressed in clean blue T-shirt and jeans, he perches in the galactic
centre of an immense vermilion sofa.
I know of instances
when priests have shown parishioners specific price lists, he murmurs.
Also, paint was thrown over the sculpture in the dead of night –
dislike of the scallops has ignited local politics. A counter-petition
championing the scallops has opened in a photocopying shop on the high
street, this time on the theme We cannot compromise on Andromeda.
Alfredo continues
The central fact of the DVD experience is that film is no longer a one-hit
thrill flowing inexorably before you in linear space-time. Instead,
it bends to your instincts, a submissive light to your all-influencing
black hole. DVD turns cinephiles into capricious obsessives, analysers
and fetishers.
It’s not for nothing
that greed for money is regarded as a vile and murderous passion amounting
to a betrayal of God, replies the Patriarch, concerned that such un-Christian
practices were alienating the youth. It is an infernal sin.
Certain brain pathologies
induce states of hyper-religiosity: temporal lobe epilepsy, for example.
This is sometimes associated with sensations of ecstasy and awe, oceanic
feelings of connectedness with the cosmos and a sense of being in the
presence of God.
The seven post-millennium problems
in the order that Alfredo presents them here are 1)the Rieman hypothesis
2)the Yang-Mills theory and the mass gap hypothesis 3)the P versus N
problem 4)the Navier-Stokes equations 5)the Poincare conjecture 6) the
Dalinean space-time enigma and 7)the Fermi Paradox.
At “bitch ‘n’ swap” parties
meanwhile, women get together in one of their own homes, drink gossip
and swap their cast-offs, such as velvet embroidered mules reduced from
$299 to $179.
An associate editor at Edifice Wrecked, Dan McNeil's award-avoiding fiction and reviews have appeared in digital and print format in: Alien Contact (translation), Antipodean SF, The Beat, Cellar Door, Fantastic Metropolis, Fragment, Ink Magazine (UK), Laura Hird's Showcase, Mad Hatter's Review, Outsider Ink, The Quarterly Staple, Redsine, Whispers Of Wickedness, Word Riot and Zygote In My Coffee. New fiction will appear in a future edition of Edifice Wrecked. Some fairly pointless information about the reclusive McNeil can be found at http://truthnlies.blogspot.com.