The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy by Mike Ashley
Author:Mike Ashley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781472114938
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
MATH TAKES A HOLIDAY
Paul Di Filippo
Paul Di Filippo is one of the best of the modern generation of humorists. Cleverly observed quips and remarks shimmer from his computer like a dog shaking itself after a swim. Although he sold his first story in 1977 he didn’t really hit his stride till the mid-eighties, since when there has been a regular flow of ingenious and unusual stories, observations and commentaries on this weird world and others. My favourite amongst his works so far is The Steampunk Trilogy (1995), a grotesque and fascinating creation of an alternate Victorian world. There are more anarchic stories in Ribofunk (1996), Fractal Paisleys (1997), Lost Pages (1998) plus a new novel, Spondulix (2001). The following story, completed with the approval of Rudy Rucker (in case you wonder!), is pure Di Filippo.
Lucas Latulippe pitied the religious physicists and mystical biologists, the prayerful chemists and godly geologists of his acquaintance. As a mathematician who chanced also by a fervent and unexpected mid-life conversion to be a practising Catholic, Lucas felt extreme sadness when he contemplated the plight of his fellows in the scientific community who sought to reconcile their spiritual beliefs with the tenets of their secular professions. The Creation versus the Big Bang, the Garden of Eden versus Darwinism, the Flood versus plate tectonics. What a mind-wrenching clash of diametrically opposed values, images, priorities and forces these valiant men and women faced every day! To embrace the rigorous cosmos of Einstein, Hawking and Wilson without letting go of the numinous plenum of Augustine, Mohammed or Krishna – an impossible task on which one could waste much valuable mental energy better spent formulating theorems.
Lucas owed his unique peace of mind and consequent productivity entirely to his youthful choice of discipline. When his epiphanical conversion had ineluctably struck him – one cool autumn day while daydreamily crossing the campus and witnessing a dove alight on the chapel steeple – Lucas had faced no interior conflicts. His newfound faith offered no impediments to his practice of theoretical mathematics, nor did his academic pursuits interfere with his worship.
That was the beauty of the kind of rarefied math Lucas practiced. It was completely divorced from practical implications, had no bearing on the workings of the universe, and thus held no potential for conflict with the received wisdom of the Church. Oh, certainly the other, less refined sciences used math to embody and clarify their own findings, contaminating the glorious legacy of Pythagoras and Euclid to a certain degree. Lucas would not deny, for instance, the famous observation that a simple little equation underlay the hard-edged reality of the atomic bomb. But admitting this much was like saying that a few of the same glorious words employed by C. S. Lewis could be utilized in the instruction sheet for assembling a playground swingset.
Blessed with such an ethereal conception of his discipline, Lucas enjoyed an ease of worship that he was certain scientists of any other ilk could not experience. He attended Mass daily with a clean conscience and an undisturbed soul.
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