So, there’s this huge multi-national food conglomerate, and they have a research and development division. These people do vital investigations into such important stuff as finding a name for ketchup or horseradish that doesn’t mean anything dirty in eighty world languages.  This would be such an opportunity for recent grads in Modern Languages or Asian Studies. Picture the big mainframe computers churning out pages of obscenities about tomatoes and radishes, each to be checked against the company’s product range.

            In a nearby research group, a comely physicist in a white lab coat has just discovered how to manipulate the quantum structure of certain foods to make them weigh more. Her experiments don’t improve the food at all—say, bagels—but the food just gets heavier.

            Now, before you write this off as a useless discovery, think what the bean counters in accounting would say if you could sell five hundred grams of bagels with one less bagel in the package. Higher profits, right?

            The only problem is that objects around our lady scientist have started to lose weight. Her glasses float right off her face and tissues float out of her coat pockets. Is this personal? Are parallel researchers of some mirror universe striking back at her for poaching weight from their anti-matter bagels?

            This is heavy stuff I know. I think when I wrote the novel Bagelwarp years ago I must have been grousing about the high cost of groceries. My son, mind you, thought I was ‘on something’. In fairness, it was intended as a social satire.  I even fancied that it would be funny.

            Bagelwarp was my first novel, and I didn’t know then that—as playwright George S. Kaufman put it—satire is that which closes on Friday. Bagelwarp was never published. It was written when I was exploring the refined art of doing whatever the hell I wanted, prospective publishers be damned. 

            In recent years I’ve devoted more time to the proposition that readers like some stuff, and hate other stuff, and that this is oft reflected in their choice of reading matter. For a writer, that’s something of a breakthrough, actually.

            I can’t remember what happened to our comely physicist. I think she got lost in a warehouse forest of artificial Christmas trees, the kind with the lights built in, and was only rescued when she thought to raise one of her shoes on a long string so the workers could find her.  

            Ah! The literary world lost a gem there all right.