O'Brien was an eccentric writer of tremendous comic spirit. His work reveals an impressive knowledge of science, philosophy, literature, and theology. But his attitudes are always playful and satiric. Like Swift, who made fun of the Royal Society in Gulliver's Travels, O'Brien had a talent for making the principles of science seem ridiculous. The Sergeant in The Dalkey Archive, for example, explains the "Mollycule" theory: "Now take a sheep. What is a sheep only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around doing intricate convulsions inside the baste." This is all by way of explaining that people who spend too much time on bicycles, according to the Sergeant, "get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles." In the same novel, the crazy genius and fraud De Selby invents a substance to "abolish air" and destroy the world. He calls it DMP (after "The Dublin Metropolitan...