Text page
Omnicide - Foreword In Praise of Abnormal Persistence
A theory-fiction text that refuses the border between conceptual writing, scene construction, and speculative narrative.
Archive condition
The extracted text is present, but the work has not yet had a full editorial pass. The page stays public and linkable while treating quotation and interpretation cautiously.
What survives here
The central move of theory-fiction is to treat style and concept as inseparable. Fiction is not illustrative garnish placed on top of theory; it is one of the ways theory begins to operate materially.
These texts work by montage, compression, fictional carriers, and unstable voices. They build scenes, entities, markets, or atmospheres that behave like conceptual machines rather than like examples waiting to be decoded.
That matters because a great deal of the archive's originality lies in form. The writing does not merely report on cyberculture and modernity; it engineers new ways of sensing and narrating them.
Reading note
Read the title, opening burst, and recurring terms before trying to flatten the text into a normal argument. Orientation comes from motifs and relays, not from a single thesis statement.
Track where journalism, fiction, market language, and philosophy contaminate each other. That contamination is the method.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
xi Foreword: In Praise of Abnormal Persistence Robin Mackay By what signs shall we recognise the maniac?
Definition · paragraph 12
xxii OMnicide at the same time exerting a hypnotic effect, working by means of ritual incantation and repetition, in an insidious rhythmic poetics that demands submission and elicits abnormal persistence.
Appears in sections
Theory-Fiction and Cyberstyle Primary section
How theory-fiction, cyberpunk prose, and anti-academic style became part of the archive's method.