Numbers Don't Lie - Softcover

Bisson, Terry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1892391325 ISBN 13: 9781892391322

Publisher: Tachyon Publications, 2005

Synopsis

Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu.

Rock musician, Volvo mechanic, trial lawyer, camel driver, aeronautics engineer, and entomological meteorologist, Wilson Wu is the man to call if you stumble on, say, a rift in the space-time continuum. He’ll do the math. You handle the financial transactions, especially with the guy who runs the junkyard.

Gently witty, seductive, and intoxicating as Kentucky whiskey in Park Slope, Numbers Don’t Lie takes us from deepest Brooklyn to the Deep South and back again, on a journey of friendship, romance, and wacky physics that just might be true. Bisson’s prose, compact as an iPod and smooth as an I-80 on-ramp, is, he explains, “scrupulously illustrated with Wilson Wu’s formulas, all of which have been reviewed for elegance by famed mathematician Rudy Rucker.” Can we trust Terry Bisson? Of course! Check out the math: Numbers Don’t Lie.

These inventive stories were originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction as “The Hole in the Hole,” “The Edge of the Universe,” and “Get Me to the Church on Time.”

About this title

About the Author

Terry Bisson is the author of Talking Man, Fire on the Mountain, The Pickup Artist, and Any Day Now. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire awards. He is best known for his short fiction, which has been collected in Bears Discover Fire, In the Upper Room, Greetings, and TVA Baby. Terry is the editor of the Outspoken Authors Series published by PM Press. In conjunction with Tachyon Publications, Bisson hosts the monthly SF in SF reading series in San Francisco.

Reviews

Starred Review. To the honorable list of science-fictional nutty geniuses, among them Stanley G. Weinbaum's Prof. Haskel Van Manderpootz and J.U. Geisy's Dr. Xenophon Xerxes Zapt, add the name of Wilson Wu, the hero of Bisson's hilarious collection of three related stories filled with puns and inscrutable mathematical formulas. No piker, Wu manages to walk, in "one long step for mankind," from an auto repair garage in a nondescript part of Brooklyn directly to the moon in "The Hole in the Hole." He even brings back half of a dune buggy left behind by astronauts and casually explains the situation as "a periodic incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency." In the second tale, "The Edge of the Universe," Wu saves the expanding universe from shrinking. Finally, he patches "a hole in the fabric of space-time" in "Get Me to the Church on Time." Fans of the late Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will relish this irreverent but never smart-alecky spoof. Bisson has won Hugo, Nebula and other major SF awards. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Lawyer and Brooklyn patriot Irving has this six-foot-two friend, Wilson Wu, also an attorney (Harvard-trained, no less; well, maybe Yale)--not to mention pastry chef, rock guitarist, engineer, herbalist, camel driver, Volvo connoisseur (so's Irv), and, during the period spanned by the three stories corralled here under a title that's also his motto, entomological meteorologist. First and foremost a Princeton mathematician, Wu can explain--via equations, of course--the anomalies in space-time that Irving innocently encounters. Like the gateway to the moon in the Volvo junkyard Irving goes to for the parts that'll stifle his squealing brake pads. Like the segment of universe-edge that's going counterclockwise in Huntsville, where Irv is cramming for the Alabama bar while waiting for his sweetheart Candy's daddy to make good on a do-not-resuscitate order. Like the fact that everything in New York runs on time when Irv returns for his honeymoon with Candy. Bisson, an sf clown-prince who madly embroiders ludicrous premises with wordplay, nutty incongruities, goofy character humor, and outrageous irony, is in top form here. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Tachyon Publications
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1892391325
• ISBN 13: 9781892391322
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 163