Numbers Don't Lie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1892391325 ISBN 13: 9781892391322

Publisher: Tachyon Publications, 2005

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 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.

Review:

This slim volume is essential reading for the author’s fans and for fans of speculative fiction laced with considerable humor.”
Library Journal

"A leisurely Golden Age tall tale enriched by the wonderful gibberish of mathematical physics. All fun and pure pleasure."
Rudy Rucker, author, Infinity and the Mind

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.”
Publishers Weekly, starred review

Resplendently outrageous! Transcendently silly! Immensely fun!”
Amy Thomson