How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Enhanced Edition)

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Enhanced Edition)
Author: Charles Yu
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2010-09-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307379884

This enhanced eBook includes video, audio, photographic, and linked content, as well as a bonus short story. Hear TAMMY talk. Learn the origins of Minor Universe 31. See the TM-31. Take a trip in it. Photos and illustrations appear as hyperlinked endnotes. Video and audio are embedded directly in text. *Video and audio may not play on all readers. Check your user manual for details. National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time. Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life. Wildly new and adventurous, Yu’s debut is certain to send shock waves of wonder through literary space–time.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Author: Charles Yu
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2011-05-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 085789353X

Brimming with alternative universes, futuristic landscapes and gleeful metaphysics... Yu's spirit of invention is infectious. - Sunday Times Highly inventive and hilarious - The Times _______________________________________________________________________________________ With only TAMMY - a slightly tearful computer with self-esteem issues - a software boss called Phil - Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0 - and an imaginary dog called Ed for company, fixing time machines is a lonely business and Charles Yu is stuck in a rut. He's spent the better part of a decade navel-gazing, spying on 39 different versions of himself in alternate universes (and discovered that 35 of them are total jerks). And he's kind of fallen in love with TAMMY, which is bad because she doesn't have a module for that. With all that's on his mind, perhaps it's no surprise that when he meets his future self, he shoots him in the stomach. And that's a beginner's mistake for a time machine repairman. Now he's stuck in a time loop, going in circles forever. All he has, wrapped in brown paper, is the book his future self was trying to press into his hands. It's called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. And he's the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could save him.

Sorry Please Thank You

Sorry Please Thank You
Author: Charles Yu
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2012
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307907171

Presents a collection of stories featuring a retail employee who is confronted by a zombie, a computer warrior who leads his fighter band across a virtual landscape, and a company that outsources grief.

Interior Chinatown

Interior Chinatown
Author: Charles Yu
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307907198

NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • “A shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood” (Vanity Fair) and a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.

Third Class Superhero

Third Class Superhero
Author: Charles Yu
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2006-09-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0547545703

“A compulsively readable collection” of short fiction from the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Publishers Weekly). With deadpan humor and originality, Charles Yu spins Kafkaesque tales of modern identity and insecurity in this whip-smart debut. In 401(k), a couple living in the Luxury Car Commercial subdivision are disappointed when their exotic vacation turns into a Life Insurance/Asset Management pitch. The author struggles to write the definitive biography of his mother in Autobiographical Raw Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction. And would-be superhero Moisture Man must come to terms with the darkness in his heart. Throughout the collection, Yu’s characters run up against the limitations of their artificial story lines while tackling the terrifying aspects of existence: mothers, jobs, spouses, and perhaps most terrifying of all, the need to express feelings. Heartbreaking and hilarious, Third Class Superhero marked the debut of an author who has been a PEN award finalist, and whose novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe was named one of Time’s best books of the year. “The post-collegiate braininess of many of Yu’s stories is like the music of the Talking Heads, making the familiar seem off-kilter. . . . Takes a Kafkaesque turn in its comic examination of the essence of identity.” —Kirkus Reviews

Ready Player One

Ready Player One
Author: Ernest Cline
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2011-08-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307887456

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. “Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready? In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days. When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself. Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club “Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”—HuffPost “An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN “A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”—Boston Globe “Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR “[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”—iO9

The Writer's Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe

The Writer's Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe
Author: George Ochoa
Publisher: Writer's Digest Books
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1993
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780898795363

To hold the interest of knowledgeable sci-fi readers, a writer the genre must stay within certain fuzzy boundaries of scientific belief. This volume provides some of the scientific detail that will make a writer's adventures compelling and consistent with current views of the universe. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A Fire Upon The Deep

A Fire Upon The Deep
Author: Vernor Vinge
Publisher: Tor Science Fiction
Total Pages: 626
Release: 2010-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429981989

Now with a new introduction for the Tor Essentials line, A Fire Upon the Deep is sure to bring a new generation of SF fans to Vinge's award-winning works. A Hugo Award-winning Novel! “Vinge is one of the best visionary writers of SF today.”-David Brin Thousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures, and technology, can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence. Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. Tor books by Vernor Vinge Zones of Thought Series A Fire Upon The Deep A Deepness In The Sky The Children of The Sky Realtime/Bobble Series The Peace War Marooned in Realtime Other Novels The Witling Tatja Grimm's World Rainbows End Collections Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge True Names At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Life as We Knew it

Life as We Knew it
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2008
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0152061541

I guess I always felt even if the world came to an end, McDonald's still would be open. High school sophomore Miranda's disbelief turns to fear in a split second when an asteroid knocks the moon closer to Earth, like "one marble hits another." The result is catastrophic. How can her family prepare for the future when worldwide tsunamis are wiping out the coasts, earthquakes are rocking the continents, and volcanic ash is blocking out the sun? As August turns dark and wintery in northeastern Pennsylvania, Miranda, her two brothers, and their mother retreat to the unexpected safe haven of their sunroom, where they subsist on stockpiled food and limited water in the warmth of a wood-burning stove. Told in a year's worth of journal entries, this heart-pounding story chronicles Miranda's struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all--hope--in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar world. An extraordinary series debut Susan Beth Pfeffer has written several companion novels to Life As We Knew It, including The Dead and the Gone, This World We Live In, and The Shade of the Moon.