Numbers Don't Lie

Now you can get Terry Bisson’s three Wilson Wu novelettes in one place, including the Hugo-nominated “Get Me to the Church on Time”. Wilson’s been a rock musician, an engineer, and a pastry chef; he graduated law school and passed the bar on the first try. Drawn into adventure by his friend Irv, another lawyer with a talent for stumbling on strange phenomena, Wilson crunches the numbers. Together they find a junkyard dedicated to Volvos that conceals a rift in the space-time continuum, and a beaded seat cushion in a vacant lot that heralds the premature collapse of the universe. And when an airport baggage claim works like clockwork . . . ? Check out the math (Bisson has scrupulously illustrated the stories with formulas, all of which have been reviewed for “elegance” by famed mathematician Rudy Rucker), and discover for yourself that NUMBERS DON’T LIE.

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.)
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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
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