Things get really complicated in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, but here’s what you need to know about Charles Yu’s thought-provoking new time-travel novel if you want to win a one-of-a-kind sci-fi artifact.

Tech support wonk Charles Yu, who’s been traveling in a telephone booth-size pod for nine years fixing broken TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Devices, shoots his future self in a predestined panic just as Version 2 hands off a metallic volume and says, “It’s all in the book. The book is the key.”

The tome he’s talking about is the silver-foiled Book From Nowhere pictured above. In the novel, the book serves as a set of memories that may unlock the mystery of how protagonist Yu can come to terms with his past. Author Yu, winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his short story collection Third Class Superhero, described the book in an e-mail to Wired.com as a “residual object. It travels around in a time loop, and is, I think, perfectly logical and non-paradoxical. It just has the strange feature of having no clear moment of creation.”

Even stranger is Yu’s Text Object Analysis Device, or TOAD, a read/write tool used in the story to consume the contents of the Book From Nowhere.

Excerpted from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Yu describes how TOAD and the Book From Nowhere interact.

“It’s part keyboard, part microphone, part optical scan, and part brain-scan. When I want to type, I raise my hands up in front of me, palms down, in a position approximating typing, and a virtual QWERTY layout materializes in front of me. When I want to switch to voice, I just start reading the book and the unit switches to an auditory-recognition transcription system, converting my voice into modifications in the written text. If I get tired of typing and voice modes, I can simply read the text to myself, and the unit will track my eye movements to determine with near perfect accuracy, what word I am reading, based on the minute ups and downs, left and rights of my retinas, and then matching those movements, using brain activity data as a kind of rough double check, against the blood flow and heat output of various areas of my language- and concept-processing lobes and sublobes of my brain.”

Andy Hughes, head of production for Random House’s Knopf publishing group, did not figure out how to measure your brain lobe activity, but he did dream up the idea of fabricating the 5 1/2-by-8 1/4-inch artifact containing 256 digitally printed silver-foil pages, pictured above and in the Comic-Con International video embedded below.

Here’s how they made the fictional book-within-a-book a reality.

“The outer cover typography is actually positive-printing film imaged from the book’s title page PDF file, laminated to the metal cover,” Hughes said in an e-mail interview. “The interior was printed in China, and the foiled sheets were spiral-bound.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe explores time travel.
Image courtesy Random House

“The fabrication of the final book was done by hand, using metal cutters,” he continued. “The covers have been attached to the text block using rivets, and various metallic tapes were used to help avoid bloodletting due to the sharp edges of the covers.”

To vie for this one-of-a-kind art book, respond with your take on time travel as defined in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

In the book, Yu writes, “The good news is, you don’t have to worry. You can’t change the past. The bad news is, you don’t have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the past. We’re not … skillful enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even our own tiny lives.”

Agree or disagree? Weigh in below. The winning commenter, as determined by Wired.com and Yu, will be notified by e-mail. Deadline is 12:01 a.m. Pacific, Sept. 20, 2010.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, released last week, sells for $24.

Images and text excerpt courtesy Random House. Follow us on Twitter: @hughhart and @theunderwire.

See Also:

• Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
• Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World

Authors: Hugh Hart

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