When I heard that Charles Yu was giving away the mysterious “Book from Nowhere” from his novel I was terribly excited. The book is a McGuffin/plot point in Yu’s novel “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” – the protagonist is the author who gives himself the book before shooting himself in the stomach.
It’s one of those books.
The publisher actually created a physical mockup of the all-metal book from the story and let Wired give it away in a contest – best comment wins the tome. I dashed off an entry and a few days ago I learned that I won that contest.
My winning comment was what I could get done in a little bit, but I’m so excited to have won that I cooked up a special presentation of the story I wrote. Charle’s book deals with fathers and sons and families and regret and time and loss and paralysis and so does this.
Click here to read “How to Safely Live on in a Science Fiction Universe”
I wrote this. I can’t illustrate worth a damn, so I wrote some code to do it for me. Every time you load that page, it will reach out to Flickr for Creative Commons licensed images on the subjects of mistakes, loss, time, etc. Much thanks to Tove Hermanson and Sam for their help as my editors. There are also links in there. Click them.
But wait, there's more
This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Really, really neat.
This is ten kinds of awesome.
Conkatzulations! I love the presentations of the story on your site. You're becoming a regular internet presence, Mr. Katz.
dang!
Good going!! I'm so very proud!
Congrats! That is an awesome anchor for a book collection. Will it fit on any of your existing bookshelves?
MattK: I'm very happy your story won the metal book I made. I hope you like it and be careful not to get pricked by any sharp edges. A. Hughes, Pantheon Books, KDPG
Andy, it's very nifty! I'm very impressed by the craftsmanship and work in it. Way to make a unique and cool object!
love the short story man! are you going to put the metal book on display? levitating over a bed of magnets and fire?
I absolutely loved the story. Its really cool.