“Sorry Please Thank You” seemed appropriate as a title, being words for concepts that, if not universal, are found in a great many languages and cultures.
These are artificial environments created or enabled through technology, and I was interested in how people communicate, in these environments, about how people talk to each other, about what limitations there are in language as a medium to express our desires, how technology might remove some of those limitations, but create new ones we’ve never had before.
A lot of the stories in the book are about different universes, some big, some small, some of which already exist today, and some of which are not hard to imagine in the near future. It was originally a piece that I actually wrote onto a cocktail napkin, as part of Esquire’s Napkin Fiction Project, and which I expanded for the collection. Yu: The title comes from the last story in the book. When he’s not writing, Yu is a lawyer living in Los Angeles with his wife and their two children. He has been favorably compared to writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth and Jonathan Lethem. Yu’s quirky mix of science fiction and social commentary has attracted a loyal following among discerning readers and critics. While he pokes fun at pop culture, Yu also finds the human moments in what he often portrays as an increasingly isolated and sterile existence. In his new book, Yu returns to skewer more science fiction concepts, including the multiverse, time travel, video games and zombies. It dealt with a fictional version of the author, another Charles Yu, a lonely time machine repairman stuck in a time loop.
Yu’s 2010 novel, “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” was named one of the best books of the year by TIME magazine. “Sorry Please Thank You” is his new collection of mind-bending, moving and sometimes melancholy stories arriving in bookstores July 24. Author Charles Yu hopes you like his new book, but if not, an apology is built right into the title.
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