Numbers Don't Lie

Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu.

Rock musician, Volvo mechanic, trial lawyer, camel driver, aeronautics engineer, and entomological meteorologist, Wilson Wu is the man to call if you stumble on, say, a rift in the space-time continuum. He'll do the math. You handle the financial transactions, especially with the guy who runs the junkyard.

Gently witty, seductive, and intoxicating as Kentucky whiskey in Park Slope, Numbers Don't Lie takes us from deepest Brooklyn to the Deep South and back again, on a journey of friendship, romance, and wacky physics that just might be true. Bisson's prose, compact as an iPod and smooth as an I-80 on-ramp, is, he explains, "scrupulously illustrated with Wilson Wu's formulas, all of which have been reviewed for elegance by famed mathematician Rudy Rucker." Can we trust Terry Bisson? Of course! Check out the math: Numbers Don't Lie.

These inventive stories were originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction as "The Hole in the Hole," "The Edge of the Universe," and "Get Me to the Church on Time."