{"id":58,"date":"2015-05-07T17:53:26","date_gmt":"2015-05-07T17:53:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/?p=58"},"modified":"2015-05-07T17:53:26","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T17:53:26","slug":"mathematics-in-sci-fi-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/?p=58","title":{"rendered":"Mathematics in Sci-Fi"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe<\/em>, 2010, Charles Yu.\u00a0 Wow!\u00a0 I loved this book!\u00a0 It has mathematics to the nth degree.\u00a0 Some of it in the form of inside jokes that made me laugh out loud.\u00a0 Some of it, such as \u201cequations that had sadness as a constant,\u201d are in a \u201ctechno-poetic\u201d style that I strive to achieve in my own writing.\u00a0 Yu\u2019s description of writing on a sheet of graph paper was absolutely fantastic, a journey into Minkowski space and the realm of \u201cscience fictional equations.\u201d\u00a0 If you don\u2019t see the phrase \u201ceasy to use partial differential equations\u201d as an oxymoron, but as a monster more frightening than Alien or Predator, then you won\u2019t like this book.\u00a0 But if \u201cZermelo-Frankel set theory plus the Continuum Hypothesis\u201d sounds cool, go for it.<br \/>\nThe story takes place in universe 31, \u201ca smallish universe &#8230; Not big enough for space opera and anyway not zoned for it.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIn terms of topology, the reality portions of 31 are concentrated in an inner core, with science fiction wrapped around it.\u201d\u00a0 The self-referential recursion of a book within a book within a book makes the paradoxes of time travel even more interesting.<br \/>\nI really, really liked \u201cthe wrapping\u201d, but the \u201creality portions\u201d in which the main character pursues his quest \u201cfind his father\u201d are as deep and well done a theme as any I have read in sci-fi.\u00a0 Absolutely wonderful!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe, 2010, Charles Yu.\u00a0 Wow!\u00a0 I loved this book!\u00a0 It has mathematics to the nth degree.\u00a0 Some of it in the form of inside jokes that made me laugh out loud.\u00a0 Some of it, such as \u201cequations that had sadness as a constant,\u201d are in a \u201ctechno-poetic\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}