Product Description
Meg Carpenter is broke. Her novel is years overdue. Her cell phone is out of minutes. And her moody boyfriend's only contribution to the household is his sour attitude. So she jumps at the chance to review a pseudoscientific book that promises life everlasting.
But who wants to live forever?
Consulting cosmology and physics, tarot cards, koans (and riddles and jokes), new-age theories of everything, narrative theory, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and knitting patterns, Meg wends her way through Our Tragic Universe, asking this and many other questions. Does she believe in fairies? In magic? Is she a superbeing? Is she living a storyless story? And what's the connection between her off-hand suggestion to push a car into a river, a ship in a bottle, a mysterious beast loose on the moor, and the controversial author of The Science of Living Forever?
Smart, entrancing, and boiling over with Thomas's trademark big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, how we can rewrite our futures (if not our histories), and how stories just might save our lives.
But who wants to live forever?
Consulting cosmology and physics, tarot cards, koans (and riddles and jokes), new-age theories of everything, narrative theory, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and knitting patterns, Meg wends her way through Our Tragic Universe, asking this and many other questions. Does she believe in fairies? In magic? Is she a superbeing? Is she living a storyless story? And what's the connection between her off-hand suggestion to push a car into a river, a ship in a bottle, a mysterious beast loose on the moor, and the controversial author of The Science of Living Forever?
Smart, entrancing, and boiling over with Thomas's trademark big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, how we can rewrite our futures (if not our histories), and how stories just might save our lives.
About the Author
Scarlett Thomas is the author of several novels, including PopCo and The End of Mr. Y. She was named one of the twenty best young British writers by the Independent on Sunday and Writer of the Year at the 2002 Elle Style Awards. She teaches at the University of Kent and lives in Canterbury.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I was reading about how to survive the end of the universe when I got a text message from my friend Libby. Her text said, Can you be at the Embankment in fifteen minutes? Big disaster. It was a cold Sunday in early February, and I'd spent most of it curled up in bed in the damp and disintegrating terraced cottage in Dartmouth. Oscar, the litery editor of the newspaper I wrote for, had sent me The Science of Living Forever by Kelsey Newman to review, along with a compliments slip with a deadline on it. In those days I'd review anything, because I needed the money.
How do you survive the end of time? It's quite simple. By the time the universe is old enough and frail enough to collapse, humans will simply be able to do what ever they like with it. They'll have had billions of years to learn, and there'll be no matron to stop them, and no liberal broadsheets, and no doomy hymns. by then it'll just be a case of wheeling one decrepit planet to one side of the universe while another one pisses iself sadly in another galaxy.
How do you survive the end of time? It's quite simple. By the time the universe is old enough and frail enough to collapse, humans will simply be able to do what ever they like with it. They'll have had billions of years to learn, and there'll be no matron to stop them, and no liberal broadsheets, and no doomy hymns. by then it'll just be a case of wheeling one decrepit planet to one side of the universe while another one pisses iself sadly in another galaxy.
