Charles Yu, the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, is back with a collection of short stories Sorry Please Thank You. They are really good by the way. Like really good. What makes me qualified to make such a claim? Qualifications? I’ve read them, and I’ve read at least 3 other books in my life, so I’m pretty much a professional reader.

If you are not familiar with Yu’s work I think its time you check him out. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe was Yu’s first novel, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and a 2011 best book of the year by Time Magazine. Not to mention I thought it was awesome. In HTLSIASFU Yu is a time travel technician that floats, or speeds, or whatever through Minor Universe 31. What is his purpose? He gets people out of their time travel predicaments, cycles, loops, jams, pickles, etc. While he’s flitting about time and space saving folks he finds that he too suffers from the same cycles, loops, and melancholia of the age and might need a bit of some salvation himself.

Designer Emotion 67 is one the shorts featured in his new collection and was originally published in The Oxford American. The story begins with the CEO of PharmaLife, Inc. giving the 2050 fiscal report to its shareholders and announcing he will reveal their newest hottest drug after he’s gone over the numbers. PharmaLife has specialized in depression medications, but we are told they are moving on to bigger fish:

“Where was I? Yes. Depression. Depression has been good to us. But at this point, as you all realize, it has come to be run as an exercise in sales and marketing. We’re late in the product life cycle. The Depression-industrial complex has been built. Winning in the Depression/Suicide space these days means keeping the machine running smoothly…Depression earned three forty-two a share last year, or just over nine and a half billion dollars for PharmaLife. Not depressing at all! … Depression may have matured and become a marketing shop, but the DREAD business unit is still the domain of the engineers, … It’s an exciting time over at DREAD… We are going to cure dread by the end of the decade. And by cure, I mean, find a blockbuster drug that has a differential rate of indication greater than the margin of error in white mice that exhibit symptoms of dread. Or whatever the mouse version of dread is.”

Dread, though a big fish, is not the biggest in PharmaLife’s infinite ocean. I’m not going tell you the end, I’m not going to tell you how cool and weird and terrible Designer Emotion 67 is, because I want you to read it for yourself, I want you to experience Yu’s craftsmanship, because it is wonderfully hilarious and fun and yet frighteningly close to home.

So come by and get Sorry Please Thank You, you won’t be sorry.

(If you haven’t read HTLSIASFU you should also get that. If you have read it, well, just get it again.)

-Austen

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