This author appeared at the 2012 festival. Please view the list of authors appearing at this year's festival or see our suggestions for similar authors below.
Have you ever wished someone would patent a product that removed boredom, depression, or embarrassment? Or wondered what it was like to be that nameless guy on the exploration team who dies in every sci-fi episode? Charles Yu’s Sorry Please Thank You mingles excerpts from a dystopic future where super-companies have turned emotions, lives, and time into commodities with surreal snapshots of relationships balancing on a knife’s edge. Hijinks ensue in "Hero Absorbs Major Damage," where a video game avatar with existential issues is traveling with a cast of characters who worship the child "god" Fred. The characters of "Open" inhabit a Dali-esque world where thoughts and happenings manifest in floating words and doorways that lead to alternate lives, while "Designer Emotion 67" explores commercially manufactured feelings including solid research on the eradication of dread — slight zombification and insanity side-effects not withstanding. Yu is also the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and ThirdClass Superhero, which earned him the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award. His work can be found published in the Harvard Review, as well as many other journals. Yu was featured at the 2011 Festival for How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.