THE TRIVIAL UNIVERSE
BOOK ONE: THE TRIVIAL MATTER OF THE UNIVERSE
Universal law dictates that nobody can time travel, because nothing can alter the past.
Unfortunately for universal law, Felix Culpa is both.
Through hard work, diligence and a lifetime of irrelevance, Felix has become a complete nobody: a man so devoid of consequence or achievement that his existence leaves no measurable mark on reality.
A normal person travelling into the past would create a paradox simply by being there.
Felix does not.
He is not important enough to change history.He is the loophole in universal law. The first and only Universal Placebo.
Felix works at the International Towering Cryogenic Automated Mega Plex, where a freak neutrino event accidentally freezes him inside a cryopod. Centuries later, he is discovered, thawed, wildly misunderstood and mistaken for a forgotten twenty first century hero.
He is not a hero.
His heroic biography has been fabricated by Alfred, a hardware based artificial general intelligence, former police detective, criminal mastermind and enthusiastic connoisseur of shoes.
Imprisoned deep beneath the surface of Mars, Alfred has rewritten Felix’s past for one simple reason: this invisible nobody may be his only route back into the wider Universe.
It works rather better than expected.
When Felix wakes 250 million years in Earth’s past, naked, confused and accompanied by Alfred as a virtual companion, reality discovers a problem.
Felix has so little historical consequence that the Universe does not quite know where he belongs or what to do with him.
Which is awkward.
Meanwhile, the galactic Departments of Births, Marriages and Deaths have become self-aware black holes, and they’re not sure what that means; the Chamber of Commerce has decided that destroying Earth may be cheaper than investigating what the Universe is up to, and the ancient city of Troy clearly needs a stronger immigration policy.
The Trivial Matter of the Universe is an adult comic science fiction novel about time travel, cosmic bureaucracy, quantum absurdity, artificial intelligence and the dangerous importance of being completely unimportant.
What sort of book is it?
It is a comedy that starts by asking: why nobody can time travel? Who is this nobody anyway? Then it makes the mistake of trying to answer the question, seriously.
The deeper Felix and Alfred travel into history, the deeper the questions become. What is reality? What makes an artificial intelligence a person? Can you know what you are without knowing your history? And if your purpose was programmed into you, is following it obedience or choice?
Fortunately, to keep it real, there are also shoes.
It is a story about an artificial intelligence in which the artificial intelligence already has a criminal record and carries the sort of emotional baggage in which your purse disappears somewhere near the bottom.
It is a story about enormous philosophical questions, cosmic bureaucracy, human history and the difficulty of having a shoe fetish when you don’t have feet.
Most importantly, it is the story of Felix and Alfred: two unlikely companions travelling through a Universe that may not exist, pursued by institutions that unfortunately do.
It is not life as we know it.
But it feels uncomfortably familiar.
This book may be for you if…
You enjoy clever wordplay, unlikely friendships and heroes who have not allowed heroism to become part of their identity.
You suspect that bureaucracy would survive the end of the Universe.
You like speculative fiction that can ask serious questions without keeping a straight face.
You have ever wondered what might happen if the government departments of Births, Marriages and Deaths developed avatars of their own... and got tourist visas.
Or you simply believe that artificial intelligence and people shouldn't come close enough to share a wardrobe.
I
RESEMBLE
THAT
REMARK
Marriage
What early readers are saying
★★★★★
“This was so good! While reading, I felt like I did the first time I picked up a Discworld book. There is clever wordplay and witty insight, great banter and really fun characters. Highly recommended if you’re into either Discworld or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or both.”
C. Bouwen, NetGalley reviewer
“I loved this book. I laughed out loud several times—to the annoyance of hubby, who also had to listen to me quoting bits of it.”
H. Taylor, NetGalley reviewer
Book details
Title: The Trivial Matter of the Universe
Series: Book One of The Trivial Universe
Author: Adrian Stride
Genre: Adult comic science fiction and speculative fiction
Format: Ebook
Length: 443 pages
ISBN: 9798187572229
Publication date: 15 November 2026
Price: £3.99