How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
A Novel
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- USD 3.99
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- USD 3.99
Publisher Description
From the National Book Award–winning author of Interior Chinatown, comes a razor-sharp, hilarious, and touching story of a son searching for his father ... through quantum space-time.
Every day in Minor Universe 31 people get into time machines and try to change the past. That's where Charles Yu, time travel technician, steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he's not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. The key to locating his father may be found in a book. It's called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and somewhere inside it is information that will help him. It may even save his life.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Funny, brainy, and unexpectedly tender, this story turns time travel into something beautifully human. Charles Yu, a weary repairman in a universe where people keep trying to rewrite their pasts, spends his days fixing broken timelines—and his nights searching for the father who vanished into one. His only companions are TAMMY, an anxious operating system, and Ed, a dog who may not exist but still feels real. The result is a looping, self-aware adventure that plays with science-fiction tropes while quietly breaking your heart. Author Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown) turns paradox into poetry, exploring how regret and memory make us all our own time machines with a mix of humour and melancholy that feels closer to Kurt Vonnegut than Robert Heinlein. As soulful as it is inventive, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a time-travel story about what it means to finally arrive in your own life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yu uses futuristic ideas to explore a mundane theme: writing about the self and the moment in Tristram Shandy esque digressions. The protagonist, who shares the author's name, spends most of the story interacting with entities that either mirror him (TAMMY, an operating system who reflects his personality) or don't exist (Ed, a "weird ontological entity" in the shape of a dog; Phil, a programmed supervisor who thinks he's human). The conclusion tries to mitigate character-Yu's risk-averse solipsism, but is too quick and abstract to really counter the rest of the book's emotional weight. Mainstream readers will be baffled by the highly nonlinear Oedipal time travel plot, but the passive, self-obsessed protagonist is straight out of the mainstream fiction that many SF fans love to hate, leaving this book without an audience.
