I’m a huge fan of stories full of character-driven energy, filled with science fiction tropes, and pulls on your heart in that way only a good science fiction story that wants you to believe in humanity again could ever do.
Here’s more about How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
A story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time.
Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life.
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My thoughts
Have you ever felt like you might have read a book too fast and missed out on the bigger scope that’s laying between the lines of text? This is a book that’s not meant to be read over a weekend, but over a longer span of time which kind of makes it interesting given that this book is about time.
The story follows…Charles Yu (the same name as the author, but not a memoir) as he returns from years of searching for his father in the vast time/space continuum. In this book, time travel has been invented, the world has been destroyed, life relies on technology, and I think fictional science fiction tropes are real (but I may need to explore that again in my reread).
Charles Yu definitely has an interesting way of sharing stories. This is my first book by him and it definitely won’t be my last, but his writing is definitely not conventional. Don’t expect to go into this one thinking that there will be a linear plot line. Similarly to the travels of his character, this book jumps between the past, present, and future to show you the life Charles Yu lived and lives and will live in time. It’s a life where his mother lives out the same hour every single day of her life. It’s a life where Charles is a time machine repair man than a world famous inventor. It’s a world where a young man is desperate to find a father that abandoned his family way before he ever left. And in many ways, it’s humorous, but also a beautiful representation of a human life slung between what has happened and what’s to come.
And thinking about this book in hindsight, that’s very true for Charles Yu. While I could get pedantic about the lack of plot, the repetitive nature of the story, or even the frustrating lack of worldbuilding, I’m pulled into this book by its literary prose on life choices and the struggle each of us endures in a world that’s not filled with time travel.
There was something more going on in this story that I wish felt more clear. Because of the confusing components of the story, the time loops, the frustrations with paradoxes, there was a richness of human connection between a man and technology that’s waiting to be explored. There was an adventure across time and space that was begging to be challenged, but a lot of it fell to the wayside in the convoluted mess this book is told in. At the same time, it’s a story I want to read again and again just to make sense of it.
Something about this book reminds of me that scene from Spaceballs when the two dudes are watching a copy of the movie on VHS and get to the part where they’re looking at themselves talking about how they’re watching the scene that they are filming right now. I wonder if this scene went through Charles Yu’s mind when he was writing the book because it was one that I couldn’t stop thinking about.
Simone and Her Books 