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How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe (2010)

by Charles Yu(Favorite Author)

3.38 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0307379205 (ISBN13: 9780307379207)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Pantheon

review 1: POSSIBLE SPOILERSWhile this book creates a fairly interesting world, the author is not tricked into the whole "world building thing." The main character, a time machine repair man, is at his most human when he interacts with those who have broken down. Unfortunately, these instances are rare, and he spends the majority of his time being rude, or at least generally unpleasant. He also obsesses over his father, and enjoys rhapsodizing over mathematical formula, or explaining his life in terms of them, then repeating it, in different words, at least two times, just so you know what's going on. I was sure that, at some point, he would become his own father, because of his seeming obsession and recursive loop, but alas, he just really worries about his dad. On the plus side, a... mores well as the world, I liked Ed, the removed sidekick mutt of a western star, and I was glad that our main character eventually became a better person, even though that was at the very, very end.
review 2: There's a thin line between "gimmick" and "brilliant concept," and it's hard to tell which side of the line Charles Yu is on. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe uses time travel as a means of exploring personal history. The suggestion is that we are all time travelers, with or without machines, specifically we are time travelers of the past. The future, of course, is a harder place for us to go on our own because it is unknown, and as such Yu doesn't even bother to consider the future. He's interested in the past, how we recycle the past, bend it, transform it to our own personal narrative needs. The book then takes a bit of a detour when Charles Yu (character, not author) gets stuck in a time loop and has to find a way to get out. These sections are at once wild and impossibly cheeky. You get the sense that Yu knows he's getting away with meta-fiction murder, because there's no real reason he needs all the fancy metaphysics. How to Live is a playful book, though, which works to keep its chrono-meditations moving and meaningful even if they are covered in a lot of nonsense. less

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