Book Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel, by Charles Yu

Source: Amazon.com

From the book’s cover:

National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching 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.

Wildly new and adventurous, Yu’s debut is certain to send shock waves of wonder through literary space–time.

The Review:

A quick review on this one. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is full of good ideas, and is put together in an interesting way, but the author keeps trying to tie together some elements in what I can only suppose are from his own life, and these slow the narrative down and make it seem too moribund for me.

The lead character is a time-machine repair man, which is an idea fraught with potential. The author uses this vehicle (no pun intended there, by the way) to good effect in places, but gets too tied down in discussing the relationship dynamic between himself (again, a supposition as to who the main character represents, but I'd bet it's a good guess), his father - who invented the time machine and who has disappeared into the labyrinth of subspace (betcha didn't know that wasn't just a Star Trek thing; I didn't) - and his mom - who is living the same hour over and over again in a sort of future-ific rest home-come-neural interface device that allows people to go back to some part of their lives they'd rather live in (as opposed to the present - and yes, that sounds like a good idea to me sometimes, so sign me up!). The ideas are all good, including the quirky but somehow very human computer interfaces that the protagonist interacts with, the use of the concepts of physics, grammatical construction, and science fiction as the building blocks for the author's ideas, and the way the writer draws the reader in by making the book they are reading into a direct analog to conscious thought.

The author, Charles Yu / Source: LATimesBlogs.latimes.com

Hmmm. As with so many other books I read, there are two ways to look at this book. On the one hand, the ideas involved in How to Live Safely... are really good, and have the potential to be quite immersive and really make the reader think. But on the other hand (and I admit fully that this is my own bias and others might not see it this way), the author spends too much time pining over the relationship with his mother and father. I realize this familial tie is vital to Mr. Yu, and no disrespect is intended, but it gets to be so bad a drag on the plot at times that I just wanted to metaphorically slam the book shut and stop (it being an audiobook I was reading, this would preclude slamming it shut in reality, mind you).

In fact, at three-quarters of the way through, I almost stopped reading all together. The author was delving into a situation that brought about the disintegration of the protagonist's family - that is: the failure of the father and son's time machine to perform upon inspection by "the director," a scientist business man type - and the lengths to which Yu went to to describe how crushing it all was were both well written, but... I believe he could have used a bit more editing. I wanted to say: "You made your point to the extent that I stopped caring!" Maybe I'm just callous, but it got so that I felt less sympathy for the guy after he started relating his situation than any reader should for a main character. Like I might have started to root for things to actually fall apart, you know? To hell with a happy ending; this book annoyed me. That sort of feeling crept in there.

The idea of a time travel technician reminds me of the Halloween episode of The Simpsons when Homer gets his hand stuck in the toaster oven - repeatedly - and then in an attempt to fix it - accidentally creates a time machine.  That episode has some of the best lines in it...  "OK, don't panic -- remember the advice your father gave you on your wedding day." (Homer remembers Abe with hair and a tuxedo)  "If you ever travel back in time, don't step on anything because even the tiniest change can alter the future in ways you can't imagine."  That's good advice, if you think about it. / Source: SFX.co.uk

Anyway, How to Live Safely... has its merits, and I like the ideas contained therein, but ultimately, I found it a slog and would not recommend it. If heavy jargon-laced sci-fi with a hefty dose of familial dynamics is your thing, you might like this one. Heck, maybe its just me here, but I just barely survived How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe. Maybe I was reading it upside down...

Learn more about How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel on Amazon.com


The parting comment:

Source: LOLSnaps.com

From How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe, to How to Properly Mount and Effectively Dispense Toilet Ppaper, this post has all your bases covered.