How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

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How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

3.37 of 5 stars 3.37 · rating details · 5,106 ratings · 1,233 reviews

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,...more

Hardcover, 233 pages

Published September 7th 2010 by Pantheon

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New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010

28th out of 100 books — 558 voters

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Best Time Travel Fiction

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Mar 26, 2012 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: audiobook, 2006-2010, humor-and-satire, science-fiction, reality-sucks, time-travel, literary-fiction, literature, signed-first-or-limited-edition

Another example of high concept literary fiction costuming itself in the tropes, set designs and jargon of genre fiction, while striving to create something unique, penetrating and memorable.

And, in this case, succeeding brilliantly. Bravo, Mr. Yu.

While not an untrammeled success and a bit murky, at times, with its message delivery, I thought this was, overall, an exceptional achievement. I certainly thought it was a terrific contrast to what I found to be the glossy, soulless disingenuousness ...more

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Mar 26, 2012 Richard rated it 1 of 5 stars

Rating: 0.125* of five

The Book Report: I have no bloody idea what this, this hideous waste of a perfectly good tree is about. If anything. Turgid, awkward sentences meander about in a time traveling machine, doing nothing to illuminate a plot that I could discern through the fog of irritated disdain that began to enshroud me on p2.

My Review: DO NOT READ IT. No one on Planet Earth could conceivably be geeky enough to want to read this. It is ungainly in its lineaments and sounds like what would h...more

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Jun 26, 2012 Megan Baxter rated it 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this book a great deal more than I did. I wanted to be moved. But in the end, it left me a little cold.

I enjoyed the premise, the set up, the notion of living already in a science fictional universe where, at certain points, the reality ratio went up, but at others, significantly down. I liked the idea of born Protagonists, and what happens to all the poor Joes in a science fictional universe who live in the background of the stories, and keep things running. Except these things...more I wanted to like this book a great deal more than I did. I wanted to be moved. But in the end, it left me a little cold.

I enjoyed the premise, the set up, the notion of living already in a science fictional universe where, at certain points, the reality ratio went up, but at others, significantly down. I liked the idea of born Protagonists, and what happens to all the poor Joes in a science fictional universe who live in the background of the stories, and keep things running. Except these things were alluded to, once or twice, but never developed.

And dammit, I liked the idea of time travel as a metaphor for what we all do anyway, sometimes, which is dwelling in the past. Yu's time travellers never seem to go to the future, they go to their pasts, to the moments they find unbearable in their own personal histories, and try to change them, or simply watch. The main character lives in his time machine, repairs the time machines of others, but he is constantly looking for where his father might have gone in time, how he might have gotten unstuck, while his mother is trapped (voluntarily, at the start) in the same slice of time - dinnertime with her family, over and over again.

And then, of course, the main character (with the same name as the author) meets himself coming out of his time travel machine one day, and shoots him. And then has to go through what he has, in many ways, gone through many times before, and leads up to being present to be shot. On the way, he reads a book as he writes, and uses this to watch some of the moments that tell him where his father might be lost.

These metaphors this books uses to tell the story are powerful, and yet somehow, at the end, I wasn't particularly moved. The ideas themselves are evocative, but I didn't feel like the writing itself helped really bring home the emotional impact. I hope Charles Yu writes more, because he has great and poignant ideas, and the seeds of being a great writer. But this book didn't quite deliver.

How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe is a good book, but not a great one. Yet it has seeds of greatness within it.(less)

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Dec 22, 2010 Kemper rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: alt-universes, humor, modern-lit, sci-fi, time-travel

If anyone is ever crazy enough to make a movie version of this, they better hire Charlie Kaufman to do the adapted screenplay. Even he would probably be left scratching his head and saying, “What the hell??”

Trying to summarize this is going to be like trying to explain Inception to someone who has never had a dream or seen a movie. Essentially, it’s a science fictional universe where time travel is possible. Fiction and reality have blended together so that you may run into Luke Skywalker’s son...more If anyone is ever crazy enough to make a movie version of this, they better hire Charlie Kaufman to do the adapted screenplay. Even he would probably be left scratching his head and saying, “What the hell??”

Trying to summarize this is going to be like trying to explain Inception to someone who has never had a dream or seen a movie. Essentially, it’s a science fictional universe where time travel is possible. Fiction and reality have blended together so that you may run into Luke Skywalker’s son or know someone who works on the Death Star, yet the Star Wars movies are still somehow movies. Confused yet?

Charles Yu is a time travel technician who has spent ten years living in his own time machine set in a stasis mode. (Notice that the author’s name is also Charles Yu.) He has aged and still gets and answers service calls, but he has existed outside of the normal time flow. His only companions are TAMMY, a computer operating system that suffers from low self-esteem, and Ed, a dog he saved from being retconned out of a western. He’s like a more anti-social version of Doctor Who.

Charles spends his work time assisting people who have screwed up their time machines by trying to change their own pasts. He uses his free time to brood about his lost father, an engineer who had invented his own form of time travel. When Charles makes an error, he finds himself stuck in a time loop where his only clue is a book that he is both reading and writing at the same time.

The whole concept of time travel is presented as a weird form of narrative that’s based on English grammar rules. Or something like that. Hell, I think I had a mild stroke trying to figure this out.

It’s original and funny at times. The stuff with Charles’ memories of his father and his preference to spend years in a time machine rather than move forward with his life are sad and touching. However, this ended up being a book that I wanted to like more than I actually liked it.

My main issue is that Charles Yu arranged a big Homecoming Metafiction Parade down Metafiction Avenue, and he’s the Metafiction Parade Marshal waving to us from his big Metafiction Float just in front of the Metafiction Show Horses who will take a big steaming Metafiction Dump right in the street in front of us.

I get it, Charles. You wrote a book with a bonkers sci-fi concept so you could tell us about your daddy issues in the guise of a time traveler who is creating a sci-fi book as he’s living it.

I would have liked it more if he would have spent a bit more time telling us about the science fictional universe, and a little less time showing us how clever he was being. Not a bad book, but a little more story and a little less showing off would have suited me better.(less)

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Mar 15, 2011 Elijah Kinch Spector rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: dont-own

This book teeters on the edge of being too clever and snarky, and then suddenly on the edge of being too earnest and depressing, and somehow manages to not fall, which makes it very, very good.

I had more, but GoodReads ate it and produced nothing. Generally, this is a suprisingly smart and fun book that reads far faster than it should, that draws in “genre” and “literary” readers alike with specific terminology and themes, and is especially enjoyable if, like me, one really can appreciate both....more

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Jan 20, 2012 Tobin rated it 1 of 5 stars

An interesting premise begins the tale of Charles Yu (yes, the author) doing a bit of meta-writing about a Charles who time travels. Yu uses time traveling as scaffolding to discuss a sadness, reality, and perception. It's only 240ish pages but I stopped cold on p. 183 when CY (the author) lost the period key on his keyboard and wrote a sentence longer than 1.5 pages.

I read a lot of books (no duh, I'm on Goodreads) and I think I'm pretty permissible when authors pull tricks because I'm typicall...more

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Mar 19, 2012 Kevin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, post-modern-literary-fiction

The NYTimes blurb compares Yu to Douglas Adams and Philip K. Dick, which is like telling me the book is made of chocolate that cures cancer. So far I think Yu hovers closer to the Dick pole than the Adams (yes, I just wrote "Dick pole"), and his use of himself as a fictional character attempting to sort his human identity from his fictive one reminds me of Martin Amis or Paul Auster. Yet I think the pomo fiction conceit works better here than with those more "realistic" authors; science fiction...more

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Apr 10, 2013 Space rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: e-books, time-travel

What did I think? You know, I don't really know. I mean it's hard to know what to think. I know it wasn't great. Well, in fact, it wasn't even good. It was a very laborious read. Mr. Yu would go on long-winded multi-page introspective narratives, telling us the same thing in four hundred different ways. "This was it. This was the end. It was no longer the beginning. It was not the middle, and not after the end, but it was that point that comes at the finale of any event. Sometimes people call it...more What did I think? You know, I don't really know. I mean it's hard to know what to think. I know it wasn't great. Well, in fact, it wasn't even good. It was a very laborious read. Mr. Yu would go on long-winded multi-page introspective narratives, telling us the same thing in four hundred different ways. "This was it. This was the end. It was no longer the beginning. It was not the middle, and not after the end, but it was that point that comes at the finale of any event. Sometimes people call it the finish line. But it was most definitely the end." And so on.

I got so tired of all those expositions I finally started skimming to get to the real meat of the story. And the problem with this book is that the real meat of the story doesn't really make any sense. Okay, so he's calling this reality we live in a science-fiction universe. :what: Why? I never quite made that connection. I guess he's saying we can look into the past but cannot change it, and since we can really only change the present, it's science fiction. Or something. And yeah, that whole bit where he says he worked on the Death Star. And worked for Darth Vader. And took a job for L. Skywalker. L being Linus, Luke's son...

Listen. You just don't do that shit, okay? Unless this is labeled a Star Wars book, like another one of the three hundred-some ridiculous episodes of some story that should have died decades ago. Seriously? How is Star Wars, its characters or its universe even relevant still? It's like these people who are so attached to it they live their lives pretending it's real. And that it means something to know what Luke's son's name is. And what planet he was born on. Seriously. Who gives a shit, okay? And throwing it into your book doesn't make you cool, or funny, or - well, nothing. It really just made me feel embarrassed and sad for you. Because you were going for comedy - I guess - and what you ended up with was a Star Wars reference that was out of place and uncomfortable. Like the wrong hole in the back of a Volkswagen.

Moving on, the story really never went anywhere. It wasn't good. It didn't make hardly any sense. There were no grand revelations or resolutions. There was no fancy twist-ending. There were no moral lessons to be learned. He didn't finally solve the not-so-grand problem he'd been fighting with for a third of his life. It really, all said and done, just ended up being sort of a waste of time. Like the way you feel when someone tells you that your nose is bloody. You wipe it on the back of your hand, say, "eh," and go on about your day.
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Mar 19, 2012 Bennet rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels-stories

I finished this book like stepping off a roller coaster, and I’m still dizzy from the ride, and I loved it.

This is what time travel is like when you can actually move back and forth through the life narrative inside your own head, because your life narrative has combined with others to form a navigable science-fictional universe, also called a story space, through which you may freely roam in your very own time machine constructed from a, and I quote, “grammar drive built on a quad-core physics...more

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Sep 14, 2010 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book, which I misunderstood as something I might enjoy as light bedtime reading, is perhaps the most original work I've read in the last year. It has the same new-ground-is-broken-here feel that Abigail Thomas's "Safekeeping" or Dinty Moore's "Between Panic and Desire" have; not only is the story good, but the prose is new and changes the way it's possible for us to think about narrative itself.

It's experimental, but it's also a very accessible book. And, at it's heart, it's a very human, v...more

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Jan 17, 2013 Sue rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I like it so far, but I will probably not give it five stars when I finally review it because the content does not translate well to ebook format. It says it right in the text.

Publishers: if your content does not translate well to ebook format, don’t sell an ebook version of it. Or make a better translation. Or charge less. Even if I love your book, I will not give it five stars if I’m missing some of the content.

Funny thing is with this sort of post-modern, McSweeney’s-inspired, self-referenti...more

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Sep 16, 2012 Aerin rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: audio, science-fiction, time-travel, well-that-was-terrible

What a waste of six hours that I will never get back, this book was.

Before I get into my full-on rant (AND THERE WILL BE RANTING, BECAUSE OH MY GOD), let me just explain the premise of this book. It takes place in a "science fictional universe", and everyone who lives therein knows they're basically fictional SF characters. Yeah. This is one of those clever "meta" books that are just flying off the shelves these days. Don't you love those? Where high-concept literary acrobatics do their very dam...more What a waste of six hours that I will never get back, this book was.

Before I get into my full-on rant (AND THERE WILL BE RANTING, BECAUSE OH MY GOD), let me just explain the premise of this book. It takes place in a "science fictional universe", and everyone who lives therein knows they're basically fictional SF characters. Yeah. This is one of those clever "meta" books that are just flying off the shelves these days. Don't you love those? Where high-concept literary acrobatics do their very damnedest to distract you from the fact that the story is soulless and empty? If there even IS a story? Because here, not so much.

Our protagonist, Charles Yu, is on a quest to find his father, who has gotten lost in time because time travel? Really big in this science fictional universe.

Spoiler alert!

SPOILER ALERT: Time travel is a metaphor. HA HA, JUST KIDDING, that wasn't a spoiler. That's fucking obvious from page one. Also, a super-duper original idea that no-one has ever used before. (And all of those no-ones handled it far more adeptly and poignantly than this hack. (See: "Another Story, or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea" by Ursula K. Le Guin for but one example.))

ANYWAY. So then for about 200 pages, nothing happens, except Yu at one point randomly meets his future self, and promptly SHOOTS HIM for exactly no reason. Well, for no reason other than to set up the SINGLE major plot point in the book, which is that Yu now exists in an infinite time loop, where he shoots his future self, then grows up to be his future self, then is shot by his past self, and round and round it goes. ALTHOUGH, I was never sure why he spent so much time angsting about it being an INFINITE TIME LOOP, when really, he only goes through it ONCE, just visiting the same event twice from different perspectives, but NEVER MIND THAT.

So there's this time loop, which seems important, but really never serves any purpose except as a pretext for long-winded pseudophilosophical blathering, and to inject a vague semblance of gravity to the otherwise DOA plot. The main focus is on Yu's father, and his quest to find him. So he spends most of the book revisiting his past (TIME TRAVEL IS A METAPHOR!!!!) and reliving his Greatest Hits of Dad-Related Angst. Blah blah blah. (Meanwhile he's falling in love with a neurotic computer program, but let's just not touch that one.)

So that's the plot. It's really fucking lousy. Now for the ranting.

See, I have a pretty good relationship with my parents, and I am also a fucking adult who has mostly come to terms with my childhood. So the protagonist's whinging about his booooring fuuuuucking daddy issues just made me want to stab things. I didn't even get what his fucking problem was. That his parents fought sometimes? That his dad invented a shitty machine that didn't work, and so boo-hoo, he didn't get a job at the fancy-pants research facility? That his dad was a complete and utter sad-sack and he feels responsible for that for some reason? JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, guy, get a life! You're a grown-ass man! Make your own damn FRIENDS, maybe give dating a try, get the fuck OVER your childhood, IT REALLY WAS NOT THAT BAD.

But no, instead we get this overwrought pretentious head-thwacker of a premise where blah blah time travel is a metaphor for acting like an overgrown infant your entire life, and blah blah they all live in a universe based on crappily-thought-out sci-fi precepts and it's sooooo clever, do you see how clever it is, and blah blah the protagonist's name is the same as the author's because GET IT IT'S ALL META AND SHIT BUT IT'S ALSO AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL GET IT GET IT GET IT? And the whole thing is so piss-poorly written, it makes a fourth grader's "what I did on my summer vacation" essay read like fucking Shakespeare. It's a short-ass book (mostly because there's no plot), but it's still filled with PAGES of needless description, about graph paper, about a clock, about this one time he watched a kid hit a baseball and it was SOOOOO MEANINGFUL OMG. I listened to this on audio, and the narrator couldn't even be assed to PRETEND like he gave a shit about the material, reading the whole thing in a tedious Keanu-Reeves cadence that was an abomination in its own right. Like, duuuuuude, this shit is boring. Whooooa.

And you know what, fuck this book. Why do pieces of shit like this get published? Why do people fawn over this tripe, as if all that metafictional sleight-of-hand were any substitute for meaning? Why should anyone want to listen to - or read 200 pages of - some whiny manchild's manifesto about why-don't-you-love-me-daddy-whyyyyyy? Fuuuuck. I hate this book.(less)

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Jun 13, 2011 Steffanie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I am now in love with Charles Yu, this bright new young author. I feel like Yu was onto something *so* big here. Everything about the book excited me. I read it in just a couple of days. The cover excited me. The plot description excited me. Every page I read excited me a little more.

The first time that I predicted that this was going to be my new favorite book was on page 17:

(Yu is a time machine repairman...and these machines only break down when people try to break the rules---change the pas...more I am now in love with Charles Yu, this bright new young author. I feel like Yu was onto something *so* big here. Everything about the book excited me. I read it in just a couple of days. The cover excited me. The plot description excited me. Every page I read excited me a little more.

The first time that I predicted that this was going to be my new favorite book was on page 17:

(Yu is a time machine repairman...and these machines only break down when people try to break the rules---change the past or what-have-you)...

"But the reason I have job security is that people have no idea how to make themselves happy. Even with a time machine. I have job security because what the customer wants, when you get right down to it, is to relive his very worst monment, over and over and over again. Willing to pay a lot of money to do it, too."

The theme of regret throught the novel is very strong. Powerfully worded, I believe. There are so many quotes that I want to put up here, because there are so many beautiful sentences. Well, since I'm a sucker for romance, I'll give you another one:

"All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things. She used her heart, as a physical transmitter of love, and what came out of it was no more voluntary than gravity or time or time travel or the laws of fictional science itself."

Now, I really love that sentence, but what does it even mean? It's cute, but no...the heart is not a physical transmitter of love. That would be gross. It *is* words that transmit love. The heart may feel it, but you can not touch your heart to your lover's heart to transmit some loving electrons. This is the problem I have with the book. There are a lot of really cool sounding ideas, and sentences that make you think. But many of them are empty. I think are suppose to sound cool, more than anything else.

The premise of the story is seriously and ridiculously awesome!! And Yu keeps building and building, bringing us closer and closer to the moment of awe (that I think we all felt coming). And then it ended. It's almost like the book isn't about what we are lead to believe it is about. It's not really about time paradoxes or tears in the fabric of the universe. It's really about loss and regret and guilt and shame and every other negative feeling you can conjure up when you think about the past.

I did say *almost*. Some of the science-fiction in it is certainly new and fresh and not stolen from the older greats of sci-fi. And the non-narration pieces of the novel--the parts that are meant to resemble the handbook alluded to in the title...are very cool.

i.e. "Theorem- At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever." It's cool things like this that keep the book compelling, but in the end, I just wish it would have come together a little more. It needed to be clearer, and more plot driven, and less regret filled (at least by the time the end rolled around)...or else what did Charles Yu teach us? I didn't learn anything. I suppose that's where the loss of the star (4 stars) comes from. I thought the book was the coolest thing ever, but I don't feel any different today. Other authors change me a bit. Some (like Haruki Murakami and Issac Asimov and John Irving) change me a lot! Charles Yu needs a little more practice turning an awesome idea into a truly moving work of art.

I definitely recommend the book, and even though I can't help but be a little dissapointed, I would do anything to be this guy's friend. Charles Yu is the guy I want at my party. Perhaps I can find him and change him from 'the man I never befriended' to 'the man that I am going to befriend someday.' (reference to the novel) :D

Cheers!
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May 21, 2011 Julie rated it 3 of 5 stars

If you are looking for an action-packed space opera, you will not find it here. This novel looks inwards, to the mind and how it perceives time. There are a LOT of run-on sentences, which annoyed me a little, but also some beautiful and insightful prose. There were also some math and physics references that were burdensome, hence the 4 stars.

In a world where anyone can travel back in time to view (but not change) their own past, what do they do? They go to those moments when they feel they made...more If you are looking for an action-packed space opera, you will not find it here. This novel looks inwards, to the mind and how it perceives time. There are a LOT of run-on sentences, which annoyed me a little, but also some beautiful and insightful prose. There were also some math and physics references that were burdensome, hence the 4 stars.

In a world where anyone can travel back in time to view (but not change) their own past, what do they do? They go to those moments when they feel they made a bad decision, and are guilty about it. There is a word for these obsessive thoughts about the past - rumination. It comes from the term for a cow chewing its cud, swallowing it, and vomiting it back up to chew it some more.
"Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward."

The protagonist is doing just that, but he comes to realize that each time he views a memory, he will see something new in it. That is because we grow and change as we digest those thoughts, and when we bring them back again, we think about them slightly differently than before. That is how you resolve the past within your own mind and escape the time loop of rumination, which prevents you moving forward. It's called closure. Does that make sense?

If it doesn't, you may struggle with this novel, which is a philosophical, and often humorous, journey. I got a good idea of what it felt like to be from a lower-class immigrant family, and how a father and son interact. I found it ironic that the protagonist viewed his mother as depressed, but didn't recognize that he suffered from the same condition. The only difference was that he hid away from the world and pushed people away with mean words, instead of crying incessantly. This is pointed out to him by TAMMY, his computer, when she admits that she bases her self-deprecating personality on his own.
My favorite excerpt:
"Life is, to some extent, and extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years."
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Feb 09, 2011 Emily rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

This wants to be a highbrow "Hitchhiker's Guide" but ultimately I found it disappointing due to its meandering plotlessness. The protagonist is a time-machine repairman in a future or alternate present where time travel or travel to fictional universes is a service like cable TV today. The beginning of the book holds some existential gut punches where the protagonist discusses the nature of regret. Given the ability to travel through time, most people choose to relive not the best, but the worst...more

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Jan 31, 2011 Seak (Bryce L.) rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, sci-fi

When I first heard of this book and even after the first couple pages, I thought, don't we already have The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Not so, not so.

I'm really glad my first impressions were wrong because How to Live Safely Blah Blah Blah is a book that's much different and entirely it's own awesome experience. Hilarious at times, nerdy at others, fun, entertaining, with some clever ideas, How to Live Safely is a book of introspection and introduces the serious theme of making something...more

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Dec 04, 2010 Vheissu rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Vheissu by: drbuckley@roadrunner.com

Shelves: cosmology, literature, fantasy-horror

Included in the New York Times list of "100 Notable Books of 2010."

A wonderful story of hope and regret, of family and loneliness, of failure and success. It is also science fiction, where science is less important than the reflections of one life made possible by it. A quote:

How do we know what it means to perceive an event as presently occurring, rather than as a memory of a past event? How can we tell present from past? And how do we move the infinitesimal window of the present through the vi

...more

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Aug 31, 2010 Amy rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: amazon-vine, 2010-books-read, time-travel, disappointing

There went 237 pages of my life that I'll never get back. Luckily, I don't live in a science fictional universe. I was really expecting something great with all the hype. And the premise of the book surely had promise.

Unfortunately, this is mainly a book where nothing much happens... *SPOILERS (to the THREE things that happen in the book) to follow!* Even the girl he never marries and his time-traveling dog companion aren't real. In fact, the only thing that happens to the time machine repairma...more

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Nov 10, 2012 Kevin Fox rated it 2 of 5 stars

I'm a huge science fiction fan, but I never really got into this book. It seemed to me that the author was spending far too much time trying to be clever and "meta". There is very little plot and sentences and paragraphs that run on and on and on, making it feel more than a little repetitive. My feeling was that the story, such as there was, could have been told as easily in a short story of just a few pages and then I wouldn't have had to endure the author's endless navel-gazing.

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Jul 31, 2011 Noah rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An intriguing pseudo-science-fiction novel. Not exactly what I was expecting, but a fun experience, especially as the book becomes a self-referential object within the story itself. If you're a serious science-fiction fan you'll probably be bothered by the way the story uses the idea of time travel a means to telling a very personal story about family dynamics and doesn't try too hard to make it grounded in reality (or at least our reality). But if you like your fiction in the vein of Borges and...more

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May 06, 2013 Matt Stalbaum rated it 4 of 5 stars

Charles Yu's short stories often blur the space between technical explanations of science-fictional concepts, the philosophical implications of those concepts, and how all of that affects people emotionally. "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" is Yu's only published novel, coming between two short story collections. Luckily, the story manages to expand upon the deceptively simple style of his short pieces, but with varied success.

The protagonist of Yu's novel is Charles Yu. His...more

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May 04, 2013 daniel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

i had planned to talk about how i felt similarly about this book and the movie 'primer'. they're both smart, fun, and i'm not entirely sure either makes sense. that i can see myself probably engaging with both of them again to see if i glean anything further, and why not? they're both smart and fun.

or maybe i was going to talk about never wanting to read a book with a comma again-- question whether punctuation can bring down a book, or if that's just silliness.

or wonder aloud whether (obsessive)...more

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Feb 22, 2013 Tom Negrino rated it 2 of 5 stars

This is a book in which the author has a good command of language, and in which nothing of any note or interest happens. In a 225 page book, one would expect that a plot would mosey onto the stage by page 50. No. Instead, Yu has bound and gagged the plot and stuffed it into an alternate universe that we never get to see. To distract us from this, he uses all sorts of time travel-y language, and tries to fool the reader into thinking he's writing a literary science fiction novel. Alas, that is no...more

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Feb 18, 2013 Chris Gillies rated it 1 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. It took me 2 attempts to read through this book. I'm not one to abandon reading a book but this one tried my patience! However, having read reviews for this book during my sabbatical, I decided to have a stab at finishing the book off.

SPOILER ALERT

The favourable reviews I read said that there was a point somewhere around halfway into the book where suddenly all becomes clear and it makes it worthwhile ploughing through the first half. I found the landmark point, and was totally unimpressed with...more

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Feb 12, 2013 Winston O'Toole rated it 3 of 5 stars

Great concepts, great ideas, great setup. Hilarious and tender at moments, time travel as abused by depressed people, a depressed family, in a mixed up science fictional world, where stories are real but not everyone is a protagonist, some are too poor and have to live in reality, don't get a story at all.

There are some really great lines in this book and overall I probably enjoyed it, but Yu's writing becomes agonizing. The book peaks, the highest trajectory on a parabolic arc, the apex, this...more

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Feb 01, 2013 Janet Gardner rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jan 23, 2013 Jim Elkins rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: american

The book dips in and out of real life. The author is in his 30s; he grew up in California; he is Asian-American (that's clear from the book), and his family is Taiwanese (that's mentioned only in the acknowledgments at the end). The version of the author who narrates the book has the author's real name, and is also in his 30s, and also grew up in California. But he has a white-collar job as a repairman for time travel devices.

The book opens as pure science fiction, but elements of Yu's childhoo...more The book dips in and out of real life. The author is in his 30s; he grew up in California; he is Asian-American (that's clear from the book), and his family is Taiwanese (that's mentioned only in the acknowledgments at the end). The version of the author who narrates the book has the author's real name, and is also in his 30s, and also grew up in California. But he has a white-collar job as a repairman for time travel devices.

The book opens as pure science fiction, but elements of Yu's childhood are woven in as the book progresses. Most of the narrative is about his father and mother, and their suburban house and neighborhood. In the story, Yu's parents' actual house is at the center of a diminished reality, torn apart and rearranged, and now known to be part of a larger science-fictional universe numbered 31. When this works as a narrative device, it's because time travel is an allegory for people's disaffection and alienation from one another. Yu's father, an engineer in real life (as we learn in the acknowledgments), is said to have designed a time travel device in his garage; at one point he moved just a minute into the past, so people couldn't communicate directly with him. In the book, he disappeared into some other time; that's presented as an allegory for his emotional distance.

Two comments: one about the narrative, and the other about the images that are inserted into the text.

1. The narrative is clever, self-referential, ironic, knowing, post-postmodern, and so forth. The problem is that the knowing inventions and ironies melt into a mush of sentimental memories. The central episode concerns his father's failed attempt to become famous. It takes place on a baseball field, combining the bathos of "Field of Dreams" (or, I suppose, any American baseball narrative) with the endless longing and disaster of Charlie Chaplin movies. The emotions here are maudlin. That could have been meliorated in two ways: it would have been possible to expand and strengthen the "science-fictional" parts so that they had some control over the presentation of the deep emotionalism of the central scenes; and it would have been possible to put in some of the details, the sights and smells and ideas and preoccupations of middle-class Asian American life in the 1980s in California.

But in this book, the texture of Yu's family life is nearly absent: there is nothing but his distance from his mother and father, and his father's bottomless, pathetic desire for success and inexorable, predictable slow-motion fall into suburban obscurity and failure. Even Buddhism, mentioned in passing as his parents' religion, is presented in a manner so devoid of detail that it could have been written by someone who only knows Buddhist temples from Hollywood movies. Where is the grit, the feeling, of this suburban life? What exactly did his family do in their spare time? What television did they watch? What cultural histories interested them? Did they subscribe to Taiwanese newspapers? It's the absence of culture and history that bother me here, and open the door to the childishly endless emotionalism of the central scenes of the book.

Not every narrative has to be as full of everyday life as Updike, Cheever, Hemon, Pamuk (or any number of others) but there is nothing here but the yawning abyss of middle-class aspiration and the insatiable desire for success and love. There is only one fully successul, immersive fantasy life in the book, and that is the character of a successful research scientist, who enters the narrative briefly and is presented as calm, distanced, and effortless. He lives in a secure fantasy: everyone else's world is a wreck of disillusion, propped by ineffective opiates (time travel, impossible success, unattainable love).

When Yu is writing as an ironic contemporary novelist, and not as a memoirist, he tries to up the ante of time-travel narratives by being cleverer about paradoxes than his predecessors have. It happens I saw the movie "Looper" while I was reading this book -- in fact I saw it just before I came to the page in the book that has a diagram of a time-travel loop -- and Yu's treatment is certainly more complex. But all of that just leads down the road to unironic science fiction or the common complexities of any murder mystery. "Memento" is still the most clever in that vein. But it's not what Yu really wants, and in the end the "science-fictional" physics, diagrams, definitions, and jargon are just distractions. When Yu writes about time-travel paradoxes, he sounds like a mixture of Mark Lerner and Douglas Adams, but it's as if he can't keep his mind on it in any consistent way: sometimes the time-travel devices are allegories of emotional states; sometimes they are said to be founded on emotional states; but in other passages the time-travel evaporates, and we're on the Field of Dreams.

2. I read the book for the images, as part of a project to read contemporary fiction that uses images. Here images come in several kinds: in the Kindle version, there is one picture of the pages of the book itself (an almost mandatory moment of self-reference), several diagrams (drawn with GraphViz?), an image of a hypercube (drawn in Mathematica?), a couple of book covers (drawn in Photoshop?), a made-up, childish sketch for the cover of the book, a link to a YouTube video, a link to an entry on quantum mechanics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (disappointingly obvious, after the book's more arcane mathematical references), and, most interestingly, a number of pictures of Yu's neighborhood.

Those snapshots are what mostly interest me about this book. They make the entire "science-fictional universe" melt away: they remind me, repeatedly, that this is the product of a thirty-year old Asian-American writer, and that everything I am reading is a fiction. That's an unusual use for images in fiction. The narrative is also open about the fact that the "science fictional" part of the book is fiction, but a snapshot of Yu's totally ordinary house (linked to the words "as soon as you step outside your house") declares the fictional nature of the book in a decisive way. Another photo, an entirely indifferent picture of two houses and a couple of cars, is captioned "Unincorporated region between SF and reality, in close proximity to Charles Yu's childhood home" and linked to the text:

"Despite improvement in recent years, successful transition into the SF zone remains difficult to achieve fr many immigrant families, and even after decades of an earnest and often desperate striving for acceptance and assimilation, many remain in the lower-middle reaches of the zone, along the border between SF and 'reality.'"

That sentence is a perfect one-line description of the book, whose bathos brings it right back to the father and son's "desperate striving" and erases all the "science-fictional" irony. Once a reader has seen one of these suburban snapshots, it is difficult to suspend disbelief and return to the narrator's world as a time traveler. Yu never expects his readers to fully suspend their disbelief -- this is a novel about novels and movies about time travel -- but I don't think he realizes how coercive these photographs are. They are so relentlessly, unanswerably real that the narrative becomes a filigree. I think the fact that this did not concern Yu is a sign that he did not take the images as seriously as I think they need to be taken. By the time a reader comes to the picture captioned "The park where my father attempted to sell his time machine prototype," and sees, again, an utterly ordinary park with an utterly ordinary baseball field, it's clear that Yu isn't really looking at his own images.

Photographs proclaim their reality much more loudly than any declaration in the narrative about the difference between Yu's "real" world and the "science-fictional universe." Images work differently, and perhaps the only way to control their reality effect is to ignore them -- to refuse to notice that photographs are unanswerably strong.
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Jan 20, 2013 Toussaint Egan rated it 3 of 5 stars

There was a lot of half-fictitious, pseudo-scientific jargon to parse through and meta-textual mind-twisters to puzzle my way past, but at the heart of the book was a genuinely moving story about a wounded father-son relationship and how a man learns to reconcile the regrets of his past with the reality of his present and the uncertainty of his future.

Despite the nature of its name, the book is less of a comical tongue-in-cheek How-to novel (ala The Zombie Survival Guide) and more of an autobio...more

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Dec 21, 2012 Antonio Farias rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What an incredibly fun read! I'm not a big metafiction fan, but Charles Yu really sucked me into the narrative with the poignant and at times heart breaking story of a broken family and the yearning of the narrator to find his father and mend the past. The premise of the time traveling is clever (grammatical rules are the fuel of time travel) rather than being overly geeky and at times the protagonist comes to realizations that really made me put the book down and think, as when he says that hum...more

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Nov 30, 2012 Vasha7 rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I used to wonder why fiction didn't often use metaphors drawn from modern physics. Mostly stuck to at best the classical concepts, or even totally outdated "folk" theories. Well, now I have found a book of 21st-century metaphors; and, not surprisingly, reading it is hard work. (There is one beautiful and comprehensible Newtonian passage: the parabolic trajectory of a life, with weightlessness at the highest point.) If I hadn't just finished The Future of Spacetime I would have struggled even mo...more

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Sci Fi Aficionados: * June 2012 Random Read - How to Live in a Sciencefictional Universe	15	59	Jul 02, 2012 06:48pm
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About Charles Yu

Charles Yu lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Michelle, and their two children.

He has received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his story collection Third Class Superhero, and he has also received the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. His work has been published in the Harvard Review, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, and Mid-American Review, am...more

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“...unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.” — 50 people liked it

“I don't miss him anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. I wish I could but unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience... It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.” — 40 people liked it

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