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How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

3.38 · Rating details · 10,498 Ratings · 1,938 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

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Hardcover, 233 pages

Published September 7th 2010 by Pantheon (first published July 23rd 2010)

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Best Science Fiction of the 21st Century

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100 books — 660 voters

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Community Reviews

(showing 1-30)

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May 11, 2011 Stephen rated it really liked it

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

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 disingenuousne ...more

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Dec 14, 2010 Kemper rated it liked it

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

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 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. ...more

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May 22, 2012 Megan Baxter rated it liked it

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

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May 29, 2015 Ｆｒａｎｋｅｅೃ༄ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, contemporary, book-diet-2015-2016, sci-fi-month

Enter the following data:

META (search for definition)
SCIENCE FICTION (search for definition)
TIME TRAVEL (search for definition)

Computing...
Trajectory locked.

To find the only way to exit a time loop, please refer to Appendix A of this manual (How To Live Safely Inside a Science Fictional Universe)

+++

When it happens, this is what happens: By reading Charles Yu's incomparably original work of fiction, I'm realizing, have realized and will have realized that I've lived and I am still living inside a ...more

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Mar 26, 2012 Richard Derus rated it did not like it

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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Sep 14, 2010 Sarah rated it it was amazing · 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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Feb 25, 2011 Bennet rated it it was amazing

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 physic 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 engine, which features an applied temporalinguistics architecture allowing for free-form navigation within a rendered environment, such as for instance a story space . . . ”

Or, as Yu’s mom calls the contraption, a box.

And why not? “Why can we see a far away snow-tipped mountain range, or a jet taking off, or the moon or the sun or the stars, and not an event that took place a minute ago, let alone a month ago, a year, thirty years ago?”

Here you can see and re-experience those events, or if you prefer there is an option to coast in the present-indefinite, which Yu finds tempting: “A self auto-dislocated by at least one-half phase shift from his own subjective present will not, under ordinary conditions, encounter any other version of his self in a controlled story space environment, which is to say, if you hide inside this box and don’t look out the porthole, you can, if that’s what you want, manage to get through middle age without ever learning anything about yourself.”

In stasis or not: “The good news is, you don’t have to worry, you can’t change the past. The bad news is, you don’t have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the past.”

So what’s the point? And what happens when narratives collide? In a universe made of them, it’s bound to happen. Even if you never encounter a narrative outside your own, you’re still navigating a personal galaxy spinning with regrets, intentions, choices, etc., so there’s no end of potential snarls and detours on the way to whatever it is you’re looking to find or salvage.

For Yu it’s relationships. His mother is caught in a time loop. His father is lost who knows where along the continuum. The woman he never married and should have met is out there somewhere. Not to mention he’s got other people’s problems to fix because he’s a time machine repairman.

As if that's not conundrum enough, the iterations of a single event (as experienced at different points in time) can become nesting boxes of sorts, through which you might rummage forever in search of a defining moment.

“Look in the box. Inside it, there’s another box. Look in that box and find another one. And then another one, until you get to the last one. The smallest one. Open that box.”

I won’t say whether Yu gets lucky or not, but (like the rest of us) what he’s really hoping to find is hope.
...more

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Aug 23, 2010 Amy rated it it was ok

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

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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Feb 28, 2012 Kevin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: post-modern-literary-fiction, science-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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Jul 26, 2012 Nostalgebraist rated it it was ok

Shelves: anger-inducingly-bad, sf

Nope. Sorry, Charles Yu. But just -- nope. This doesn't work.

The world in which this novel takes place differs from ours in two key respects:

1) Humanity has discovered (though it is not made clear when this discovery was made, or by whom) that the fundamental laws of physics are actually the laws of narrative -- specifically, of science fictional narrative. The book's reality is a vast multiverse in which individual universes, and parts of universes, behave like stories from different sub-genres ...more

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Apr 11, 2011 Aldrin rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Humans and Vogons alike

Recommended to Aldrin by: Ander Monson

With his nonexistent canine sidekick, his clinically depressed personal digital assistant, and his daddy issues constantly in tow, time machine repairman Charles Yu attempts to navigate the future meta-science-fictional Minor Universe 31 in this dizzingly crafty novel written by present-day, happily-married-with-two-kids Charles Yu. Naturally, along the way the fictional Charles Yu stumbles upon a guide book titled “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.” Don't panic: “How to Live S ...more

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Dec 29, 2010 Sandi rated it liked it

Shelves: 2011

You will notice that I do not have this book on my sci-fi shelf. It's quite clear from the beginning that How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is not science fiction. Rather, it's a book about literature, life and the blurring between them. It kind of reminds me of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series without the wacky humor.

To be honest, this book made my head hurt. It uses big invented words. Your first clue that Yu's time machine is literature because it uses grammatical somethi ...more

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Dec 26, 2010 seak rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2011

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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Feb 13, 2011 Danielle Parker rated it it was ok

I rarely get out and read other reviews of a book before I write my own, wanting to have a pure opinion (for what it’s worth). But once in a while, nagged by something I can’t always vocalize, I read other reviewers just to see if they experienced what I did (good or bad) from the story.
One of the signs of the vast divide between literary darling and popular appeal (or, vice versa) is wildly divergent ratings by reviewers and general readers.
And yeah, that’s exactly what we’ve got with Yu’s “Ho I rarely get out and read other reviews of a book before I write my own, wanting to have a pure opinion (for what it’s worth). But once in a while, nagged by something I can’t always vocalize, I read other reviewers just to see if they experienced what I did (good or bad) from the story.
One of the signs of the vast divide between literary darling and popular appeal (or, vice versa) is wildly divergent ratings by reviewers and general readers.
And yeah, that’s exactly what we’ve got with Yu’s “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe”. On Amazon, the ratings tend to run either to a gushing five stars or a grim one, averaging out to a midpoint few readers actually gave it. You either loved this story, or you found it as boring as the back of a cereal box.
In truth, I could understand both sets of readers.
To give a short synopsis, we’ve got a time travel mechanic who’s the classic geek, flabby nerd, flinching from life, hiding out in his out-of-sync time travel machine. He can’t even manage to interact with his machine’s A. I. or his weird not-really-alive dog. He doesn’t call Mom, has lost his father somewhere in or out of time, and eats a lot of ramen noodles. He’s too dysfunctional to endure living in real time anymore. He tries to avoid all interactions with, well, anything. Everyone petrifies him.
So this is the story of how Yu (the protagonist is autobiographical, which means, I suppose, this whole book is its own metaphor) meets his future self, shoots himself in a fright, hunts for his daddy, and manages to start living life in the present tense. The work could be subtitled, “The Geek Grows Up”, or “The Nerd Learns to Stop Panicking”, or something like that. I think that describes the feel-good arc of this story.
And that, I think, also explains the widely divergent love-hate reaction to this story. It’s a feel-good son-grows-up tale, full of reminiscences and family history, like Amy Tan for the future. That accounts for the rave ratings.
The one stars for this book are because it’s also terminally boring. The whole book is cloaked in pseudo-scientific time travel mumbo-jumbo. Most readers will glaze over and turn the page as fast as they can (and that includes me). The narrative style is lengthy, rambling, and just what you’d expect in the stream of consciousness of one boring, terrified, no-social-skills and no-guts geek. If you like that headset, dig in.
Maybe what a reader should do is skip to the end. Get to the feel good fast, and close the page on Happy Ever After, and sigh. Son comes to terms with past, determines to call on Mom more often, decides to look for Good Woman and have enough guts to ask her out this time. Ah! I’m tearing up already.

...more

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May 12, 2011 Beth Dawkins rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2011

4.5

This is very close to amazing. The only thing that fell off, was the story. The depressed time traveler is after his father. That is the point of the book, but the point changes to the narrative. I wouldn't have enjoyed it, but the narrative was pretty good. It points out crazy ideas and thoughts all of us have had when intoxicated. You know that moment where you think you are so smart? Yep, there are a lot of those, and I enjoy those.

It is also funny. Mentions of Star Wars had me laughing. ...more

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Dec 11, 2010 Tobin rated it did not like it

Shelves: never_finished

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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Jun 13, 2011 Steffanie rated it really liked it · 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 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!
...more

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Dec 29, 2010 Aura rated it it was amazing

Shelves: our-mind-it-melts, malfunctioning-parent-alert, mathematicals, fiction

It starts like this. We have a book in our hands and we're looking at it thinking: the summary on this jacket cover is funny and sort of cute, what with its self-deprecating asides to depressed software and ontologically-valid domestic pets, and with its blurbs from famous authors saying stuff like "This book is cool as hell" - well, this is at the creeping onset of the winter crankiness, so we say to ourselves, we could use a book that is cool as hell! And we take it home.

It sits on our nights It starts like this. We have a book in our hands and we're looking at it thinking: the summary on this jacket cover is funny and sort of cute, what with its self-deprecating asides to depressed software and ontologically-valid domestic pets, and with its blurbs from famous authors saying stuff like "This book is cool as hell" - well, this is at the creeping onset of the winter crankiness, so we say to ourselves, we could use a book that is cool as hell! And we take it home.

It sits on our nightstand for a few weeks, next to The Varieties of Religious Experience and on top of Beloved and under The Stupidest Angel, while we bustle from here to there, generally forgetting about it and doing work and getting ever crankier.

But every now and then we will open it up just to reread the jacket-cover summary, to lift our flagging spirits, or to construct wistful fantasies about how wild and original and inventive and adventurous and tongue-in-cheek this book is going to be compared to our sorry excuse for a life. And then we will forget about it, again.

Anyway, it starts like this. We open the book because we have a migraine that day, and we want to cheer up. Mind-bending start. Clever. An explosion of an imagined universe. We think to ourselves through our migraine-induced haze, we like this. We really like this.

Then, slowly, things start to annoy us a bit: where is the cheap action we'd fantasized about? The adventure? Why is this a book more intensely emotional than we'd bargained for? Why does this invented reality require so much concentration to understand? And why, why, is the narrator so gosh darn repetitive, just endlessly repetitive, repetitive like the fixed cycles of reality in which we're all trapped, repetitive all the time??!? DO YOU KNOW THIS IS NOT CLEVER, CHARLES YU?

We put the book down, disgruntled and headache-y, and go to sleep.

The next day we pick it up again, no headache, no expectations.

It starts like this. We're reading along - still, without realizing it, feeling the mild dregs of yesterday's irritation - and something begins to occur to us, very slowly and sneakily. We are not sure what that something is. At first we think it's the fact that the book is getting funnier - which it is, but that's not it. Possibly it's the fact that the book is getting more serious - which it also is, but that's not it. Possibly it's the fact that the protagonist is nothing like us, and yet.

And yet.

Or possibly it's the fact that even as How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe unfolds itself, revealing its sad, screwed-up, mind-bending reality to be increasingly nonsensical, that's when its pieces come together and make the most sense they ever will.

We don't know how it started. We don't know when we first moved up our mental star rating from three stars to four stars. We don't know when we realized that at some point, some alternate self of us has probably thought stuff like the stuff in this book; but we are not an alternate self of us, we are just us, so we've only thought about a tiny fraction of this stuff, and with much less awareness. Yet all of this is so shockingly relevant to our life that a smarter alternate self would have picked up on these things, we are convinced.

So it started a million times but we can't say how it really started. We just know that it ended by watching this story fall face-first into its fifth star, in a blazing nebula that was brilliant and stunning and sad. You know how some stars are brighter dying than they are living (look! metaphor! see, we can do it too!)? - that is our opinion of this book. Which is not to say the build-up is at all dim. It's just that that was one hell of a nebula.

...more

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Oct 18, 2012 Space rated it it was ok · 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 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.
...more

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Jun 07, 2012 Harold Ogle rated it liked it

Shelves: conceit, sf, time-travel, literary

An interesting conceit, this book posits that time travel is a combination of technology, verb tense, and personal perspective. But it's also not primarily a book about time travel. It's one of these science fiction books that Larry Niven famously scorned, in which the science is not really necessary for the plot. It's much more a story of personal discovery, a young man wrestling with a sense of insignificance and the general meaninglessness of his life. The book is both charmingly absurd and r An interesting conceit, this book posits that time travel is a combination of technology, verb tense, and personal perspective. But it's also not primarily a book about time travel. It's one of these science fiction books that Larry Niven famously scorned, in which the science is not really necessary for the plot. It's much more a story of personal discovery, a young man wrestling with a sense of insignificance and the general meaninglessness of his life. The book is both charmingly absurd and ridiculously drawn-out, and has a great deal in common with any number of late-night monologues from drunken undergraduates (particularly ones I knew), who all seem to favor this blend of Wired-style science fantasy, philosophy, and literary criticism. In all, the book reads a great deal like a first draft of a NaNoWriMo entry, in which the author indulged in quite a few long, meandering trains of thought in order to flesh out the length of the manuscript. It's still entertaining, and though it would probably have been a better novella, it's still a pretty quick read. I found it satisfying.

(view spoiler) ...more

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May 12, 2011 Sandy Parsons rated it really liked it

Shelves: book-club, science-fiction

This book has all the same problems that every time travel story has, those moments when you're going "Wait, but..." and then a little later, you're like, "But...?" until you finally end up glossing over the paradoxes/improbablities/undefinable-in-words so that you can appreciate the narrative, which, in this case was a little thin. This is, I think, in part, due to an attempt to circumvent the reader's delving too deep and realizing it's all a fancy magic trick, a bunch of glittering streamers This book has all the same problems that every time travel story has, those moments when you're going "Wait, but..." and then a little later, you're like, "But...?" until you finally end up glossing over the paradoxes/improbablities/undefinable-in-words so that you can appreciate the narrative, which, in this case was a little thin. This is, I think, in part, due to an attempt to circumvent the reader's delving too deep and realizing it's all a fancy magic trick, a bunch of glittering streamers sparkling only so long as there's someone on the other side blowing them at you.

Still, there are some laugh out loud bits, like the advice that "...if you ever see yourself coming out of a time machine, run" and some keen, current pop culture references appreciable by everyone but especially precious to readers of both literary and mainstream sf. Still further, there are some moments that make you go hmmm, like when his father wonders, "How do we know what it means to percieve an event as presently occuring, rather than as a memory of a past event? ...How do we move the infinitesimal window of the present through the viewfinder at such a constant rate?" Finally, there are moments of jaw-dropping poignancy,like the following quote, which manages to both be true and complex in a way that you always had the knowledge inside you and are glad that finally somebody pointed it out to you-

"...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 and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncatergorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter."

...more

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Aug 08, 2011 Annette Abbott rated it it was amazing

I'm giving this five stars ONLY because I can't give it six.

I started reading this while sitting on the floor at Books Inc in Mountain View, bought it, and despite having a full weekend - I managed to squeeze in reading this book whenever and wherever possible.

Have just finished it and can I just say it was the most fun I've had reading a book ever -- ok, maybe not ever, but definitely in a LONG time. It twists your head -- not too much, but just enough to be clever. Lots of really funny parts ...more

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Dec 11, 2010 Michael rated it did not like it

Too clever for its own good, I found Yu's book [title too long to type] very self-indulgent, written by a writer too aware of his own cleverness. Wait I sort of already said that.

I'm sure this book will find an audience. It's the kind of thing I might have liked in my early 20s, when I'd read a book and force myself to enjoy it, if only because to do so would increase my own sense of satisfaction. I was just a boy then, insecure, who liked to accomplish things, like reading literary fiction, tha ...more

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May 04, 2011 Steve rated it it was ok

A killer premise with some very meta-potential that loses itself in its own oh-so-quirky structure.

Charles Yu takes readers along for a ride with...Charles Yu (!), as his fictional self (a time travel machine repairman) zooms through space and time (and quantum physics 101) in search of his father in this fun little adventure which turns out to be more "exercise in logic" than narrative.

The brilliance ends at the premise as we are dragged through the same old scenarios, the same old questions of ...more

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Oct 25, 2010 Tristan MacAvery rated it did not like it

When I read 53 pages of a 231 page book, and I'm still not hooked, it's time to stop. I say this because so many people seem to have raved about how good this book is that I wonder if I've completely missed the point. Charles Yu owes a great deal of his artistic voice to Sherman Alexie; the similarities of style, of dumping a sudden and potent image in your lap in an unexpected and sweetly ironic way, should titillate me, as I find Alexie brilliant.

What I feel that is lacking in Yu's work is a s ...more

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Feb 06, 2012 Michael rated it liked it

Shelves: books-i-have-reviewed

Normally I stop reading books like Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe after about 50 pages because if I don’t know what’s going in the story by then I figure I never will. I’m sure I’ve missed out on a lot of good books in my time but that’s the breaks, life is short and the list of books is long.

I didn’t quit How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe because despite not knowing what was happening for much of those first 50 pages, Charles Yu’s writing was to ...more

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Aug 14, 2011 Will rated it did not like it · review of another edition

This is a story about a man who lives inside a small time travelling cubicle and travels around the universe and tells people that everything they've hoped and dreamed for is impossible.

The world that this man lives in is unfinished science fiction, with lumpy protagonists and sidekicks, and people like Our Protagonist in the background trying to keep everything running. This man is very sorry for his life and everything that hasn't happened in it. His boss is a Microsoft computer program. The A This is a story about a man who lives inside a small time travelling cubicle and travels around the universe and tells people that everything they've hoped and dreamed for is impossible.

The world that this man lives in is unfinished science fiction, with lumpy protagonists and sidekicks, and people like Our Protagonist in the background trying to keep everything running. This man is very sorry for his life and everything that hasn't happened in it. His boss is a Microsoft computer program. The AI that runs his machine is clinically depressed and prone to crying jags. His mother has retreated to a fictional dinner with a fictional son on a time loop that repeats every hour, and his father has long since disappeared.

It's clear from the narrative that the writer misses his father terribly, but it's never clearly exactly why. His father didn't even seem to like him all that much, and was mostly focused on inventing time travel. He doesn't have any great love for his mother. He claims to have a crush on his AI, but they don't exchange much dialogue with each other... in fact, the only real affection that we see in this book is for Ed, his dog.

In any event, he keeps the cubicle set to the "indefinite present" rather than an actual time period so long that the machine breaks and he has to limp home to get it fixed. And then... he sees his future self handing him a book. So he shoots him. Because nothing happening to him is apparently better than anything at all happening. The plot of the book continues from there.

There is a conceit in the book that a fictional person in a science fictional who "remembers" the past in a book is literally time-travelling back to it, and cannot tell whether he is re-experiencing it or remembering it. It's all the same to him, all times, all places. And so most of this book is internal dialogue, flashbacks and exposition. The book even points this out -- "no time" passes in the cubicle so the clock only ticks when he goes outside and actually does something. The point of the book -- that he rarely does so -- is so apparent that you start to understand why his AI seems frustrated and has crying jags.

But there's a bigger problem with this book. This isn't science fiction. In other books, i.e. The Time Traveller's Wife, you cannot have the story without the science fiction element. In this book, you could have him (view spoiler) and then the book ends. There's no actual science fiction in the story -- all the rules, footnotes, corporate owned universes etc. are irrelevant to the actual plot. It's a sham.

To be fair, the book explicitly points out that it's a crappy, unfinished, fictional universe. But simply saying you're a failure doesn't make you interesting or unique. Think of how interesting the Doctor would be if he were afraid to go outside of the TARDIS. Then throw this book in the trash and never read it again. ...more

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Jun 06, 2011 Corry L. rated it liked it

Recommended to Corry by: Locus Awards finalist 2011

Shelves: literary, sf-f

This book is an odd superposition of literary fiction and science fiction. It starts out strong, with a promise that it can integrate both its literary and speculative natures and create something greater than the sum of its parts. That promise doesn't quite pan out. The book's strength in the beginning lies in its humor and quirky take on time travel and a "science fictional universe," but the world isn't coherent or complete in the way a reader of speculative fiction likely wants. It's a colle ...more

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Mar 22, 2012 Jayaprakash Satyamurthy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, genrebender

Amazing and sometimes a little infuriating, this self-absorbed, often solipsist, frequently overwritten novel is also conceptually brilliant - metaphors nestling within metaphors, and all tellingly deployed - and moving. It's as if a bright emo kid read too much po-mo fiction and somehow managed to sit down and right a great novel anyway. This is the usual novel of a son paying the psychic debts of his father's abdication from paternal duties, but played out with both verve and heart against a s ...more

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Nov 28, 2010 terpkristin rated it it was ok

Shelves: sword-and-laser, 2010, kindle

You'll note that I didn't put this book down as science fiction even though I suppose it has some strong sci-fi elements. This book was just OK. I surely wouldn't recommend that anybody actually waste their time reading it, ESPECIALLY if they're expecting it to be science fiction. It's more like a study of the human condition (from the perspective of a person who seems to have daddy issues...he should probably see somebody about that) with some sci-fi words thrown in.

Seriously, this was a letdow ...more

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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.” — 111 likes

“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.” — 60 likes

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