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How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu (Goodreads Author)

3.40 · Rating details · 13,295 ratings · 2,282 reviews

A story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time.

Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the ...more

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Hardcover, 233 pages

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

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May 11, 2011 Stephen rated it really liked it

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

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 disingenuou ...more

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Dec 14, 2010 Kemper rated it liked it

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

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

Rating: 0.125* of five

The Publisher Says: National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time.

Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and Rating: 0.125* of five

The Publisher Says: National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time.

Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life.

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

My Review: 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.

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 happen if you gave Stephen Hawking a big dose of ketamine and stood back to watch.

Unpleasant. ...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 Selkie ✦ Queen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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

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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Aug 05, 2015 Tom Quinn rated it really liked it

This book is a five-star idea with a three-star execution, so I've decided to average it out to 4 stars overall. Despite the plot's faults (it rushes a bit here, it drags a bit there, it's sometimes metaphorical and sometimes technical and can't seem to decide if it wants to be hyper-detailed or gloss over the science of time travel and ends up doing both unsatisfactorily) this one really made me FEEL more than other contemporary sci-fi. The mood is achingly heartbreaking, the tone is celebrator ...more

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Aug 23, 2010 Amy rated it it was ok

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

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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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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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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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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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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Jan 22, 2012 Antonomasia rated it really liked it

Shelves: american, sff, 2017, decade-2010s

I've no longer any idea what I expected of this book when I added it to 'to-read' back in January 2012, a few months after joining GR. But I can say that it's way out of place on the lists of SF comedy novels where I saw it recently. And perhaps that's why the book has comparatively low ratings: it's been marketed all wrong and quite a lot of readers are disappointed.

It does have a few funny/silly moments, but overall this is a melancholic book, and one that has most context among films, rather I've no longer any idea what I expected of this book when I added it to 'to-read' back in January 2012, a few months after joining GR. But I can say that it's way out of place on the lists of SF comedy novels where I saw it recently. And perhaps that's why the book has comparatively low ratings: it's been marketed all wrong and quite a lot of readers are disappointed.

It does have a few funny/silly moments, but overall this is a melancholic book, and one that has most context among films, rather than other novels I know. There is a kind of stealthy subgenre of indie(ish) SF films and series about depressive, lonely / solitary geeks and nerds, often with an atmosphere that evokes the numbness and/or claustrophobia of the lead character's existence - Pi, Moon and Mr Robot are among those I've seen all or part of quite recently - and How To Live Safely... feels like another from the same stable. Its book-about-a-book metaness, combined with the character's lack of success, also added a dash of Adaptation to the mix. And the central time travel plot concept is a whole lot like Looper (a movie released the same year as this novel).

It also has a social / class dimension: in this present world where geeks have supposedly inherited the earth, there are still those who have not: the guys who didn't become rockstar programmers; who had the wrong combination of life chances and because they weren't gifted with the bootstraps personality everyone's expected to have now, landed worse jobs than The IT Crowd. They are commonly mocked in popular culture, and now stereotyped as easy meat puppets for alt right recruitment. Charles Yu's apparently eponymous protagonist - the not especially talented son of a more talented, but still depressive, unlucky and self-effacing cubicle engineer and amateur inventor - who works as a time machine repair technician (but who surely would have done better had his parents been better off) humanises and gives a reflective sophistication to a type of person whom the media likes to imply lacks these qualities, although most people have probably met tech nerds who are basically sweet, decent, somewhat socially awkward people. During the SJW outcry that all we ever heard from online were male geeks with chips on their shoulders, somewhere along the line, a big category of people got dehumanised as the scales tipped. Although, of course, this book is, crucially for that axis, not white: it's quite subtly about being a second generation immigrant and what it's like when your parents - the narrator's relationship with his father is a big part of the novel - don't have the right cultural capital and nous (which can be cultural and/ or personality) to get you 'in', that mysterious 'in' which it feels like others have, and the sense of apartness provoked by having a different history from those around you. The protagonist's loneliness is pervasive enough that readers who feel worse surrounded by realist characters who have more of 'a life' than they do will find almost nothing to bother them here.

I'd be interested to see what maths & physics types have made of the 'fictional science' in here. It has a density normally associated with hard SF and, according to the acknowledgements, owes quite a bit to the work of David Deutsch.

Yet the high ratio of emotional-reflective content to sci-fi action - and the sophisticated vocab in which this reflection is expressed, just about preventing it being cheesy, as the same sentiments in simpler language would certainly have been at times (Richard Powers is acknowledged at the end too, and this blend of science, sentiment and literature does feel like the work of an aspiring apprentice to his style) - make this an unusual hybrid of litfic and SF (not really the usual 'literary science fiction'), neither fish nor fowl, about the inner life of one whom the lit world is generally uninterested in, and I'm not surprised that this is one of those books which has confounded a fair number of readers. ...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 14, 2020 Philip rated it liked it

Shelves: first-person, science-fiction, fiction, time-travel

The problem here may be more me than Yu (sorry - couldn't help it), but this was just way too literary for my plebeian SF tastes. This book was WRITING! the way Jon Lovitz's "The Thespain" character on SNL was all about ACTING!; and so yeah, bit of a slog, especially the second half where our narrator (also named Charles Yu) is stuck in a time loop looking for his dad. In fact, I started feeling like I was stuck in a loop myself, as vast swatches of run-on sentences started feeling like I'd alre ...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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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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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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May 12, 2011 Sandy Parsons rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction, book-club

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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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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Dec 08, 2018 Michael Burnam-Fink rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sci-fi, 2018, fiction

I'm always a little skeptical when a literary prodigy does genre fiction. Science fiction is bad enough enough, without the literary ball of neuroses that is the Iowa Writer's Workshop sliding in. So let me say that How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe is slick and brilliant, and so gloriously clever that my concerns are washed out in a trillion degree flash of light.

Charles Yu is a time machine repairman is a science-fictional universe. Glamorously described, his job involves shut I'm always a little skeptical when a literary prodigy does genre fiction. Science fiction is bad enough enough, without the literary ball of neuroses that is the Iowa Writer's Workshop sliding in. So let me say that How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe is slick and brilliant, and so gloriously clever that my concerns are washed out in a trillion degree flash of light.

Charles Yu is a time machine repairman is a science-fictional universe. Glamorously described, his job involves shutting breaches in the spacetime continuum and rescuing time travelers from reliving the worst day of their lives over and over again. In practice, it has all the glamour of being a technician for Verizon. Yu lives in a box that drifts in a kind of temporal neutral outside of the normal flow of life, with an ontologically valid but nonexistent dog, his time machine's AI TAMMY, and occasional messages from his manager Phil, a piece of software which mimics a kind of extroverted bro. It's more or less what Charles wants, since his father disappeared and his mother retired to a 60 minute time loop.

Time travel in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is based around a combination of narrative tenses and the intersection of physics and information theory a la Roger Penrose. Yu uses this to literary device explore his narrator's relationship to his father, a striving immigrant engineer who almost invented the time machine, and then became unstuck from the present in disappointment. We are all time travelers, moving into the future at a rate of 1 second per second, and yet it is unclear why we perceive the present and member the past.

When Charles returns to his home base, he breaks the first rule of time travel, "never interact with yourself" when a future him appears, he shoots the future him, and his dying future self hands him a copy of a book "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" before he escapes into his time machine, and the spiraling doom of a closed time-like loop.

The novel is dizzyingly inventive and creative, but pessimistic in its assessment that there only a few seconds in the roughly 2.3 billion we are bestowed which in which we are truly present, truly authentically there with ourselves. Kemper put it better words than I could:

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.

This book is good, maybe even great, but it's too ironic to be perfect, and I wish it was. ...more

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Feb 19, 2018 Kara Babcock rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, time-travel, 2018-read, from-library

Time travel: tricky stuff. Meta-fiction: tricky stuff. Combining time travel and meta-fiction? Extremely tricky stuff. Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe aims high by doing just this. I read it at a time when I was precisely in the mood for this kind of timey-wimey, universe-bending confusion of a narrative, so that was a point in its favour. And by and large I think Yu manages to pull it off, though it’s lacking a certain something that might have pushed it to the n ...more

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Dec 29, 2010 Aura rated it it was amazing

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

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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Jun 07, 2012 Harold Ogle rated it liked it

Shelves: time-travel, conceit, sf, 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 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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Jan 23, 2013 Jim Elkins rated it it was ok

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 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.
...more

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Jun 02, 2019 Chandra rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2019-book-riot-challenge

While the execution was not perfect, I am rounding up to 4 stars because this book was so original and so much fun to read. A winding, philosophical story about one man's experience with time travel.

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Mar 27, 2016 Kevin Kelsey rated it it was ok

Shelves: read-2016

What’s frustrating is that the setup is so clever, so thoroughly unique, and promised so much, and then the narrative completely loses it’s way halfway through, and never regains its composure. What’s frustrating is that this was a good book, even a terrific book, and then suddenly it wasn’t. What’s frustrating is that it had so much potential, that it squandered so completely. What’s frustrating is that the majority of the second half of the book keeps saying the same things over and over and o What’s frustrating is that the setup is so clever, so thoroughly unique, and promised so much, and then the narrative completely loses it’s way halfway through, and never regains its composure. What’s frustrating is that this was a good book, even a terrific book, and then suddenly it wasn’t. What’s frustrating is that it had so much potential, that it squandered so completely. What’s frustrating is that the majority of the second half of the book keeps saying the same things over and over and over again, in ever so slightly different ways, with lots, of, unnecessary, commas, just sort of drawing it out as long as it can, kind of like this review.

What’s frustrating is that there was a story that was setup very well, it would’ve been amazing, and then it disappeared halfway through, replaced by a lesser story, and the mother of all Deus Ex Machina endings. What’s frustrating is the concept — using a lexicon so full of interesting, fun science fictional words combining, quite literally, ’scientific’ and ‘fiction writing’ terms relating to time and narrative, chronology and character, examining the ideas of creating worlds and traveling via the process of creating, writing, crafting a narrative, grammatical choices etc — is such a good concept, and then it’s ironically wasted precisely through the misuse of those same tools on a practical level: narrative, chronology, character, etc.

What’s frustrating is that I get what the author was trying to do, but in my opinion, it didn’t happen. The book he was trying to write, is not this book. It’s absolutely clever, and post-modern/self-aware as hell, and I love all of that. The character is aware they’re in a fictional world, aware of other fictional worlds, this universe the author created had so much potential for amazing things, and then none of them happen. Lots of setup, no payoff.

All that being said, the strengths of the first quarter of this novel, make me think that I might really enjoy Charles Yu’s short fiction, so I’ve picked up his first collection (on my own conflicted recommendation).

This book could’ve been amazing. ...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 SonLight 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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About Charles Yu

Charles Yu

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CHARLES YU is the author of three books, including the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was a New York Times Notable Book and named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, and was nominated for two WGA awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. He has also written for shows on FX, AMC and ...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.” — 127 likes

“If I could be half the person my dog is, I'd be twice the human I am.” — 76 likes

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