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Loading... How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel (Vintage) (edition 2011)by Charles Yu
Work InformationHow to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
  
» 12 more Summer Reads 2014 (38) Books Read in 2023 (238) io9 Book Club (29) To Read (232) KayStJ's to-read list (1,341) Good Buddhist Novels (11) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) teejayhanton | Mar 22, 2024 |   ) Treebeard_404 | Jan 23, 2024 | Still thinking about this one- 3.5/5 rounding up to 4. It feels a little like Kazuo Ishiguro's [b:Never Let Me Go|6334|Never Let Me Go|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353048590l/6334._SY75_.jpg|1499998] in that the book is technically SF/F genre but is mostly very literary pondering. NLMG at least has the interactions of Kathy and her friends; here, fictionalized Charles Yu mostly lives a solitary life as a time-machine repair technician, with a $3 million dollar AI and a reconned dog as companions. Time travel is a construct for fictional(?) Yu to resolve father-son issues in a meta narrative where the dad might be literally stuck in a minute in the past. I'm still within the half hour of finishing it so I don't have any elegantly strung-together thoughts on what my overall thoughts are, but as is habit I'm looking at other reviews and I feel like some readers were expecting a more, well, genre action-driven narrative instead of a thoughtful trip through the nature of our narrative reality. ( ) Daumari | Dec 28, 2023 | BookyMaven | Dec 6, 2023 | ) Bebe_Ryalls | Oct 20, 2023 |
 The deceptively simple plot can be told in one sentence: a time-travel-machine repairman wants to locate his missing father before his past catches up to him and shoots him dead. Our anxieties and fears are heightened as the protagonist's past gets ever closer. That the protagonist's father devoted his life to creating a time-travel machine allows us to ponder the dilemma of a brilliant person trapped in the role of a family man. VERDICT: Fans of Ursula K. Le Guin and 'social science fiction,' as well as readers of an adventurous nature, will enjoy this book, which has the potential to become a cult classic.  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is intellectually demanding, but also emotionally rich and funny. It's clearly the work of a scifi geek who knows how to twist pop culture tropes into melancholy meditations on the nature of consciousness. There are times when he starts off a paragraph about chronodiegetics that just sounds like pseudo-scientific gibberish meant to fill in some space. And then you realize that what he’s saying actually makes sense, that he’s actually figured out something really fascinating about the way time works, about the way fiction works, and the “Aha!” switch in your brain gets flipped. That happened more than once for me. There are so many sections here and there that I found myself wanting to share with somebody: Here—read this paragraph! Look at this sentence! Ok, now check this out! The eponymous lonely-guy narrator in Yu’s debut novel is a time-machine repairman working in the slightly damaged Minor Universe 31, where people can time-travel for recreational purposes—or, Charles muses, is it re-creational purposes, given our desire to rewrite history? Charles dwells in a small module with TAMMY, a cute but insecure operating system, and Ed the dog, who is good company even though he’s a “weird ontological entity” rather than a flesh-and-blood animal. Woebegone Charles has never gotten over the disappearance of his father, a thwarted time-travel pioneer. With Star Wars allusions, glimpses of a future world, and journeys to the past, as well as hilarious and poignant explanations of “chronodiegetics,” or the “theory of the nature and function of time within a narrative space,” Yu, winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 Award, constructs a clever, fluently metaphorical tale. A funny, brain-teasing, and wise take on archetypal father-and-son issues, the mysteries of time and memory, emotional inertia, and one sweet but bumbling misfit’s attempts to escape a legacy of sadness and isolation. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a triumph, as good as anything in Calvino or Stanislaw Lem. I wish I could travel back in time with a copy and fraudulently publish it under my own name. Like most people, I thought I learned everything I needed to know about time travel from H.G. Wells and Star Trek, but I thought wrong: In Yu's skillful hands a worn-out science fiction plot device becomes a powerfully expressive metaphor for how we experience the flickering, ineffable, ungraspable spatio-temporal phenomenon of life. Because after all, we're all time travelers, blundering forward into the future at the rate of one second per subjectively experienced second. Except when we don't. Think about it: How many times have you yourself been trapped in a time loop, cycling obsessively through one inescapable moment, again and again and again, while the rest of the universe rolled forward and left you behind? Is expanded inHas as a commentary on the textAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Charles Yu, time travel technician, helps save people from themselves in Minor Universe 31, a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction. When he's not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog named Ed, and using a book titled "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" as his guide, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.38)
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