It’s about time travel and cosmology, yes, but it’s also about language and narrative - the more we learn about Minor Universe 31, the more it resembles the story space of the novel we’re reading, which is full of diagrams, footnotes, pages left intentionally (and meaningfully) blank and brief chapters from the owner’s manual of our narrator’s time machine. But Yu’s novel is a good deal more ambitious, and ultimately more satisfying, than that. “If How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe contented itself with exploring that classic chestnut of speculative fiction, the time paradox, it would likely make for an enjoyable sci-fi yarn. No doubt it will be made into a movie, but let’s hope that doesn’t take away the heart.”
A clever little story that will be looped in your head for days. Dick are touchstones, but Yu’s sense of humor and narrative splashes of color–especially when dealing with a pretty solitary life and the bittersweet search for his father, a time travel pioneer who disappeared–set him apart within the narrative spaces of his own horizontal design. is like Steve Jobs’ ultimate hardware fetish, a dreamlike amalgam of functionality and predetermination.” Yu has a crisp, intermittently lyrical prose style, one that’s comfortable with both math and sadness, moving seamlessly from delirious metafiction to the straight-faced prose of instruction-manual entries. A complex, brainy, genre-hopping joyride of a story, far more than the sum of its component parts, and smart and tragic enough to engage all regions of the brain and body.”
Yu is a superhero of rendering human consciousness and emotion in the language of engineering and science. “Glittering layers of gorgeous and playful meta-science-fiction…Like Adams, Yu is very funny, usually proportional to the wildness of his inventions, but Yu’s sound and fury conceal (and construct) this novel’s dense, tragic, all-too-human heart. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and somewhere inside it is information that will help him. The key to locating his father may be found in a book. When he’s not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician, steps in. through quantum space-time.Įvery day in Minor Universe 31 people get into time machines and try to change the past. From the acclaimed 5 Under 35 winner, comes a razor-sharp, hilarious, and touching story of a son searching for his father.
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