How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel

Charles Yu

Sep 2010 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

From the National Book Award–⁠winning author of Interior Chinatown, comes a razor-sharp, hilarious, and touching story of a son searching for his father ... through quantum space-time.
 
Every day in Minor Universe 31 people get into time machines and try to change the past. That's where Charles Yu, time travel technician, steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he's not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. The key to locating his father may be found in a book. It's called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and somewhere inside it is information that will help him. It may even save his life.

Ratings and reviews

I recommend reading some of Charles Yu's available work before paying for this. His style in How to live safely is the same as his other writings, and it is not a style that works well for science fiction. This book comes across as more of a gimmick than a legitimate science fiction novel.

My favorite recent read. Experienced the odd sensation of expecting (hoping?) it to end with me having written it. Which probably says more about my own world view than the rabbit hole Yu takes us down. A challenging story to conclude. Still, I keep thinking about it.

In Yu's phantasmagorical, somewhat allegorical tale, his main character, Yu himself, spends a lot of time in boxes. Yu actually spends time in his novel talking about how often he says box. He shares with the reader that his use of the word "box" is not because he lacks the literary talent to use different words or synonyms that pack a punchier punch; no, he repeats the word box almost like a litany because of the word's direct simplicity. He uses it to define a limited space. He underscores it to convey the limited sense of reality within a narrative that strives to create a universe without limits. It is this paradox that drives Yu & his readers down a path of self-exploration and discovery within a universe that is not what it seems. On the surface one can view his work as as a slightly melancholy, science fantasy that moves at warp speed against a backdrop of scientific gibberish that sounds intelligent without having any way of knowing if it is or not. Populated with characters that may or may not exist except for their emotional attachment to Wu, the reader is left to wonder whether or not the story's arc will crash, burn or rise, phoenix-like from the ashes. And perhaps, somewhere within that confusion, lies the brilliance of his novel. For what Yu does is to create a space within his box/our box that allows you to experience this time travel as a metaphor for our own inner fascination & fixation upon wanting to change what has passed, knowing full well, all along, that we cannot & that the exercise is & always will be, totally futile.

About the author

CHARLES YU is the author of four books, including Interior Chinatown (the winner of the 2020 National Book Award for fiction), and the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (a New York Times Notable Book and a Time magazine best book of the year). He received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award and was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. He has also written for shows on FX, AMC, and HBO. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications. Together with TaiwaneseAmerican.org, he established the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Writing Prizes, in honor of his parents.