Yu’s world and characters come to us broken. could find his father, he thinks, he could change something - anything - in their shared lives. Y.’s search for him through time and space and narrative device occupies much of the novel’s ostensible plot. His father disappeared years ago after inventing the mechanism of time travel and failing, crucially, dramatically, to get it working. Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.” His mother opts to live in a boutique time loop, experiencing the same 60 minutes over and over. Especially after you’ve seen what I’ve seen. Y.) lives nonchronologically, having sequestered himself from the passing of time and actual interaction with people: “Chronological living is a kind of lie. 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. You might be forgiven for thinking that this setup smells strongly of vintage Douglas Adams. His two companions are TAMMY, the love interest (of sorts), a neurotic, depressed, sexy piece of software, and Ed, a nonexistent yet “ontologically valid” dog. Yu’s protagonist, a time machine repairman also named Charles Yu, has lived the past decade of his life boxed up in a tiny TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device. The conceit of Charles Yu’s new meta-science-fictional novel, “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” is a touch wacky.
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