July 2024 Book Club: How to Safely Live in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

 

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Sci-fi
Content: Sex bots and masturbation are mentioned

 

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 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.

 

This was very meta. It's a book being written within a book and very obviously a metaphor for parental abandonment and the way it affects the child. Throughout much of the book I wondered if the main character was just sitting in a box making this all up in his head, which could be what the author did, since this appears to be his personal story. At least that's what I'm assuming since he put himself in the book. I feel like the title even points to living in a fictional reality so as to block out the feelings of abandonment, but maybe I'm reading too much into it. A big theme in this book is not wasting the time we have. There's a part where he talks about how his dad wasted so much time trying to get more time, which was both profound and sad. This was my favorite thing about the book, and in support of that theme, I stopped wasting my time at about halfway through and skipped to the end.