Current Reading

I am currently reading Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. (Yu has also written for television, including HBO'sWestworld.) The Times describes it as follows:

The conceit of Charles Yu’s new meta-science-fictional novel, “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” is a touch wacky. 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. 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. You might be forgiven for thinking that this setup smells strongly of vintage Douglas Adams. It does. 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. 

Hardly a hero, Protagonist Yu (P. Y.) lives nonchronologically, having sequestered himself from the passing of time and actual interaction with people: “Chronological living is a kind of lie. That’s why I don’t do it anymore. . . . Especially after you’ve seen what I’ve seen. 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. His father disappeared years ago after inventing the mechanism of time travel and failing, crucially, dramatically, to get it working. P. Y.’s search for him through time and space and narrative device occupies much of the novel’s ostensible plot. If only P. Y. could find his father, he thinks, he could change something — anything — in their shared lives.

This is not a time travel adventure story. Let me just say that you will like the book if you appreciate things like this:

But no one grows up wanting to be the time machine repair guy.

No one says, Hey, I want to be the guy who fixes stuff.

My cousin is in accounts receivable on the Death Star, and whenever we talk he always says how nice it'd be if I joined him. He says they have a good cafeteria. So that's an option. And there's an opening for a caseworker at the social services bureau for noninteresting aliens. Government aliens.