His job is to rescue people whose time machines have broken down or, more often, intercede when they try to do something stupid like alter their own timeline. He lives, sleeps, etc., in a TM-31 (coincidence?) pod thing that lets him travel through time. And by and large I think Yu manages to pull it off, though it’s lacking a certain something that might have pushed it to the next level-likeable (or simply less cardboard) protagonist, more clearly defined conflict/antagonist, or more tense worldbuilding-pick one.Ĭharles Yu is a time travel technician in Minor Universe 31. I read it at a time when I was precisely in the mood for this kind of timey-wimey, universe-bending confusion of a narrative, so that was a point in its favour. Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe aims high by doing just this. Combining time travel and meta-fiction? Extremely tricky stuff. And somewhere inside it is the information that could save him.Time travel: tricky stuff. All he has, wrapped in brown paper, is the book his future self was trying to press into his hands. It's called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Now he's stuck in a time loop, going in circles forever. And that's a beginner's mistake for a time machine repairman. With all that's on his mind, perhaps it's no surprise that when he meets his future self, he shoots him in the stomach.
He's spent the better part of a decade navel-gazing, spying on 39 different versions of himself in alternate universes (and discovered that 35 of them are total jerks). And he's kind of fallen in love with TAMMY, which is bad because she doesn't have a module for that. With only TAMMY - a slightly tearful computer with self-esteem issues - a software boss called Phil - Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0 - and an imaginary dog called Ed for company, fixing time machines is a lonely business and Charles Yu is stuck in a rut.
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