How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe

Description

From a 5 Under 35 winner, 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.

Reviews

"Glittering layers of gorgeous and playful meta-science-fiction. . . . Like [Douglas] 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. . . . Yu is a superhero of rendering human consciousness and emotion in the language of engineering and science. . . . A complex, brainy, genre-hopping joyride of a story, far more than the sum of its component parts, and smart and tragic enough to engage all regions of the brain and body."--"The New York Times Book Review" "Compulsively rereadable. . . . Hilarious. . . . Yu has a crisp, intermittently lyrical prose style, one that's comfortable with both math and sadness, moving seamlessly from delirious metafiction to the straight-faced prose of instruction-manual entries. . . . [The book itself] is like Steve Jobs' ultimate hardware fetish, a dreamlike amalgam of functionality and predetermination."--"Los Angeles Times ""Douglas Adams and Philip K. Dick are touchstones, but Yu's sense of humor and narrative splashes of color-especially when dealing with a pretty solitary life and the bittersweet search for his father, a time travel pioneer who disappeared-set him apart within the narrative spaces of his own horizontal design. . . . A clever little story that will be looped in your head for days. No doubt it will be made into a movie, but let's hope that doesn't take away the heart.""--Austin Chronicle ""If "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" contented itself with exploring that classic chestnut of speculative fiction, the time paradox, it would likely make for an enjoyable sci-fi yarn. But Yu's novel is a good deal more ambitious, and ultimately more satisfying, than that. It's about time travel and cosmology, yes, but it's also about language and narrative -- the more we learn about Minor Universe 31, the more it resembles the story space of the novelr

Author description

Charles Yu received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award for his story collection "Third Class Superhero, " and he has also received the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. His work has been published in the "Harvard Review, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, "and" Mid-American Review, " among other journals. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Michelle, and their two children.