Redheaded Reviews: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

First off, this book has a lot of physics terms (at least I think they are physics terms; he could be making it all up for all I know of physics). But that does not matter. Just like watching Star Trek or Star Wars, or any other science fiction show or movie, you do not really have to understand what they are talking about. You can get the general gist of what it means in normal terms. I do not understand how the Star Trek: The Next Generation Enterprise Core worked, but I have general ideas when the plot centers around the engine core blowing up.

This book centers on a thirty-year-old time machine tech, Charles Yu who spends most of his time in his time capsule named Tammy (who has a self-esteem problem and cries often). His job is to go back in time to help other time travelers who have damaged their machines and fix them so they can get back to the present. He finds it sad that when you can go to any point in your timeline and visit (you must NEVER meet yourself or bad things will happen) they choose the worst moment of their life and relive it over and over again, hoping for a different outcome which never happens, because no matter how hard you try, you can not change the past. The universe will not allow it.

Charles got into the time machine business as a young child. His father came up with a theory on how to make time travel possible and the two spend ten years working on building a time machine. When things do not work out as planned, Charles's father hops into his new time machine and disappears, leaving him and his mother alone. He is forced to drop out of school and get work as a tech and his mother ends up renting a machine that replays one hour on a loop for however many years you pay for. She plays out a dinner with Charles and her husband as holograms. Charles, in person, rarely visits her, which he feels guilty about. Charles has shut himself off from the world by essentially living in his time machine with a science fiction dog and Tammy for company. Every few years or so he goes back home for maintenance of his vehicle, and while years have passed in his life a day or maybe a week has only passed at home.

After returning for maintenance he shows up to pick up his machine and he sees another him step out of a machine and instead of running away, which is what he is supposed to do, he shoots his future shelf and climbs into the time machine and is now in a time loop. Inside the machine is a book that is partly filled out and shows him how to find his father, who can possibly save him. But time is running out and as he tries to accept his impending death, he cannot quite give up so easily, even though you cannot change time he will do his best to attempt it.

This book delves into the life of a lonely man who longs to know why his father deserted him and his mother and shows how he refuses to face life and instead hides away from it in his machine. He makes up a life he could have lived and convinced himself that he does not need others, but over time, he begins to regret that he did not try to meet the girl of his dreams or make those close friends or be nicer to Tammy and his manager, a computer program that does not know it is only a program and acts like it is human and has a family, with a wife who is a spreadsheet program. She knows they are not real, but she goes along with it to keep him happy in his delusion. Truly this is a story of a boy and his father and their attempts to connect until it all falls apart and he loses his father, this incredibly innovative, creative, and emotional book will keep you turning the pages until the end dying to find out if you can cheat fate.

Quotes

…but unfortunately, it’s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.
--Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe p 54)

If I could be half the person my dog is, I would be twice the human I am.

--Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe p 65)