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S'està carregant… How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universede Charles Yu
  
Summer Reads 2014 (38) » 9 més Best Time Travel Novels (127) io9 Book Club (29) To Read (221) KayStJ's to-read list (1,329) Good Buddhist Novels (10) No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra.  ElspethW | Feb 26, 2022 |  Interesting book. I hesitate to rate it as I think I need to loop back around through time and experience it several more times before I can decide if I liked it or not. (  ) smbass | Jan 30, 2022 | Still not convinced that this is a book about time travel, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit (  ) KrakenTamer | Oct 23, 2021 | Unusual, beautifully written and quite moving. ( ) Dreyfusard | Sep 9, 2021 | Trippy, occasionally funny, but I don't quite see the comparisons to Douglas Adams that some reviewers have made. (  ) Enno23 | Aug 15, 2021 |
 The deceptively simple plot can be told in one sentence: a time-travel-machine repairman wants to locate his missing father before his past catches up to him and shoots him dead. Our anxieties and fears are heightened as the protagonist's past gets ever closer. That the protagonist's father devoted his life to creating a time-travel machine allows us to ponder the dilemma of a brilliant person trapped in the role of a family man. VERDICT: Fans of Ursula K. Le Guin and 'social science fiction,' as well as readers of an adventurous nature, will enjoy this book, which has the potential to become a cult classic.  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is intellectually demanding, but also emotionally rich and funny. It's clearly the work of a scifi geek who knows how to twist pop culture tropes into melancholy meditations on the nature of consciousness. There are times when he starts off a paragraph about chronodiegetics that just sounds like pseudo-scientific gibberish meant to fill in some space. And then you realize that what he’s saying actually makes sense, that he’s actually figured out something really fascinating about the way time works, about the way fiction works, and the “Aha!” switch in your brain gets flipped. That happened more than once for me. There are so many sections here and there that I found myself wanting to share with somebody: Here—read this paragraph! Look at this sentence! Ok, now check this out! The eponymous lonely-guy narrator in Yu’s debut novel is a time-machine repairman working in the slightly damaged Minor Universe 31, where people can time-travel for recreational purposes—or, Charles muses, is it re-creational purposes, given our desire to rewrite history? Charles dwells in a small module with TAMMY, a cute but insecure operating system, and Ed the dog, who is good company even though he’s a “weird ontological entity” rather than a flesh-and-blood animal. Woebegone Charles has never gotten over the disappearance of his father, a thwarted time-travel pioneer. With Star Wars allusions, glimpses of a future world, and journeys to the past, as well as hilarious and poignant explanations of “chronodiegetics,” or the “theory of the nature and function of time within a narrative space,” Yu, winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 Award, constructs a clever, fluently metaphorical tale. A funny, brain-teasing, and wise take on archetypal father-and-son issues, the mysteries of time and memory, emotional inertia, and one sweet but bumbling misfit’s attempts to escape a legacy of sadness and isolation. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a triumph, as good as anything in Calvino or Stanislaw Lem. I wish I could travel back in time with a copy and fraudulently publish it under my own name. Like most people, I thought I learned everything I needed to know about time travel from H.G. Wells and Star Trek, but I thought wrong: In Yu's skillful hands a worn-out science fiction plot device becomes a powerfully expressive metaphor for how we experience the flickering, ineffable, ungraspable spatio-temporal phenomenon of life. Because after all, we're all time travelers, blundering forward into the future at the rate of one second per subjectively experienced second. Except when we don't. Think about it: How many times have you yourself been trapped in a time loop, cycling obsessively through one inescapable moment, again and again and again, while the rest of the universe rolled forward and left you behind?
Charles Yu, time travel technician, helps save people from themselves in Minor Universe 31, a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction. When he's not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog named Ed, and using a book titled "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" as his guide, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — S'està carregant…GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)813.6 — Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana: (3.38)
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5
The only things keeping me from giving this book five stars were the repeated instances of casual misogyny and the logical inconsistencies. The misogyny was not enough to outright offend but enough to take me out of the story and remind me that the book was written by a man.
As for the logical issues, I would have been ok with a few because the whole science fiction aspect is clearly metaphorical. This is really a book about a father and son, not a book about time travel. Time travel itself is always tricky and I'm willing to grant authors of these stories a bit of hand wavery, but these weren't problems that can just be solved with suspension of disbelief. There were so many places where the author directly contradicted himself that it became hard to ignore. For example, at the beginning he goes on a long tangent about how he doesn't know exactly how long he's been travelling in his time machine. He says he could calculate it but it would take a lot of complicated math and he's not interested. A few chapters later he just casually mentions exactly how long he's been there, which he knows from a device implanted in his wrist. He also refers to having a one night stand with an alien, but then says they met up a couple of times. Before his parents even immigrated there, the entire US had been collapsed into one giant city, itself merged with Tokyo (such a cool concept), and yet at one point the author mentions wanting a toy as a kid that required sending money off to another state. When other states didn't exist any more. It was even explicitly mentioned that Hawaii and Alaska were included in the concatenation.
The last inconsistency in particular has me thinking that this novel might be the result of two disparate books being merged together. A lot of the reminiscences of childhood come off as very grounded in reality, which is great, but sometimes you can see the seams where the author stitched these personal essays into his sci fi time travel adventure. And not just in these instances, but overall the writing came off as disjointed. It's a shame because the world is fascinating and I would have loved to get immersed in it but couldn't. I love the idea of showing these realistic, down-to-earth family dynamics in a crazy world, but they just weren't integrated that well. It's disappointing because the issues could have been easily resolved without sacrificing any of the heart and I'm left wondering how they were missed by the author and the editor.
I read this book twice in a row so clearly I loved it. I read it again to go back and savour the philosophy, but the issues with consistency were more obvious the second time through. Still, I'm left wanting more from this world. I want to know everything about it. Overall, highly recommend. (