How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Sort of funny but definitely not laugh out loud. It actually makes my head ache, trying to keep up with the jumping back and forth between stories and time periods and the science (or science fiction).

This book caught me off guard a little bit. I expected mindless fun, action: a filler. But instead, it was a very human story which happens to be set in a science fictional universe. While the plot does lean heavily into time travel, which is the obsession of the main character's father, the centrepiece is not the time travel itself but the emotional journey of a man raised by a parent who sacrificed everything to his work. Also currently reading GEB and found the self referential nature of several elements of the book interesting. All in all a weird but welcome detour into unhappy man themed sci fi. 

There is something as too many run-on sentences and too much angst. It's a fast read but not much happens.

read the first third, had to stop. found it bland and was not hooked.

I thought I would like this a lot more than I did. It was amusing at times and I loved the concept/premise but I was disappointed in the execution. But I was able to listen to it through my library so that's a plus.

How do I even describe this book? To say it's a bit strange is an understatement and I don't think it will be everyone's cup of tea, however, I found it funny, surprisingly emotional and somewhat thought provoking amid all the sci fi jargon. Not to mention that I have a huge soft spot for time travel stories, so this was definitely up my alley in the first place. It has the same kind of zany feel as Douglas Adams, although I think Douglas Adams is still a few notches up. It was a quite compelling read, fast paced, humorous and though not action packed, it manages to keep you flipping pages to see what's around the corner. Top that off with a poignant and touching look at life and how we live it in relation to our past, present and future and whether we actual engage in it or just ride along with it and the story goes from just a fun sci fi romp into something a little more. I thoroughly enjoyed it and think it's a worthwhile read if you don't mind a story that's a bit strange and you enjoy time travel, sci fi and maybe a small dose of heart.

Don't give up on this book before you get to his dad.

I like Yu's style and his ambition, but if you're actually expecting a story about epic time travel... you'll get quite the opposite.

I thought it was about this one thing but it was actually about this other thing about living in the present and I think I enjoyed that too. Full -disclosure : I didn't understand most of the parts about Grammar and could not tell you if how it was suppose to connect with time travel was good crap or foolish crap .

Trippy, occasionally funny, but I don't quite see the comparisons to Douglas Adams that some reviewers have made.

Oh, I don't know, it was alright. I really wanted to like it more than I did.

Its conceit was interesting, but somehow the implementation just didn't quite work for me. In an effort to strip the genre of a time travel story to its bare bones – in the process making the argument that all time travel stories are about unhappiness, regret, and our own inability to change our own lives – something essential was lost.

The result feels stretched thin, falling somewhere between charming-if-artless and a bit too twee. It was a short read but still felt too long for its content, though I can hardly accuse it of navel-gazing when in a way that was the entire point.

Still. For all that the world and narrative are carefully and painstakingly constructed, the actual plot events fall apart in two very important ways. The first is that the central action the narrative revolves around is out of character and never sufficiently explained in terms of motivation, the second in that the centralized immovable point in the narrative – the one which, it is belabored, cannot and must not be changed – doesn't actually seem to fit together into coherence when all is said and done. There are plot holes that don't seem intentional, and if there's one thing that undermines a perfectly good time travel story, it's failing to tie everything back together so that it's consistent from different perspectives.

I get what he was trying to do here but it ends up feeling like a clumsy attempt, because the time travel story itself is too weak to provide a solid framework. In the end all the telling-instead-of-showing ends up feeling heavy-handed, and well, yes, solipsism and all that, there's not enough meat to the basically shallow relationships between the characters to really carry you for an entire book.

The story is like watching a complicated movie, where you think about it afterward to put the pieces together. especially in the second half, the story seems fragmented and some mental assembly is required. Yet the emotional current that runs through the book is strong and clear. I don't think the writing style is for everyone, but I really liked it.

It's just as much about the loss of a parent as it is about time-travel. Having said that the science fiction elements are very well crafted.

I didn't really expect to like this book. At the start, everything was very confusing, and I'm not good at time travel stories on the best of days. The first module had my brain twisting around trying to figure out exactly what was going on and when is a dog not a dog. I felt similarly towards other trippy books like “Memoirs Found in a Bathtub,” like there was some subtext that I just wasn't picking up on.

Once we hit the second module however, the story clicked, and then it resonated. I realized that all the talk of chronodiagetics and the narratives and multiple universes was all the dressing over what is, at its heart, a story about stasis and the excuses we make as humans delaying adulthood.

As I started getting to know this narrator, I started identifying with him in all of my absolute worst ways. Here's a guy in his apparent thirties who doesn't visit his mother enough, works a job that guarantees him the least amount of responsibility, can barely take care of a ret-conned dog, and yet spends all day in a box without time, doing absolutely nothing. I'm not as far gone as the narrator, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel rather trapped in a state of pre-adulthood, watching my friends move through the social norm milestones of marriage, children, home-buying, and feeling just... stuck.

What Yu does is take this story, which would fit perfectly on the shelves of any mainstream fiction section, and add time travel, self-awareness, and a sense of humor ranging from morbid to slapstick. In short, he made a story about something I really should be reading into a story I genuinely wanted to read.

There is so much to love here, from TAMMY the anxiety-prone operating system to Buddhist zombie moms in weird alternate dimension. There's also so much meat to this story for its modest page count. Some might consider it a little bit of a pop psychology lesson, but it all resonated as very genuine to me. Here's this kid who watches his father transform from dream to reality, watches him leave and still thinks somehow that its going to be okay if he just finds his dad again, externalizes all of his own problems onto this time-traveling dad, and keeps himself in permanent stasis until being quite literally shot in the stomach. The metaphorical time loop becomes a literal time loop and leads to a character exploration which can make the reader ask some very hard questions.

Yet Yu keeps his wit at the ready and thus saves the novel from being too heavy-handed. At times, I had trouble following the stream of consciousness portions, and I'll freely admit to being lost during any and all talk of chronodiagetics, but to me its watching the writer manipulate time to represent how memory, regret, anxiety and all of those emotions possessed in each human heart manipulate time which make this a great story. It's the idea that we are all time machines moving in time right now, that it's not difficult to get stuck in a time loop while the world rages on outside, while our parents get older, while defining moments slip down the cracks – those things make this a valuable read.

I don't think this book is for everyone. Like I said, there is a lot of lite psychology, a very clear metaphor which some might consider overbearing, and some extremely convoluted sections of “explanation” in a very tongue-in-cheek set of universes. Also, the narrator is kind of a jerk, but the story wouldn't work if he were anything other than a jerk. For me, the underlying theme of self-imposed stasis hit hard enough that none of those things mattered. At the end, it just made me want to get off the couch and try to not shoot myself in the future stomach.

It pretends to be science fiction, perhaps, but is a surreal exploration of intentionality and getting old. I found it worth the read.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did. Neat premise, great writing, but dear Lord this book is so meta it's almost like there's nothing even there. There were a lot of intriguing plot devices that were just begging to be developed, but never were. In the end, the book was a moderately interesting character study about a boy's troubled relationship with his absent father. But in the end, I still really can't tell you much about time travel, and even less about what exactly happened at the end of the book.

I applaud Charles Yu in his ambition but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Good concept, bad the execution falls flat.

A mind-bending story. Totally intrigued by the concept but there's quite a leap of imagination needed to make sense of the story.

A very fascinating, funny, original novel that was absolutely nothing like what I expected.

In the tradition of Stanislaw Lem and Italo Calvino to my mind. These are two of my favorites. And while I enjoyed Yu's clever insights and playful way with concepts, I still don't think this book quite achieved their level.

It was ok. Not a great book but not the worst thing I've read.

I have to say this book was a quick read for me. That being said I gave it three stars, because it was an average Sci-fi novel. I enjoyed the content, but thought it was missing something. I am not sure what that is, but in the end it felt unfinished and incomplete. Although I hate to admit this, I was a little confused at the end and had to re-read it a couple of times to make sure it was truly the ending. I do recommend this book, but with the understanding that it is not the best that I have read. I do look forward to more from Yu.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe would work for you, I say tentatively, whether you like science fiction or not. It was about time travel. Sort of. And father-son relationships. Well, relationships in general, maybe. Anyway, I liked it, even if I didn't understand one word about the time travel parts. It did not really matter. My favorite science fiction book in a long, long time (although, I feel compelled to add, also my only science fiction book in a long, long time).