From the National Book Award–winning author of Interior Chinatown, 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 … 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.
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Like all of Yu’s work, the scope of this osillates between the meta and the deeply personal. There is so much love for the classic SFF tropes in this one, thrown together with affection and humor.
Yeah this was a massive disappointment to me. It felt like the book never really went anywhere at all, and just drifted along not really having any goals or points it wants to make at all.
Most of this book is almost an autobiography the character is writing as you read it. Describing his journey and what is occurring in the world while he …
I wanted to like this book. If there was humor it was lost on me. Just kind of a sad confusing ramble about loss and depression.
Traveling through time to solve your family mysteries may sound trite and foolish BUT. This book resonates and resonates.
hmmm
An avant-garde story, I guess. There are few interesting thoughts, the rest you can simply scan down the page — no real content.
A hard to describe book but very thought provoking.
It is a great premise that is fires the imagination.
I rarely find a book that I simply can’t finish; this was one of them. I felt so horribly bored by it all. There seemed to be endless descriptions and incidents that felt uncoordinated, incomprehensible, and worst of all, pointless. Let me freely admit here a personal prejudice against texts that seem pointless in some way and then tie themselves …