Ron Peters's Reviews > How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

This was the perfect chaser after the hard shots I had just swallowed of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. You can take Yu’s concepts on time, self, and father-son relationships seriously if you like, but I was in no mood to take anything seriously when I read it.

The plot is crazy meta-sci-fi. The protagonist, Charles Yu, is a time machine mechanic who lives in his time machine in Minor Universe 31 (comprised partly of reality and partly of science fictional space) with his nonexistent dog and his mood-disordered computer operating system TAMMY. One day he meets himself coming out of his own time machine, shoots himself, and the other Charles Yu gives himself a book called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, saying it contains all the answers. And so on.

I’m pretty sure I had no idea what was going on by the time the end of the book rolled around, but Yu did an excellent job of shaking me out of the state of the willies I had developed while reading McCarthy. Thank you, Yu.