![]() Charles doesn’t always time travel back to these events, but his reminiscences both entwine with and mirror his non-linear lifestyle.Īfter Charles enters the time loop the story starts to resemble a computer game. There are vignettes, snippets or wisps of memories, and snatches of conversation like half-remembered dreams. In keeping with that the narrative doesn’t have a linear structure. He travels to the past and the future for work, and when he’s not travelling he occupies a time space called the Present-Indefinite (an ‘in between tenses’ tense). Most of the writing is dedicated to showcasing that myriad permutations of reality are out there.Ĭharles rarely lives in the present tense. Yu’s novel jumps between the past and present, the fictional timelines and the ‘real’. Although, I had learned that time travel is a complicated business (nothing new there). Not unlike Super Sad True Love Story’s Lenny, Charles Yu is unattractive, a bit whiny, and not averse to feeling sorry for himself.Īfter I’d read a decent chunk, I realised nothing had actually happened. ![]() Straight away How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe reminded me of Super Sad True Love Story, not plot-wise, more the tone of narration. When Charles gets trapped in a time loop he’s forced to confront the sad state his life is in, prompting him to finally look for his father, and hopefully, in doing so, escape the time loop. Charles never wants to repeat his father’s mistake. He saw him struggle to work on something fantastic that was doomed to fail. As a child Charles had worked closely with his father. Then his father disappeared, lost somewhere in time. He travels through time in his TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device fixing the time machines of people stranded in the wrong time – an unglamorous, dead-end kind of job.Ĭharles’ father is an engineer who, years ago, attempted to invent time machines but failed. Charles Yu (the protagonist of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, not the author) is a time machine technician.
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