How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

Right now, I don’t know how to feel about this book.

I guess I just need some time.

Shit, that was supposed to be a hilarious joke, but I guess I didn’t mention that this was a time travel book just yet.

Here’s the thing: I have no patience for time travel books anymore. It seems like every time travel narrative goes one of two ways:

Oh banana oil, we’ve traveled back in time and every attempt we make to alter the future only results in us doing EXACTLY what was done before.

-or-

Oh horsefeathers, we’ve traveled back in time and now must not alter anything because it will create an alternate future somehow, although that really makes no fucking sense because it assumes there is an initial point of time travel from which time basically goes wonky, and that point is somehow in the past and also…not.

And really, that’s about it.

In this book, there is somewhat of an alteration because the main character accidentally shoots himself in the stomach, trapping himself in a time loop. Because now the version of him that did the shooting will continue on, only to end up being shot in the stomach.

And see, this all happens 100 or so pages in. Up to this point, I was loving the book. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

On Missing

I don’t miss him anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. I wish I could but unfortunately, it’s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

On Time Travel Sales

A typical customer gets into a machine that can literally take her whenever she’d like to go. Do you want to know what the first stop usually is? Take a guess. Don’t guess. You already know: the unhappiest day of her life.

Self-Help Books

..books with bright red titles, titles dripping with superlatives, with promises of actualization, realization, books that diagrammed the self as a fixable lemon, self as a challenge in mechanics, self as an exercise in bullet points, self as a collection of traits to be altered, self as a DIY project. Self as a kind of problem to be solved.

Here’s the thing: Up until the point where we get really time-travel-y, the book is great sci-fi because it uses a science-fictional platform to explore very real emotions. Great sci-fi can do that. By stripping away the familiar and leaving the reader without any compass other than the emotional one, a good book can get to the core of a lot of really great stuff.

But then we usually get a paragraph about a laser rifle and I want to pull out my eyeball and fashion it into some kind of a spike that I can drive through my other eye and end my own life.

Because there is a guidebook element to this book, I would like to give everyone a brief bit of advice concerning time travel, just in case.

1. 1. If you find yourself way back in time, I’m talking horse days, immediately change the settings on your iPod in order to maximize battery life. You’re now living a life where you’ll only be able to listen to Queen’s Greatest Hits so many times.

2. 2. If you find yourself back in time, you will likely beat yourself up for not paying attention to history. Do not let this false emotion overtake your better senses. Remember, history is bullshit.

3. 3. If you end up in a certain time period, you may feel obligated to make an attempt on Hitler’s life. But killing him, doesn’t that make you just as bad? The answer is obviously No, so see if you can get a pistol and sneak up on him during the time when he’s trying to be an artist.

4. 4. If you end up even a mere thirty years back in time, it’s going to be hard to pretend to feel excitement over technological advances. But try and act surprised. Otherwise, everyone will think you’re an asshole.