Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
    How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
    How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
    Audiobook6 hours

    How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

    Written by Charles Yu

    Narrated by James Yaegashi

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In this fiercely original novel, Charles is a time-traveling repairman working in the off-kilter Minor Universe 31. He helps clients return to their biggest mistakes, which they incorrectly believe they can repair. But they can't-and that's bad news for Charles, who once accidentally ran into and shot his future self. ". a triumph, as good as anything in Calvino or Stanislaw Lem. I wish I could travel back in time with a copy and fraudulently publish it under my own name."-Lev Grossman, New York Times best-selling author
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 4, 2011
    ISBN9781449867287
    How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
    Author

    Charles Yu

    CHARLES YU is the author of four books, including How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (a New York Times Notable Book and a Time magazine Best Book of the Year). He received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award and was nominated for two WGA Awards for his work on the HBO series Westworld. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Time, The Atlantic, and Wired, among other publications. His latest novel is Interior Chinatown.

    Related to How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

    3.5/5

    725 ratings80 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      This one's just not for me. Imagine two dials. One is Thinky. The other is Plotty. Thinky was turned up to eleven and Plotty was dialed down to the square root of -1. That's this book for me. It wasn't bad; I just prefer Thinky and Plotty to be closely matched. Your mileage may vary. I'll give another Charles Yu book a try someday.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Very original! Great humor and fun to read to everyone.
    • 4/5
      Touching at times relationship between a father and son. The meta-fiction aspects of the book sort of get in the way for me.
    • 1/5
      How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is only £1 on the Kindle Store, so I thought I'd go for it. Reviews told me to expect a Marmite (love it or hate it) situation here. I don't know: I just felt really ambivalent. I haven't read it all, admittedly -- I got 30% of the way through and was just rather bored, so.

      There are some fun observations, wry character details, and some really good lines that are, on their own, meaningful. But there wasn't much to grab hold of and hook someone, if the opening where he shoots his future self doesn't hook you -- and considering that what follows that immediately is rather mundane...

      So, yes. Gave up on it. Now I'll have to find something else to read in the laundrette. Boo.
    • 4/5
      Pretty good if you're a science fiction nerd! A bit over wordy in places, and my scientist brain tried to make sense of the made up science. Which was the point I suppose but it made it a book I could only listen to if my brain was fully in gear!
    • 3/5
      A rather unusual concept and the execution. I suspect the author was breaking the forth wall but plenty of things were confusing so don’t quote me on it. Overall I had fun but it’s a rather forgettable book. The narrator has done an excellent job btw.
    • 1/5
      This book was extremely frustrating for me. I finished it out of spite. It is the most pretentious, navel gazing tome I've ever dealt with. The recurring theme is a vortex of "I know that you know that I know that I know that you know...." I've never felt so much pressure to receive a message and to be impressed by the author. Belabored message received, and received and no, I'm not impressed. Also I didn't like this book lol.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      Every now and then, as I brought myself back to this book, having read at least 5 others and maybe as many as 10 since I started it, I got over my profound disinterest with its loser protagonist to notice how clever it is. It's also very philosophical, but yawn, not the least bit compelling for me.
    • 4/5
      I usually hate time travel stories. The time travel is usually a silly gimmick, and it especially annoys me when no effort is made to address the problem of paradox.This is not one of those stories. Although it starts out in a sort of humorous, Douglas Adams–like mode, it eventually turns out to be something sadder and more touching. Time travel, as it turns out, can be metaphorical in a science fictional universe.
    • 1/5
      Yawn, Another first-person Palahniuk-ripoff narration.

      Why is it that every time I read a debut novel by a male author under 40, it uses the same gdamn I'm-self-deprecating-but-haha-not-really-I'm-actually-pretty-competent voice I've read in a hundred (okay, maybe fifty) other novels?

      Either master the use of third-person (I know, it's hard, but keep at it), or spend the time to develop a narrator that sounds like an actual human being. Enough of this "you've got access to my inner thoughts, but only as described by an uninterested third party" nonsense.

      As for the story itself, well, okay: it's a lament over parental abandonment, told through the metaphor of time travel. Drifting through time is the same as being mentally preoccupied, get it? Travelling back in time to witness or even change the past is the same as being stuck in the past, get it? Get it?!?!?

      It's a shame, this could have been very good. If the main idea was thought through and told properly.
    • 4/5
      This is a fascinating book with a lot of little philosophical tidbits to chew on. I'll be thinking about this one for a while. It's autobiographical but transferred to a sci fi setting. There are a lot of poignant moments with the main character's Taiwanese immigrant parents, which I'm assuming are drawn from the author's life (The MC has the author's name, so not a stretch). These largely dwell on his father's struggle to make something of himself in a country that doesn't value the ambitions of poor immigrants. In the book, the father's ambition during the MC's childhood is to invent a time machine and thereby earn respect and prestige as an engineer. As an adult, the MC works as a time machine repairman, spending all his time in a nebulous region of time not connected to the real world's present, wondering where his missing father is. This leads to a lot of meditations on the nature of time and how to deal with the problem of living a finite life.

      The only things keeping me from giving this book five stars were the repeated instances of casual misogyny and the logical inconsistencies. The misogyny was not enough to outright offend but enough to take me out of the story and remind me that the book was written by a man.

      As for the logical issues, I would have been ok with a few because the whole science fiction aspect is clearly metaphorical. This is really a book about a father and son, not a book about time travel. Time travel itself is always tricky and I'm willing to grant authors of these stories a bit of hand wavery, but these weren't problems that can just be solved with suspension of disbelief. There were so many places where the author directly contradicted himself that it became hard to ignore. For example, at the beginning he goes on a long tangent about how he doesn't know exactly how long he's been travelling in his time machine. He says he could calculate it but it would take a lot of complicated math and he's not interested. A few chapters later he just casually mentions exactly how long he's been there, which he knows from a device implanted in his wrist. He also refers to having a one night stand with an alien, but then says they met up a couple of times. Before his parents even immigrated there, the entire US had been collapsed into one giant city, itself merged with Tokyo (such a cool concept), and yet at one point the author mentions wanting a toy as a kid that required sending money off to another state. When other states didn't exist any more. It was even explicitly mentioned that Hawaii and Alaska were included in the concatenation.

      The last inconsistency in particular has me thinking that this novel might be the result of two disparate books being merged together. A lot of the reminiscences of childhood come off as very grounded in reality, which is great, but sometimes you can see the seams where the author stitched these personal essays into his sci fi time travel adventure. And not just in these instances, but overall the writing came off as disjointed. It's a shame because the world is fascinating and I would have loved to get immersed in it but couldn't. I love the idea of showing these realistic, down-to-earth family dynamics in a crazy world, but they just weren't integrated that well. It's disappointing because the issues could have been easily resolved without sacrificing any of the heart and I'm left wondering how they were missed by the author and the editor.

      I read this book twice in a row so clearly I loved it. I read it again to go back and savour the philosophy, but the issues with consistency were more obvious the second time through. Still, I'm left wanting more from this world. I want to know everything about it. Overall, highly recommend.
    • 2/5
      Interesting book. I hesitate to rate it as I think I need to loop back around through time and experience it several more times before I can decide if I liked it or not.
    • 5/5
      In a word, brilliant! I know I wasn't intelligent enough to "get" it all but I got enough to love it.
    • 1/5
      I ended up very annoyed and disappointed with this book. I feel that the author tried to sell me a plotless, introspective, melancholy literary "story" by wrapping it up in a misleading science fiction package. There were some very cool SF notions here, but most of them were thrown away without being developed or utilized as story elements. Likewise, there were moments of wry humor and a few things that were cute, but nothing that struck me as "hilarious" as several blurbs described.

      Yu is a talented writer and obviously a deep thinker, but I felt he promised one book and wrote quite another. If you go into it with a more accurate idea of what to expect, you may enjoy the book more than I did.
    • 4/5
      Wow. I have to admit that more than one read will probably be necessary for me to fully grasp the thrust of this story. Charles Yu has written what is, for me, a unique narrative. A time travel story using a hard-science approach, but utilizing the lingo of literature and literary critique in place of the lingo of science. I'm not even sure if that makes any sense, without an example:

      It’s not supposed to be used as the primary driver of chronogrammatical transport. It isn’t designed for that kind of use: the Present-Indef
      inite isn’t even a real gear. It’s like cruise control. It’s a gadget, a gimmick, a temporary crutch, a holding place. It is hated by purists and engineers, equally. It’s bad for aesthetics, bad for design, bad for fuel efficiency. It’s bad for the machine. To run in P-I is to burn needless fuel in order to avoid straightforward travel. It’s what allows me to live achronologically, to suppress memory, to ignore the future, to see everything as present. I’ve been a bad pilot, a bad passenger, a bad employee. A bad son.

      A book about regret, about living in the past. About failure and success and where/whether they are the same thing. A study of human nature, masquerading as a time travel story.

      I really loved it. It challenged me to keep up and follow along. Nice.
    • 4/5
      First off, this book has a lot of physics terms (at least I think they are physics terms; he could be making it all up for all I know of physics). But that does not matter. Just like watching Star Trek or Star Wars, or any other science fiction show or movie, you do not really have to understand what they are talking about. You can get the general gist of what it means in normal terms. I do not understand how the Star Trek: The Next Generation Enterprise Core worked, but I have general ideas when the plot centers around the engine core blowing up.This book centers on a thirty-year-old time machine tech, Charles Yu who spends most of his time in his time capsule named Tammy (who has a self-esteem problem and cries often). His job is to go back in time to help other time travelers who have damaged their machines and fix them so they can get back to the present. He finds it sad that when you can go to any point in your timeline and visit (you must NEVER meet yourself or bad things will happen) they choose the worst moment of their life and relive it over and over again, hoping for a different outcome which never happens, because no matter how hard you try, you can not change the past. The universe will not allow it.Charles got into the time machine business as a young child. His father came up with a theory on how to make time travel possible and the two spend ten years working on building a time machine. When things do not work out as planned, Charles's father hops into his new time machine and disappears, leaving him and his mother alone. He is forced to drop out of school and get work as a tech and his mother ends up renting a machine that replays one hour on a loop for however many years you pay for. She plays out a dinner with Charles and her husband as holograms. Charles, in person, rarely visits her, which he feels guilty about. Charles has shut himself off from the world by essentially living in his time machine with a science fiction dog and Tammy for company. Every few years or so he goes back home for maintenance of his vehicle, and while years have passed in his life a day or maybe a week has only passed at home.After returning for maintenance he shows up to pick up his machine and he sees another him step out of a machine and instead of running away, which is what he is supposed to do, he shoots his future shelf and climbs into the time machine and is now in a time loop. Inside the machine is a book that is partly filled out and shows him how to find his father, who can possibly save him. But time is running out and as he tries to accept his impending death, he cannot quite give up so easily, even though you cannot change time he will do his best to attempt it.This book delves into the life of a lonely man who longs to know why his father deserted him and his mother and shows how he refuses to face life and instead hides away from it in his machine. He makes up a life he could have lived and convinced himself that he does not need others, but over time, he begins to regret that he did not try to meet the girl of his dreams or make those close friends or be nicer to Tammy and his manager, a computer program that does not know it is only a program and acts like it is human and has a family, with a wife who is a spreadsheet program. She knows they are not real, but she goes along with it to keep him happy in his delusion. Truly this is a story of a boy and his father and their attempts to connect until it all falls apart and he loses his father, this incredibly innovative, creative, and emotional book will keep you turning the pages until the end dying to find out if you can cheat fate.Quotes…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.--Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe p 54) If I could be half the person my dog is, I would be twice the human I am.--Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe p 65)
    • 1/5
      For the first couple of chapters, I thought this was going to be a really fun book. I thought that maybe another author was finally going to do something as clever and funny with time travel as Jasper Fforde in the Thursday Next series.Then, I started to get annoyed by the long sentences. I normally love long sentences - give me a gramatically-correct, two-page sentence, and I'll read it repeatedly just to savor it. But with Yu's long sentences, it's like he couldn't decide which word or phrase to use so he just listed them all.Then I started to wonder if we were actually going to be explanations for all of the time travel concepts he was throwing around. There are lots of invented words to describe how time travel works, and they all sound really cool. Somehow, the time travel engine uses grammar to travel through time. That's an awesome concept, but was never explained at all (and then, when the invention of time travel is described, it is invented by a scientist, not a linguist, and grammar plays no role whatsoever).Then, the big plot-driving event happens (an accidental interaction with his future self), and all of a sudden the main character is going on and on about how he is stuck in a time loop. But this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It is never explained why he is in a loop. There is absolutely no reason for him to be in a time loop. The whole story seems to revolve around this time loop, but every time he said "time loop" I wanted to scream "what time loop?!"Then there is the narrator's relationship with his father.... The father has apparently run away somewhere to hide, and the narrator wants to find him. In fact, this appears to be the narrator's main motivation throughout the book. But there is so much that isn't explained here. The narrator's relationship with his father is terrible, so why does he have all this nostalgia for his dad? Why does he want to find him? What does he think will happen when he finds him? And what about his poor mother, who suffered from depression and a neglectful husband her whole life? It just makes no sense that this quest for his father would be the narrator's driving motivation.There is a lot of talk about being in a science fictional universe. But the thing is.... being in a science fictional universe only makes sense in relation to non-fiction. In other words, if you know you are in a science-fictional universe, then you must also be aware that there is a non-fictional universe, right? No mention is ever made of how this science-fictional universe relates to reality, or what medium it exists in, or anything. This could have been really fun and fascinating, but it just falls flat: you could take out all of the references to this being a science fictional universe, and it wouldn't make any difference to the story. Not that there is much of a story....I got to the point where about once a paragraph I just had to stop and sputter. The story makes no sense. The author crams in a lot of scientific and mathematical terms to make himself sound smart, but he never actually says anything. And then there were scenes that were so redundant that I thought maybe I had turned to the wrong page of the book and was re-reading something I had read before. I don't know why I bothered to finish it, and I really wish I hadn't.
    • 4/5
      Charles Yu is a time travel repairman who uses his time machine to hide from life in this extended metaphor about loss, regret, and connecting. Funny, sad, and very clever.
    • 3/5
      Clever but not engaging.
    • 4/5
      Touching at times relationship between a father and son. The meta-fiction aspects of the book sort of get in the way for me.
    • 4/5
      This book's central conceit is that time travel exists and the main character, who shares the author's name, repairs time machines for a living. His father invented time travel, though that's a story in itself, and the author, uh, I mean the protagonist is searching for his father who disappeared years ago.There isn't much story here. The main action takes place in flashbacks/memories and the protagonist's narration of his past. In a way, the book, and the time travel conceit, is a metaphor for life and how people get stuck in their life while searching for something that may or may not really matter. I really don't want to say too much. The book needs to be experienced, not explained. It likely will mean different things to different people. I put it on my To Read list back when it was published, in 2010, because it sounded intriguing. But I never spotted it at Barnes & Noble, and since my To Read list is very, very long, I never sought it out. But I spotted it on a table in The Strand bookstore a couple of months ago and the title tickled my memory, so I bought and now have read it. I'm glad I did. It was different, and I enjoy different. If you like different, you might like it, too.
    • 3/5
      Although full of cunning one-liners and moments of hilarity, I found this book to be ultimately unfulfilling. I think the problem is that the convoluted plot is the focus, and the author tries to follow too many sub-plots and thereby gives short shrift to all of them - at the cost of character development. What is learned about the protagonist makes him seem like a pathetic schlub and is downright depressing. Although he is trying to accomplish a goal and change his life, you are left with the feeling that he will go right back to his pitiful existence as soon as the story ends.
    • 5/5
      This book is like: Douglas Adams meets Richard Feynman. Smart, imaginative, engrossing, super fun read. If you like "Six Easy Pieces" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," this book is your dream come true. LOVE LOVE LOVE this book.
    • 2/5
      How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. The title caught my eye, and I had imagined this witty account of living safely in a science fictional universe. You know...avoiding time paradoxes, how to travel faster than light speed, and what not.

      Unfortunately, this was not what was presented to me. And thusly I think that might be part of the reason I didn't find the story all that engaging. The story was a little jarring, jumping from one type of exposition to the next, and I was unclear on where the plot was headed. By the end of the book, I really did feel like I was in a time loop...reading the same thing over and over again.

      If you like experimental writing and narration, then try this book out. But if you were like me expecting something different, maybe give the next book a try.
    • 5/5
      Wow! I loved this book! As you might know if you follow my blogs, I am very interested in “mathematics in sci-fi.” This book has it to the nth degree. Some of it in the form of inside jokes that made me laugh out loud. Some of it in a “techno-poetic” style that I strive to achieve in my own writing. Yu’s description of writing on a sheet of graph paper was absolutely fantastic, a journey into Minkowski space and the realm of “science fictional equations.” The main character’s use of “mini-wormholes” to spy on his other selves could be a new sci-fi series in itself. If you don’t see the phrase “easy to use partial differential equations” as an oxymoron, but as a monster more frightening than Alien or Predator, then you won’t like this book. But if “Zermelo-Frankel set theory plus the Continuum Hypothesis” sounds cool, go for it.As the New York Times review of several years ago points out, this is a “meta-science fiction” novel. So, in addition to the mathematics, it is filled with musings on writing and creativity. The self-referential recursion of a book within a book within a book makes the paradoxes of time travel even more interesting. Grammar, especially past, present, and future tense is linked to the time machine in various ways.But the mathematics and the grammar are simply the backdrop of what turns into a very emotional and fascinating quest of the main character to find his father. I can’t recall another sci-fi book with such a deep and well done theme. Absolutely wonderful!
    • 5/5
      A book I wish I had written.
    • 5/5
      I went looking for this book because it was recommended by IO9.com as one of the best science fiction books of 2010. I was not disappointed. A boy and his dog (not a real dog but one who thinks its real) set out to find the boy's father. His father, the real inventor of time travel, is lost somewhere in time. The boy, is a time machine mechanic. People are always getting their time machines stuck somewhere in the past when they try to change something that already happened. He's never out of work. His best piece of advice is that if you ever see yourself step out of a time machine, run away. Nothing good can come of it. When this happens to him, he doesn't run, in fact shoots his future self, and gets caught in a time loop. The best part of the book, to me, is Yu's word play. The book is full of paragraphs that keep playing in my head like some sort of time loop in my brain.
    • 4/5

      Think of a refrigerator box, a normal kitchen clock, and a dad and a son, mix in time travel, and you have a bit of what the book "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is all about.


      A boy learns that if you bend life too much than "you might end up over there."pg 45. The book is an answer to what it means to group in a Science Fictional Universe.


      Charles Yu, the author, seems to confirm my suspicion that good Science Fiction is a conversation with the great science fiction writers of the past. Good science fiction is a continuation of the dialog begun by Herbert, Asimov, Bradbury, and Vance; as well as a dialog with scientists who hope to bring new ideas to light (e.g. David Deutsche and his book: Fabric of Reality). He seems to be telling the reader, read this book, then write it again in your own POV.


      The message that I gained was find those moments where you are the actual man you are and live in this light with much rejoicing. live in the science fiction possibility world.


      If my description of the book seems a tad abstract, then your right this book is a tad abstract. But well worth the Read. There is just way too much here to tell you all of it, but you should check this book out. Then write me back and let me know what you think of it.








      BTW:
      Read with Man or Astro Man for Full Pleasure Experience
    • 2/5
      Well now that I've finished it...

      Basically nothing happens until page 89 of 233. That's a long time to wait, especially while reading logorrhea from a guy who states explicitly that he's avoiding living--just hanging out with some software (and a dog that's not real) in a little box/womb. (For a minute, I thought it would turn out to be a Doctor Who parallel, but no.) Why should I care about this guy and his blathering?

      And once the "action" does start, he discovers he's in a time loop, so we get the same thing over and over again until he figures out how to break "free." Trust me, it's even less interesting than the dry description I've given here.

      Once free, he goes to revisit scenes from his childhood, in an effort to figure out where his father might have gone. Some of these are very well done (thus the 2-star rating). Too bad they came too late for me to care.

      This probably would have been a kick-ass short story. Cut out all the blah, blah, blah and I think it really could have been striking. But unless you're into a VERY poor (and apathetic) man's Ulysses, give this one a pass.