Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Listened to the audiobook of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu. I feel it’s ‘science-fictioness’ is vastly overstated. It’s not really scifi. The elements which are from that domain are interesting and fun, but they are few and far between. It’s really the story of a son, an unsuccessful time travel technician, looking for his father, a brilliant, hardworking, but ultimately unsuccessful entrepreneur.
More precisely, it’s the thoughts of that son on his journey. The book navigates philosophy, a little science, and a lot of emotion, as Charles tells us his story. It’s kind of interesting, but, to use the tired onion metaphor, I couldn’t get through the outer layers. I bought in sufficiently to finish the book, (made easier by the fact someone else was reading it to me), but didn’t really care for any of the characters. (Though the parts about entrepreneurship resonated quite well.)
This is Yu’s first book though. I’ll give his future works a shot.
-Shlok
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