How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

I didn't really expect to like this book. At the start, everything was very confusing, and I'm not good at time travel stories on the best of days. The first module had my brain twisting around trying to figure out exactly what was going on and when is a dog not a dog. I felt similarly towards other trippy books like “Memoirs Found in a Bathtub,” like there was some subtext that I just wasn't picking up on.

Once we hit the second module however, the story clicked, and then it resonated. I realized that all the talk of chronodiagetics and the narratives and multiple universes was all the dressing over what is, at its heart, a story about stasis and the excuses we make as humans delaying adulthood.

As I started getting to know this narrator, I started identifying with him in all of my absolute worst ways. Here's a guy in his apparent thirties who doesn't visit his mother enough, works a job that guarantees him the least amount of responsibility, can barely take care of a ret-conned dog, and yet spends all day in a box without time, doing absolutely nothing. I'm not as far gone as the narrator, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel rather trapped in a state of pre-adulthood, watching my friends move through the social norm milestones of marriage, children, home-buying, and feeling just... stuck.

What Yu does is take this story, which would fit perfectly on the shelves of any mainstream fiction section, and add time travel, self-awareness, and a sense of humor ranging from morbid to slapstick. In short, he made a story about something I really should be reading into a story I genuinely wanted to read.

There is so much to love here, from TAMMY the anxiety-prone operating system to Buddhist zombie moms in weird alternate dimension. There's also so much meat to this story for its modest page count. Some might consider it a little bit of a pop psychology lesson, but it all resonated as very genuine to me. Here's this kid who watches his father transform from dream to reality, watches him leave and still thinks somehow that its going to be okay if he just finds his dad again, externalizes all of his own problems onto this time-traveling dad, and keeps himself in permanent stasis until being quite literally shot in the stomach. The metaphorical time loop becomes a literal time loop and leads to a character exploration which can make the reader ask some very hard questions.

Yet Yu keeps his wit at the ready and thus saves the novel from being too heavy-handed. At times, I had trouble following the stream of consciousness portions, and I'll freely admit to being lost during any and all talk of chronodiagetics, but to me its watching the writer manipulate time to represent how memory, regret, anxiety and all of those emotions possessed in each human heart manipulate time which make this a great story. It's the idea that we are all time machines moving in time right now, that it's not difficult to get stuck in a time loop while the world rages on outside, while our parents get older, while defining moments slip down the cracks – those things make this a valuable read.

I don't think this book is for everyone. Like I said, there is a lot of lite psychology, a very clear metaphor which some might consider overbearing, and some extremely convoluted sections of “explanation” in a very tongue-in-cheek set of universes. Also, the narrator is kind of a jerk, but the story wouldn't work if he were anything other than a jerk. For me, the underlying theme of self-imposed stasis hit hard enough that none of those things mattered. At the end, it just made me want to get off the couch and try to not shoot myself in the future stomach.