How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Oh, I don't know, it was alright. I really wanted to like it more than I did.

Its conceit was interesting, but somehow the implementation just didn't quite work for me. In an effort to strip the genre of a time travel story to its bare bones – in the process making the argument that all time travel stories are about unhappiness, regret, and our own inability to change our own lives – something essential was lost.

The result feels stretched thin, falling somewhere between charming-if-artless and a bit too twee. It was a short read but still felt too long for its content, though I can hardly accuse it of navel-gazing when in a way that was the entire point.

Still. For all that the world and narrative are carefully and painstakingly constructed, the actual plot events fall apart in two very important ways. The first is that the central action the narrative revolves around is out of character and never sufficiently explained in terms of motivation, the second in that the centralized immovable point in the narrative – the one which, it is belabored, cannot and must not be changed – doesn't actually seem to fit together into coherence when all is said and done. There are plot holes that don't seem intentional, and if there's one thing that undermines a perfectly good time travel story, it's failing to tie everything back together so that it's consistent from different perspectives.

I get what he was trying to do here but it ends up feeling like a clumsy attempt, because the time travel story itself is too weak to provide a solid framework. In the end all the telling-instead-of-showing ends up feeling heavy-handed, and well, yes, solipsism and all that, there's not enough meat to the basically shallow relationships between the characters to really carry you for an entire book.