How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

I loved this book because it has mathematics to the nth degree! Some of it in the form of inside jokes like “easy to use partial differential equations” that made me laugh out loud. Some of it, such as “equations that had sadness as a constant,” are in a “techno-poetic” style that I strive to achieve in my own writing. But this “meta-science fiction” novel is also 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. The “reality portions” in which… show more.

I am not actually a huge sci-fi fan overall. I actually just love books about memory, identity, and facing up to your true self. This one is a perfect fit for this. It’s about a character called Charles Yu (yes, the same as the author!) who travels through time to find his father, the inventor of time travel no less. His job is to stop people trying to change the past, which never ends well. His own mother is stuck in a self-imposed time loop and he is in love with an operating system. In this bizarre and often humorous… show more.