![]() ![]() ![]() He returns to his time machine after it gets some needed maintenance and sees himself climbing out of it. Protagonist Yu gets himself in a real jam. It is broken, never really finished, and cobbled together from New York and Los Angeles scrunched together, with half of Tokyo thrown in for leavening. He works in Minor Universe 31 (not a coincidence that it has the same model number as his machine) – which is a pretty grim stretch of time-space continuum. Though there isn’t any extra space in the thing, he does have two companions – TAMMY, his love interest – an attractive bit of programming, and Ed, his non-existent, ontologically valid dog. For the last ten years he has lived in his own time machine, a TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device. ![]() Yu (the protagonist) works as a time machine repairman. You suspect that the protagonist claims to have written the book that you are reading… and you would be right… sort of. You know, right away, when you find out that the protagonist’s name is Charles Yu, the same as the author. It’s an odd, postmodern bit of strangeness. I was looking for something fun and not too heavy to read so I paged through the books I’d bought (mostly during Amazon sales) for my Kindle and settled the cursor over “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” by Charles Yu – clicking it into my “READING” folder. Charles Yu, “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire.” A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. ![]()
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