I'm always a little skeptical when a literary prodigy does genre fiction. Science fiction is bad enough enough, without the literary ball of neuroses that is the Iowa Writer's Workshop sliding in. So let me say that How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe is slick and brilliant, and so gloriously clever that my concerns are washed out in a trillion degree flash of light.

Charles Yu is a time machine repairman is a science-fictional universe. Glamorously described, his job involves shutting breaches in the spacetime continuum and rescuing time travelers from reliving the worst day of their lives over and over again. In practice, it has all the glamour of being a technician for Verizon. Yu lives in a box that drifts in a kind of temporal neutral outside of the normal flow of life, with an ontologically valid but nonexistent dog, his time machine's AI TAMMY, and occasional messages from his manager Phil, a piece of software which mimics a kind of extroverted bro. It's more or less what Charles wants, since his father disappeared and his mother retired to a 60 minute time loop.

Time travel in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is based around a combination of narrative tenses and the intersection of physics and information theory a la Roger Penrose. Yu uses this to literary device explore his narrator's relationship to his father, a striving immigrant engineer who almost invented the time machine, and then became unstuck from the present in disappointment. We are all time travelers, moving into the future at a rate of 1 second per second, and yet it is unclear why we perceive the present and member the past.

When Charles returns to his home base, he breaks the first rule of time travel, "never interact with yourself" when a future him appears, he shoots the future him, and his dying future self hands him a copy of a book "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" before he escapes into his time machine, and the spiraling doom of a closed time-like loop.

The novel is dizzyingly inventive and creative, but pessimistic in its assessment that there only a few seconds in the roughly 2.3 billion we are bestowed which in which we are truly present, truly authentically there with ourselves. Kemper put it better words than I could:

My main issue is that Charles Yu arranged a big Homecoming Metafiction Parade down Metafiction Avenue, and he’s the Metafiction Parade Marshal waving to us from his big Metafiction Float just in front of the Metafiction Show Horses who will take a big steaming Metafiction Dump right in the street in front of us.

This book is good, maybe even great, but it's too ironic to be perfect, and I wish it was.