Saturday, July 27, 2024

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu

I am sad to give this a two-star review. I gave it all the chances I could, reading it to the bitter end. But I can't do any better. If you have read St. Augustine of Hippo's meditation on time you get the flavor of the protagonist describing his experience of time. There's also a suggestion of technical detail, which was potentially pretty intriguing, suggesting that the techology *might* be simply a way to get into a mental state.

But it goes on and on. The time meditation gets repetitive, which is possibly intentional but still irritating. And the father-son story is just sad, mostly, without a lot of redeeming value. Leo Tolstoy said that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way--I think we may have found the disproof right here. I feel like I have met this family several times. There's just not enough in the relationship story to carry the heaviness of the chronodiagetic exposition.

I think this book would have worked better as a novella. Mostly it just needed more of a reason to exist.

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