CBR Bingo: Family
For a short period during Covid restrictions, my municipality allowed stores to be open, but only if they were outdoors. A local bookstore had a bunch of outdoor sales at the time, and since I was bored and running out of things to do and places to go, a friend and I used to visit on a weekly basis and get a dopamine hit from finding cheap books. All that is to say, almost five years later, I still have a huge backlog of physical books I haven’t read, and the sale sticker on the front of Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe indicates that this was one of those books that I purchased during those trying times.
This is a very weird book. The protagonist is named Charles Yu, he works as a time-machine repairman, and his future self delivers to him a copy of a book named How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which he then has to write. It’s meta for the sake of being meta. Charles’ father (the character) was an inventor of a time machine (not THE time machine, he made one at around the same time as others did) and went missing shortly afterwards. The bulk of the plot is Charles exploring his relationship with his father and searching for his whereabouts. The nature of the book made it unclear to me whether this was supposed to be some sort of autobiographical-adjacent musings, or if the relationship had been invented for the novel.
The writing was fine, but it tended towards rambling. It did have promise, but the execution didn’t really live up to my expectations. If it hadn’t been so short, I probably wouldn’t have finished it.