How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel

Charles Yu

Language: English

Pages: 256

ISBN: 0307739457

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


From a 5 Under 35 winner, comes a razor-sharp, hilarious, and touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space-time.
 
Every day in Minor Universe 31 people get into time machines and try to change the past. That's where Charles Yu, time travel technician, steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he's not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. The key to locating his father may be found in a book. It's called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and somewhere inside it is information that will help him. It may even save his life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space–time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions,

the proposition that a universe, in order to sustain the conditions necessary for the development of narrational sustainability, can be no bigger than a certain maximum size, which has, in the literature, come to be referred to as the Weinberg-Takayama Radius (WTR). *Professor, Center for Research in Advanced Narrative Dynamics, affiliated with the City College of New Angeles/Lost Tokyo-2. †Professor, Imperial University of Lost Tokyo-1. Also known for his seminal work on the

he had always imagined, it was coming with money. Or more accurately, the promise of money. More than money. Prestige. The promise of prestige and a sense of mystery about him, a sense of intellectual mystery that would surround him, inventor, pioneer, scientist. He imagined the prospect of seeing his name in trade journals, rivals and admirers whispering about what he was working on, his method of working, how he got his ideas. He imagined how the people at work would react when he quit, when a

looking at a prideful, intelligent, increasingly self-isolated man. A man drifting slowly into the past. Then one day, he is back. It is a little more than three years after that day in the park. I hear him in the garage for hours, and into the night, and then every day for six weeks, the testing getting louder and louder. He is working on something else. Not a time machine. Something darker, more powerful. Science fiction, but not any kind I know of. He never asks me to come down there, never

been working out so great for me. Now never has. Chronological living is a kind of lie. That’s why I don’t do it anymore. Existence doesn’t have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other. Completing the days of your life in strict calendar order can feel forced. Arbitrary. Especially after you’ve seen what I’ve seen. Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward. from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional

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