Charles Yu ‘How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe’ Hits Paperback

Charles Yu’s rather brilliant second  novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is now available in paperback:

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.

I had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Yu about his book at this year’s San Diego Comic Con. We discussed the challenge of embedding yourself as a character in your own novel and how time travel can be a metaphor for the way we all continue to revisit our past in the form of memories. As you might suspect, some of the events in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe are based on Yu’s own life, but the line between fiction and history is thicker than I had suspected. That’s the danger of trying to read too much into a writer based on his or her work.

The Charles Yu of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is fictional, but don’t all of us have many “selves”? Aren’t we really different people depending on the circumstances from moment to moment? Are we the same person we were in the past? What about the people we love? Can we even “know” them in any true sense, or just aspects of their personalities, themselves based partially on our own faulty perceptions? If you’re interested in these kinds of questions and love good science fiction, I strongly recommend that you pick up How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

You don’t have to take my word for it*, though: here’s an excerpt and a Q & A with Charles Yu.

*Yes, that’s a Reading Rainbow reference.