Yu, Charles
I realized a couple of years ago that not only am I not super-skilled anything, I’m not even particularly good at being myself.
-Pg. 10-
Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.
-Pg. 22-
You lie in your bed and realize that if you don’t get out of bed and into the world today, it is very likely no one will even notice.
-Pg. 181-
At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.
-Pg. 211-
...just like the concept of the ‘present,’ is a fiction.
-Pg. 216-
At its heart How to is a story about a family that uses the trope of time traveling to express how segregated we as humans are from the other humans; even - no - especially from our closest family members. It comes complete with infinite causality loops, paradoxes, alternate universes, and all the other clichés you’d expect.
Time travel stories have, I feel, become kind of annoying. Star Trek has beat Time Travel to death, and popular movies like Back to the Future and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure have been pretty hard to beat.
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| Party on, Wayne. Wait that's not right. |
And yet, I read How to in two sittings. It’s a fun riff on the scenario and it’s an easy, fast read.
The thing most people will probably get a kick out of from this book is Yu’s breaking of the fourth wall that makes this a very meta-fiction. It is also a book that seems heavily influenced by Douglas Adams’ The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The main character’s father, one of the discoverers of time travel, gets lost in time, and the second half of the book deals with Yu’s obsessive quest to discover where/when his father is/was/will be. The scenes with Yu’s mother/not-mother were particularly touching and played on the ubiquitous regrets that we all harbor over the things that we could have done better in our lives. We could have been better children/parents/friends/siblings/spouses and to that end we will go through greater lengths to hide the pain we carry and delude ourselves with lies than we ever would to just try and be the people we want to be moving forward. Much of the material dealing with Yu’s mother directly addresses the idea that the past is not ever truly gone as long as we remember... if for no other reason than the past continues to exist, literally, as bio-chemical processes within our own physical bodies. Shame then, I say, that there is no known way for our species to foster a sort of selective genetic memory so that we are able to pass on to our descendants important information such as:
- The proper way to handle that not-so-fresh feeling
- How to cure a hangover
- What “masturbate” means
- Why did Daddy leave?
Oh, I just realized I got off topic. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a good book. Go buy it and read it.
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