All this could easily have been up-own-fundament annoying, and is sometimes a touch too cute for its own good. But it is all redeemed in the telling by the charm and skill of Yu’s voice, pitched somewhere in that interDouglas space between Coupland and Adams.
Books How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
- Author
-
Charles Yu
- Year
- 2010
- Publisher
- Pantheon
Adam Roberts
-
This being a sci-fi metafiction, the world is the novel and vice versa: Yu’s story-line geometry does sometimes lack complexity, and while P. Y. isn’t exactly a hero, he does at least get a starring role in his own stasis. The nerdy science fiction of time travel, the framework underlying the novel’s world, while likewise incomplete and not always convincing, is enjoyably batty.
The Black Prince
Creation
The Brooklyn Follies
The Wasp Factory
Frankenstein
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World