How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

This is a fascinating book with a lot of little philosophical tidbits to chew on. I'll be thinking about this one for a while. It's autobiographical but transferred to a sci fi setting. There are a lot of poignant moments with the main character's Taiwanese immigrant parents, which I'm assuming are drawn from the author's life (The MC has the author's name, so not a stretch). These largely dwell on his father's struggle to make something of himself in a country that doesn't value the ambitions of poor immigrants. In the book, the father's ambition during the MC's childhood is to invent a time machine and thereby earn respect and prestige as an engineer. As an adult, the MC works as a time machine repairman, spending all his time in a nebulous region of time not connected to the real world's present, wondering where his missing father is. This leads to a lot of meditations on the nature of time and how to deal with the problem of living a finite life.

The only things keeping me from giving this book five stars were the repeated instances of casual misogyny and the logical inconsistencies. The misogyny was not enough to outright offend but enough to take me out of the story and remind me that the book was written by a man.

As for the logical issues, I would have been ok with a few because the whole science fiction aspect is clearly metaphorical. This is really a book about a father and son, not a book about time travel. Time travel itself is always tricky and I'm willing to grant authors of these stories a bit of hand wavery, but these weren't problems that can just be solved with suspension of disbelief. There were so many places where the author directly contradicted himself that it became hard to ignore. For example, at the beginning he goes on a long tangent about how he doesn't know exactly how long he's been travelling in his time machine. He says he could calculate it but it would take a lot of complicated math and he's not interested. A few chapters later he just casually mentions exactly how long he's been there, which he knows from a device implanted in his wrist. He also refers to having a one night stand with an alien, but then says they met up a couple of times. Before his parents even immigrated there, the entire US had been collapsed into one giant city, itself merged with Tokyo (such a cool concept), and yet at one point the author mentions wanting a toy as a kid that required sending money off to another state. When other states didn't exist any more. It was even explicitly mentioned that Hawaii and Alaska were included in the concatenation.

The last inconsistency in particular has me thinking that this novel might be the result of two disparate books being merged together. A lot of the reminiscences of childhood come off as very grounded in reality, which is great, but sometimes you can see the seams where the author stitched these personal essays into his sci fi time travel adventure. And not just in these instances, but overall the writing came off as disjointed. It's a shame because the world is fascinating and I would have loved to get immersed in it but couldn't. I love the idea of showing these realistic, down-to-earth family dynamics in a crazy world, but they just weren't integrated that well. It's disappointing because the issues could have been easily resolved without sacrificing any of the heart and I'm left wondering how they were missed by the author and the editor.

I read this book twice in a row so clearly I loved it. I read it again to go back and savour the philosophy, but the issues with consistency were more obvious the second time through. Still, I'm left wanting more from this world. I want to know everything about it. Overall, highly recommend.

First, a warning: There is not a lot of plot to this book -- you are over 100 pages in before the story really starts. People who like SF seem to get frustrated by the amount of metaphor in this book (even though all great SF is metaphor on some level). People who don't usually read SF seem to get frustrated by all of the SF tropes. And if you don't like metafiction, stay away.

I liked the book, though. I thought time travel as a metaphor for aging was an interesting idea. I enjoyed the humor ("The woman I didn’t marry is named Marie.... I suppose technically you could make the argument that every woman is The Woman I Never Married. So why not call her Marie, that was my thinking.") I thought the human characters - the narrator, his mom, and his dad - were touching. And the moral of the book is a good one.

This isn't a book for everyone, but if you are up for a slow-moving, thoughtful meditation on life, I'd recommend it.