{"id":1018,"date":"2011-01-17T22:45:49","date_gmt":"2011-01-18T06:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1018"},"modified":"2011-01-17T22:45:49","modified_gmt":"2011-01-18T06:45:49","slug":"review-how-to-live-safely-in-a-science-fiction-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1018","title":{"rendered":"Review: How To Live Safely In A Science Fiction Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Charles Yu&#8217;s <em>How To Live Safely In A Science Fiction Universe<\/em> is the sort of interesting exercise that makes writers happy to create and a certain kind of reader happy to see done.\u00a0 Generally I am one of those kinds of reader; I like to see an interesting idea executed well.\u00a0 Here Yu takes science fiction tropes and uses them as the basis for a sort of magical realism.\u00a0 It is an interesting idea, especially given how large these tropes loom in modern life.<\/p>\n<p>He chooses challenging ideas and arranges them in intricate and illuminating ways.\u00a0 He obliquely comments on escapism, regret, fixation on the past, and how modern technology and narcissism reinforce one another.\u00a0 All this is clear without bludgeoning the reader very much.<\/p>\n<p>The problem I had with the book is that it is relentlessly bleak.\u00a0 While I can respect the work that goes into setting a powerful consistent tone, <em>How To Live Safely<\/em> felt like a dirge of a book to me, with brief moments of optimism coming only at the end.\u00a0 To make it worse, those moments felt like a tacked-on Hollywood ending, unearned and unbelievable.<\/p>\n<p>It is tough to critique an author for being too pure in their vision, but for me, this was too hopeless a world to enjoy visiting.\u00a0 It is well built, though (despite the author&#8217;s repeated assertions to the contrary), so perhaps you fill find more there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charles Yu&#8217;s How To Live Safely In A Science Fiction Universe is the sort of interesting exercise that makes writers happy to create and a certain kind of reader happy to see done.\u00a0 Generally I am one of those kinds of reader; I like to see an interesting idea executed well.\u00a0 Here Yu takes science [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1018"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1022,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018\/revisions\/1022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}