"Oh. I wish you'd told me you were going to buy this book."
That's what a friend told me when she saw me reading this book. That and, "I think the title is what gets people to buy it".
She's not wrong. I was plundering a Borders, saw the title, read the description, still had no idea what the book was about, and said "oh, what the hell, it's on sale."
Think back to the early days of television or radio. Back when you could still play with the medium a bit because there weren't yet unspoken rules and regulations about what you could and couldn't do. You could experiment and do things that were simultaneously strange and brilliant. Film students still get to do that to a degree. And while reading this book that seems to be what author Charles Yu was doing. The book seems experimental in it's appearance and flow and... itself.
Charles Yu is the author and main character. He lives in a time machine with a retconned dog. He sort of left the machine with the transmission in low so it won't go very fast. He'll live his life in a matter of weeks in there.
The machine runs on vocabulary... sort of. Time travel tends to need specialized vocabulary.
"Have you killed your grandfather yet?"
"I'll be having done it a week from next yesterday."
But what if instead of a machine all you needed to do was use and believe the proper terminology? Think about last year in now terminology instead of then terminology and you leave the here and now for the then and there.
And what would you do with a time machine? Kill Hitler? Tell Abe Lincoln to duck? Most people would just try to go back and fix that one really humiliating time. You know the one. Everyone has a moment they want to redo. But time machines don't really work like that. Charles' job is to fix machines that have broken or seized up from people trying to do just that.
One day, when he went to get his transmission fixed Charles saw something horrible. He saw himself step out of a time machine. Rule one when that happens? Run. Nothing good ever happens. Charles didn't run. Instead he shot himself.
This leads to him reading a book that writes itself as he reads it and you're reading right then. And a grand tour of the complete failure of his father to build the first time machine.
It's not a bad book. Just kinda heavy on the "huh?" Once you get past the strange science the book is a story about his father's failure and disappointment.
What makes the book worth reading is "you don't that in a book too often" moments. Other than seeing the results of the experiment there's not a lot to sell this book on.
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