a flat universe
Dec. 3rd, 2010 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIt's the third night of Hanukah, and I had my mother and my mother-in-law over for dinner and fed them latkes. (This is easy for me to do, as I don't eat the things myself, so I am purely disinterested.) Inevitably, B. also had her mother and mother-in-law over at the same time; that's just the way these things work.
Among my presents are a new pair of shoes which promise not to have the laces come undone every twenty minutes, because they don't have any laces; a recording of Arvo Pärt's Fourth Symphony, which I'm going to wait for just the right introspective moment before playing for the first time; and a novel titled How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (Pantheon).
Have you heard of this? Not only hadn't I, I also hadn't heard of any of the authors who wrote blurbs for it on the back cover, either, though I have heard of an author that one of them compares Yu to, that being Richard Powers, though I can't say I really know anything about Richard Powers. Yes, there are a lot of reviews online, some of which describe it as "Douglas Adams collides with Douglas Coupland," which helps a bit more, but what I can't tell without more digging is how, if at all, this book has struck the knowledgeable SF community. Often enough, uninformed outsiders are enthralled to discover they can write a novel in which everyone on earth dies except one couple who happen to be named Adam and Eve, or - in this case, as it's apparently a time travel novel - that you can go back in time and shoot your own grampaw, and isn't that a paradox, gee whiz? Other times, of course, they get it right, like George Orwell or George R. Stewart. Which will this be, I wonder ...
Among my presents are a new pair of shoes which promise not to have the laces come undone every twenty minutes, because they don't have any laces; a recording of Arvo Pärt's Fourth Symphony, which I'm going to wait for just the right introspective moment before playing for the first time; and a novel titled How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (Pantheon).
Have you heard of this? Not only hadn't I, I also hadn't heard of any of the authors who wrote blurbs for it on the back cover, either, though I have heard of an author that one of them compares Yu to, that being Richard Powers, though I can't say I really know anything about Richard Powers. Yes, there are a lot of reviews online, some of which describe it as "Douglas Adams collides with Douglas Coupland," which helps a bit more, but what I can't tell without more digging is how, if at all, this book has struck the knowledgeable SF community. Often enough, uninformed outsiders are enthralled to discover they can write a novel in which everyone on earth dies except one couple who happen to be named Adam and Eve, or - in this case, as it's apparently a time travel novel - that you can go back in time and shoot your own grampaw, and isn't that a paradox, gee whiz? Other times, of course, they get it right, like George Orwell or George R. Stewart. Which will this be, I wonder ...
