How to Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe: Difference between revisions

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Not, you know, my self self. I shoot my future self. He steps out of a time machine, introduces himself as Charles Yu. What else am I supposed to do? I kill him. I kill my own future. }}

 

 

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* [[A Boy and His X]]: A time-machine repairman, his neurotic robot and his time-erased dog.

* [[Alternate Self]]: Charles meets a few.

* [[Alternate Universe]]: Charles visits a few, and encounters other versions of himself, but ultimately is stuck in his own universe.

* [[Author Avatar]]: Both in and out of the text - the book is written by Charles Yu. Both books. The real world book and the book inside the real world book.

* [[Bittersweet Ending]]: {{spoiler|Charles does manage to find his father. They reconcile and he finds purpose to himself and understands their relationship a bit more, and Ed becomes ontologically valid...but his dad has aged in the years he's been trapped in time, he eventually replaces TAMMY with a TIM unit, and the fate of his mother is unknown}}. And there's the whole 'getting shot' thing.

* [[Chekhov's Gun]]: {{spoiler|The advertisement for the Chrono-Adventurer Survival Kit.}}

* [[Disappeared Dad]]: Played with. Charles' father is missing by the time the book starts, but he was present and quite close to his son during Charles' childhood. The last part of the book focuses on finding him.

* [[Evil Me Scares Me]]: Charles states at one point that he has looked in at a bunch of alternate versions of himself, and they were all assholes. He then mentions that if most of the alternate versions of yourself are jerks, you're probably not hot stuff either.

* [[No Antagonist]]: Minor Universe 31 has an extreme lack of heroes and no villains to speak of.

* [[No Fair Cheating]]: Charles tries to skip to the last page of the book to see how the story will end, and ends up unstuck in time and space. {{spoiler|The last page was intentionally left blank}}.

* [[Recursive Reality]]

* [[Retroactive Preparation]]: {{spoiler|At the end of the book, Charles engages in this}}.

* [[Temporal Paradox]]: Charles's job is preventing these.

* [[Time Travel]]

* [[Unstuck in Time]]: Charles, after trying to get to the end of the book.

* [[Your Days Are Numbered]]: Eventually, Charles knows he will have to return to the time he was shot.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Science Fiction Literature]]