Pantheon Books -- hc
New York -- ©2010 -- 234pp
ISBN: 978-0-307-37920-7
Charles Yu, time travel technician - part counselor, part gadget repair man - helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he's not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished.
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I don't remember the recommended list that I came across that had this book on it, but it sounded fascinating. And it was. But it wasn't...well...it wasn't great.
For those who have read plenty of science fiction, the idea of time travel and time loops and the dizzying headaches that accompany both, is really nothing new. I can think of a few novels of this nature (David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself comes first to mind). What makes this novel slightly unique is that the narrator appears to be the author himself and that the book that we hold in our hands is the book that the narrator is both reading and writing at the same time (confusing?).
I had high hopes for a truly original sci-fi novel, but found, instead, a book that was actually pretty conventional with a main character who was generally pretty boring and not immediately like-able.
For those who've only been reading SF for the past decade or so, then this is probably an outstanding, original book. For those of us who've been reading the genre for four decades or more, than this isn't all that spectacular.
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