(Also not a spoiler, it’s in the first paragraph.) This creates a bit of a problem since this universe (it’s actually a Minor Universe) is deterministic. People visit their past and want to change it, only they can’t, and if they insist they’ll get stuck in an alternative timeline.Ĭharles also has a dilemma: at one point he meets his future self. His job involves stopping time paradoxes. He spends all of his time– well, sometime else, except when he’s doing his job. Charles has his own time machine, the TM-31, with a depressed operating system named TAMMY, and a dog who doesn’t really exist but thinks he does.
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In How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, the protagonist calls himself Charles Yu, and the paranormal bit here is time travel. The book is a sequel to Finna, which I haven’t read, though I intend to.
In an afterword Cipri explains the genesis of Derek– they’ve worked with people like him, and wondered, “what was up with that guy?” (Cipri is nonbinary, and so are a couple of characters in the book.) The alternative-worlds idea is used for both plot and thematic reasons– naturally LitenVärld uses it in the crappiest way possible. Cipri is good at making a situation increasingly worse, and I didn’t expect some of the directions they took.
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The book is short, but manages to tell a full satisfying story. Cipri is very evocative of joyless work and abusive managers, and the bullying corporate pretense that it’s all great for everyone. But apparently the times have darkened– Moore’s crew were jolly rogues compared to the dead-enders at LitenVärld. The tone reminds me a bit of Christopher Moore, whose Bloodsucking Fiends also spent a lot of time with dead-end retail workers. Also his team is composed of alternate-universe versions of himself. Derek is reassigned to the inventory team, whose job is to find furniture and other merchandise that have mutated into monsters. This bit is technically a spoiler, but it’s on the damn back cover of the book, so: LitenVärld allows sick days, but it doesn’t appreciate them, not one bit. This will turn out to be the least of the horrors visited upon him over the next two days. He lives out back of the store in a storage container, and his only problem is that he seems to have a bloody cough.
They both meet other versions of themselves.Some of the most compelling characters are not human.
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