Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Then readers will have to reach the proverbial end of the story to find out whether Charles’ time loop (conveniently mapped out and including an X event, a point in time when he will learn something about himself) will let him go.Ī fascinating, philosophical and disorienting thriller about life and the context that gives it meaning.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. I work in the self-consciousness industry.” Inevitably, worlds collide, and Charles shoots his future self in a moment of panic. “You work in this business long enough and you know what you really do for a living. “I have seen pretty much everything that can go wrong, the various and mysterious problems in contemporary time travel,” says Charles. Our narrator’s only real companions are Ed, a dog that may or may not exist, and TAMMY, an onboard operating system with a chronic case of self-doubt.
His mother lives in a kind of time-assisted living, in which she experiences the same parcel of time again and again. Charles mourns the loss of his father, who invented time travel before disappearing into its void. It all sounds rather magical-Charles has a memorable run-in with one Linus Skywalker, who carries a big chip on his shoulder about his famous father-but it’s really a very lonely world. The tech’s turf is Minor Universe 31, which is literally a science-fiction playground complete with sexbots, icons of genre fantasy and an unreliable set of physics. He’s a corporate drone for Time Warner Time, which operates multiple alternate universes for profit. His hero is Charles Yu, a kind of white-collar mechanic for time machines of the very near future. In this debut novel, Yu (stories: Third Class Superhero, 2006) continues his ambitious exploration of the fantastic with a whimsical yet sincere tribute to old-school science fiction and quantum physics. A man frozen in a universe of his own making must pursue the meaning of life.
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