“A lot like his last book, this one left me feeling a bit confused, but also kind of awed.
Charles Yu is an awesome writer, and he has awesome ideas. He’s a great science-fiction writer because he uses technology and science as an avenue to talking about human emotion instead of using it to talk about big spaceships, haunted spaceships, or really, extra big spaceships.
Does anyone write books about small, humble spaceships anymore?
I also appreciate that he’s not afraid to experiment. He’s not afraid to write a collection of very different stories, to write some that are very short, or to play around with different formats.
Some of it goes over my head, though. When things get theoretical, or when reading a story about a guy writing letters to an alternate dimension version of himself, I’m lost. And I don’t know what the threshold is, but after being lost there is a certain number of words I can read before needing to be anchored again.
So a great Charles Yu story is great. A not-as-great Charles Yu story is a little like being in a science class that’s above your level. You’re marveling at some big stuff one minute, and then in the next you’re lost. It’s good to take classes that make you feel like that. But I’ve always preferred great stories to good classes.
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