Just looking at the cover of How to live safely in a science fictional universe with its pattern of retro-futuristic guns (I nearly missed the dog), and reading the back-cover of the book, I knew that this gift would be a great read. The story revolves around a time-machine repairman, called Charles, who tries to find his father who is lost in time…

This book is quite complex, with the convoluted structure one can expect from an author that quotes Gödel, Escher, Bach as his favourite book. The chronogrammatical vehicle that Charles rides is not so much a time machine than a literary device that lets him explore his past, his regrets, and the various boxes that enclose up our lives. The writing is an interesting mix of geeky science fiction and deep melancholy with echoes of asian culture.

While it was long thought that reality was a special case of SF (i.e. QoE factor = 1, i.e. the strangeness of experience is no greater or less than intuitive notions of how things should be), it is now believed that, in some geological sense, the SF layer is structurally supported by the non-SF core of «reality,»…

Reading this text might be a bit daunting for the non scientifically inclined, but I think the book is certainly worth the effort, as this is certainly one of the most original books I have read in ages, while at the same it was very touching. So if you like strange, auto-refenrential books, that don’t actually talk about science even if they look like it, I really recommend this one.