This unique, beautifully written and imaginative book explores time travel, the human story operating within time, self and self construction through time and memory.
Then it blows the concept of time to bits.
More accurately the story of a man coming to terms with his father.
I closed this book with hope that there is no moment like the present to let go of regret, pain, old festering memories and liberate oneself from the barricade of time and into healing.
"The smell of Ed is pretty powerful in here, but I'm okay with that. He's a good dog, sleeps a lot, sometimes licks his paw to comfort himself. Doesn't need food or water. I'm pretty sure he doesn't even know that he doesn't exist. Ed is just this weird ontological entity that produces unconditional slobbery loyal affection. Superflous. Gratuitous. He must violate some kind of conservation law. Something from nothing: all of this saliva. And, I guess, love. Love from the abandoned heart of a non-existent dog." Location 91, Kindle
"I tell TAMMY it will be alright. She says what will be alright? I say whatever you are crying about. She says that is exactly what she is crying about. That everything is all right. That the world isn't ending. That we'll never tell each other how we really feel because everything is okay. Okay enough to jsut sit around, being okay. Okay enough that we forget that we don't have logn, that it's late, late in this universe, and at some point in the future, it's not going to be okay.
Sometimes at night I worry about TAMMY. I worry that she might get tired of it all. tired of running at sixty-six terahertz, tired of all those processing cycles, every second of every hour of every day. I worry that one of these cycles she might just halt her own subroutine and commit software suicide. And then I would have to do an error report, and I don't know how I would even begin to explain that to Microsoft." Location 160, Kindle
"This is what I say: I've got good news and bad news.
The good news is, you don't have to worry, you can't change the past.
The bad news is, you don't have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can't change the past.
The universe just doesn't put up with that. We aren't important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We're not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodigetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves. Navigating possibility space is tricky. Like any skill, practice helps, but only to a point. Moving a vehicle through this medium is, when you get down to it, something that none of us is ever going to master. There are too many factors, too many variables. Time isn't an orderly stream. Time isn't a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We're too slight, too inconsequential, despite all our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about. Time is an ocean of inertia, drowning out the small vibrations, absorbing the slosh and churn, the foam and wash, and we're up here, flapping and slapping and just generally spazzing out, and sure, there's a little bit of splashing on the surface, but that doesn't even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us.
I try to tell people all this, but no one listens." Location 225, Kindle
"All that got encoded in my box, too. You like like this long enough, a life without chances, you lose your bearings. A life without danger. A life without the risk of Now. In any event, what do I need with Now? Now, I think, is overrated. Now hasn't been working out so great for me. Now never has.
Chronological living is a kind of lie. That's why I don't do it anymore. Existence doesn't have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other. Completing the days of your life in strict calendar order can feel forced. Arbitrary. Especially after you've seen what I've seen.
Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward." Location 320, Kindle
"from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (manual within the book)
nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation for
Weak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.
Manifects itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one's home universe, or as a longing for versions of one's self that one will never, and can never know." Location 624, Kindle
"Can you liver your whole life at zero? Can you live your entire life in the exact point between comfort and discomfort? You can in this device. My father designed it that way. Don't ask me why. If I knew the answer to that, I would know a whole lot of other things, too. Things like why he left, where he is, what he's doing, when he's coming back, if he's coming back.
Where has he been all these years? I'm guessing that's where he is now.
I don't miss him anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. I wish I could but unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine; it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to revers it, you will never again have that original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. it will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter." Location 721, Kindle
"I learned about the future tense, how anxiety is encoded into our sentences, our conditionals, our thoughts, how worry is encoded into language itself, into grammar." Location 1072
"Even the sexbots here are lonely." Location 1103
"As I'm falling asleep, I can see, out the window, the fracture line of the disintegrated city, where this minor universe was left undone, not quite finished. Maybe it's just something I imagine in the last moment before sleep, but I swear what I see, behind a peeled-back corner of the sky, is another layer underneath us, a second, hidden layer, one that is present at every point, and always has been." Location 1118
"I can blame this stupid defective universe where everyone is always so sad there aren't even any bad guys anymore, but what if there never were any bad guys? Just guys like me. I'm the bad guy. No heroes, either. I'm the hero. A guy who just shot his own future in the stomach." Location 1226
"'This book,' TAMMY says to me, 'is a copy of a copy of a copy, and so on, forever, like that, I could keep going if you'd like.' It is a copy of something that doesn't exist yet. It is a book copied from itself.
Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years." Location 1350
"I am editing this book even as I write it, writing it as I read it, now I am repeating myself, even as I create it, I know it is flawed and possibly even inconsistent, and yet all I can do is to go forward and see where it takes me, all I can do is read it to see what happens to my father, what happened to him, to us, to see if it is true, to learn what I am apparently thinking right now, to learn what I will think, to see if I can make any sense out of his life. Which is what sons do for their time-traveling biographers, as literary executors, taking the inheritance of the contents of their father's lives, given to them in an unprocessed jumble, out of order and nonsensical. Sons do this for their fathers, they use their time machines and all of the technology inside, and they see if it is possible to put those contents into a story, into a life, into a life story. There is sense in which I am pretty sure this makes no sense. I don't know where this is going. I don't know how it ends." Location 1356
"Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire." Location 1452
"My mother spent a lifetime grieving and yet she still loved my father with all her heart: all of it. It was a structure and a vector and a power source that could be directed toward nearly any target even remotely worthy. All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things. She used her heart, as a physical trasmitter of love, and what came out of it was no more voluntary than gravity or time or time travel or the laws of science fiction itslef. " Location 1466
"That's my future self, that's my future self. Listen to you. You sound like an idiot. Who do you think you are? Imagine there's a version of you that sees all of it. A version that knows when versions are messing with the other ones, trying to get things off track, trying to erase things. A record of all the keystrokes, the storage of all the versions, partial and deleted and written over. All the changes. ALl truths about all parts of our self. We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think. You are the only version of you that is you. There are less of you than you think, and more. There are a million versions of you, half a trillion. One for every particle, every quantum coin flip. Imagine this uncountable number of yous. You don't always have your best interests at heart. That's true. You are your own best friend and your own worst enemy. You can't trust a guy who gives you a book and says, This is your life. He might have been your future, he might not. Only you know how you get there. Only you know wht you need to do. Imagine there is a perfect version of you. Out of all the oceans of oceans of you, there is exactly one who is perfectly you. And that's me. And I'm telling you: you are the only you. Does that make sense." Location 1644
"Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is a time machine. It's just that most people's machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines. We are all perfectly engineered time machines, technologically equipped to allow the inside user, the traveler riding inside each of us, to experience time travel, and loss, and understanding. We are universal time machines manufactured to the most exacting specifications possible. Every single one of us." Location 1954
"I am my own most dangerous enemy." Location 2632
"Step out of this box. Popo open the hatch. The forces within the chronohydraulic air lock will equalize. Step out into the world of time and risk and loss again. Move forward, into the empty plane. Find the book you wrote, and read it until the end, but don't turn the last page yet, keep stalling see how long you can keep expanding the infinitely expandable moment. Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodte as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it." Loction 2733
Book 5
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