Rereading one of my favorite contemporary novels, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, while I wait for my dentist appointment. It is so full of oddball but thoughtful meta-scifi gems like this:
Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.
And of course there’s this beauty which I return to all the time:
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 reverse it, you will never again have the 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.
