This is a story about a man who lives inside a small time travelling cubicle and travels around the universe and tells people that everything they've hoped and dreamed for is impossible.

The world that this man lives in is unfinished science fiction, with lumpy protagonists and sidekicks, and people like Our Protagonist in the background trying to keep everything running. This man is very sorry for his life and everything that hasn't happened in it. His boss is a Microsoft computer program. The AI that runs his machine is clinically depressed and prone to crying jags. His mother has retreated to a fictional dinner with a fictional son on a time loop that repeats every hour, and his father has long since disappeared.

It's clear from the narrative that the writer misses his father terribly, but it's never clearly exactly why. His father didn't even seem to like him all that much, and was mostly focused on inventing time travel. He doesn't have any great love for his mother. He claims to have a crush on his AI, but they don't exchange much dialogue with each other... in fact, the only real affection that we see in this book is for Ed, his dog.

In any event, he keeps the cubicle set to the "indefinite present" rather than an actual time period so long that the machine breaks and he has to limp home to get it fixed. And then... he sees his future self handing him a book. So he shoots him. Because nothing happening to him is apparently better than anything at all happening. The plot of the book continues from there.

There is a conceit in the book that a fictional person in a science fictional who "remembers" the past in a book is literally time-travelling back to it, and cannot tell whether he is re-experiencing it or remembering it. It's all the same to him, all times, all places. And so most of this book is internal dialogue, flashbacks and exposition. The book even points this out -- "no time" passes in the cubicle so the clock only ticks when he goes outside and actually does something. The point of the book -- that he rarely does so -- is so apparent that you start to understand why his AI seems frustrated and has crying jags.

But there's a bigger problem with this book. This isn't science fiction. In other books, i.e. The Time Traveller's Wife, you cannot have the story without the science fiction element. In this book, you could have him stay in a one room studio, then he goes through his father's old letters, finds a phone number, and dials it, and then the book ends. There's no actual science fiction in the story -- all the rules, footnotes, corporate owned universes etc. are irrelevant to the actual plot. It's a sham.

To be fair, the book explicitly points out that it's a crappy, unfinished, fictional universe. But simply saying you're a failure doesn't make you interesting or unique. Think of how interesting the Doctor would be if he were afraid to go outside of the TARDIS. Then throw this book in the trash and never read it again.