How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
by Charles Yu
Reviewed by Galen Strickland
Posted December 30, 2024
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Charles Yu's debut novel from 2010 was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel, and a Locus for First Novel, coming in second place for both. It can be considered a Hard SF novel of time travel and quantum computing, or viewed another way, as a meta attempt at creating an alternate universe. Except the alternate universe could just be inside the mind of Charles Yu. He talks of time travel in the terms of writing a narrative in past, present, or future tense. The science within the story is merely science fictional science, with the narrative being one of chronodiegetics; "Chronodiegetics is the branch of science fictional science focusing on the physical and metaphysical properties of time given a finite and bounded diegesis. It is currently the best theory of the nature and function of time within a narrative space."
Or, on the other hand, it could be an attempt by the author to understand his relationship with his father, although as far as I have been able to determine it would be a fictional Charles Yu ruminating on his fictional father, who left the family some years before, with the narrative being the son's attempts to find his father. Shortly after his father left them, the young Charles witnessed a phenomenal event, when Los Angeles split apart, not from an earthquake, but some other time/space anomaly, creating New Angeles, which moved east to encompass what had been New York. Shortly afterwards, Tokyo split, with Lost Tokyo-2 moving to the outskirts of New Angeles. Lost Tokyo-1 has not yet been found, perhaps flung to the far ends of the universe. What becomes known as Minor Universe 31 is eventually acquired by Time Warner Time, a subsidiary of Google. Charles works as a time machine repairman, working in his own time machine, a TM-31, which is powered by a Grammar Drive, and utilizing a Tense Operator. With him is a non-existent dog named Ed, and a depressed computer named TAMMY, both of whom he may or may not love. After ten years of traveling to help other time travelers who have foolishly attemtped to change the past, which is impossible, Charles returns to New Angeles/Lost Tokyo-2 (or Loop City as he thinks of it).
His TM-31 needs repair, and while it is in the shop he goes to the hotel room he has rented for the first time in ten years, but from the perspective of the hotel it is just a day or so. He also goes to see his mother, who had requested to live within a one hour time loop of a family dinner. He observes her from outside her apartment, as she dines with a holographic version of himself, but of course his father is not there. She does see him outside on the fire escape, and gives him a wrapped package, then goes back to her time loop dinner. When he returns to the hangar the next day, he witnesses an older version of himself exiting his time machine. He panics and shoots his older self, who, before dying, hands him a book, which just so happened to be the book I just read. His older self told him to read it, then rewrite it. As he scans the pages he thinks he sees the words he just read changing, and he is sure he already knows the words he has yet to read. He tells TAMMY to skip to the end of the book, which apparently shifts him outside of time and space, which puts him inside a very large, very quiet Buddhist temple, where he sees his mother, or at least to his mind, "The Woman My Mother Should Have Been," and he also sees his father's shoes, but not his father. It is hard for him to understand that everything he has done since he shot himself, everything he read (or wrote himself) in the book, the trip to the temple, then later trips to the past to witness different events with his father, who had been attempting to build a time machine, seeing those events differently, interpreting them differently than his memory, of times when he was proud of his father, then later disappointed, even embarrassed for his father, and thinking of how his father might have felt about him at those times, all of those things took place within the ticking of just one second on the clock within the miniature kitchen which was in the box his mother had given him.
The last two sentences are similar to many in the book, long and rambling, stream of consciousness musings. It is also similar to how they say dreams that seem to go on a long time only encompass a few brief seconds just before waking. I won't hesitate to say this is a brilliant story, no matter what it means to Yu. He is exceptionally intelligent, having earned degrees in molecular and cellular biology, along with a law degree, and within the law one must know how to manipulate the language to influence others. Along with novels he has also written short stories, with three collections so far, which I need to track down. He is now a full time writer, of both prose and television scripts, the latest being an adaptation of his own second novel Interior Chinatown. That series, and both novels I have read, are highly recommended.
There are many ideas and concepts presented here, not necessarily original or unique, but some hit very hard. Such as, "Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down in the coming years."
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