Living Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

The Daily Beast has been running a series devoted to emerging writers, and their first two choices - THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE by Julie Orringer and EVERYTHING LOVELY, EFFORTLESS, SAFE by Jenny Hollowell - are very much on the mark, at least in my book. So too is Charles Yu's HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE, which won't be published until September but which I'm pleased to be writing about now, because the book is such a joy: brainy and accessible, entertaining and ruminative.

Here's an excerpt from the piece:

Yu doesn't shy away from asking tough existential questions—is it possible to kill your own future? What does it mean to be trapped in a time loop? Can you occupy the same space in several universes?—and sparks all sorts of brain explosions in the reader with schematic diagrams, fragmented, occasionally perpendicular narratives, and humorous bullet point lists. But Yu's literary pyrotechnics come in a marvellously entertaining and accessible package, featuring a reluctant, time machine-operating hero on a continual quest to discover what really happened to his missing father, a mysterious book possibly answering all, and a computer with the most idiosyncratic personality since HAL or Deep Thought (and certainly the most memorable neuroses, including a crippling case of low self-esteem that creates boot-up havoc.)

Not surprisingly, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe as written in a non-linear fashion. "If I were to describe the geometry of the book's construction, I guess I would say it was built from the inside out, in concentric rectangles, if that makes any sense," Yu told me in a recent e-mail interview. "I started with the idea that here's this guy, he's in a box. This box he's in is a vehicle of some sort. He's moving through space in his vehicle. But wait, it's not just space. It's time. Okay, he's in a box moving through time, but now, hold up, there's a problem, and I think this is a general issue in trying to create a time travel story, as in, what are the constraints? Because you have to have constraints in a time travel story, and probably a lot of them, otherwise there are going to be way too many degrees of freedom."

Read on for the rest, and I'll be posting some bonus material that couldn't make it into the piece closer to the publication date.

Comments

[Adam McFarlane]

Thanks for the post! A few years ago, you recommended Charles Yu's Third Class Superhero in your weekly picks. That was a GREAT short story collection. Thank you for the recommendation long ago! And thanks for the news about his upcoming book!