He has purchased a retirement package for his mother, which takes the form of a time loop: she lives the same, happy hour of her life over and over forever - or until he can no longer afford the payments.
Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward." He prefers this directionless, ambitionless existence, he says, because "Chronological living is kind of a lie…. Here, however, Yu imbues his enthusiasm for formal inventiveness with emotional weight and is careful to instill narrative meaning into his clever jokes: As the novel opens, our narrator has spent the last 10 years living beyond time, with the gearshift of his "chronogrammatical" time machine set to Present-Indefinite. Some of those stories read more like thought-experiments than fiction enfleshed enough to make us care about it. This playfulness won't surprise anyone who read Yu's short story collection, Third Class Superhero, in which, for example, one story took the form of a series of word problems, and another, an extended meditation on the statistical meaning of the word "maybe."Ĭharles Yu is also the author of the short story collection Third Class Superhero. It's about time travel and cosmology, yes, but it's also about language and narrative - the more we learn about Minor Universe 31, the more it resembles the story space of the novel we're reading, which is full of diagrams, footnotes, pages left intentionally (and meaningfully) blank and brief chapters from the owner's manual of our narrator's time machine.
But Yu's novel is a good deal more ambitious, and ultimately more satisfying, than that. If How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe contented itself with exploring that classic chestnut of speculative fiction, the time paradox, it would likely make for an enjoyable sci-fi yarn.
He then takes off in his future self's time machine to try to figure some way out of his now inevitable, albeit temporally displaced, suicide. It doesn't take long for our narrator (named, in what is only the first of the book's many meta-fictional feints, Charles Yu), to run smack into what is, for a time machine engineer, a particularly knotty occupational hazard: Yu accidentally encounters his future self and, in a panic, shoots and kills him. Instead, he took a job repairing time machines in Minor Universe 31, a smallish, self-contained pocket of reality that's "not big enough for space opera and anyway not zoned for it." MU31, we learn, was abandoned by its original builder/writer midway through its construction, leaving its physics only 93 percent installed.
The narrator of Charles Yu's debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe never completed his master's in Applied Science Fiction.
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