Unlike what I saw as mere hip surface shine in Zone One, Charles Yu’s story, while slickly written, is imbued with real, tangible emotion that spoke to me. I certainly thought it was a terrific contrast to what I found to be the glossy, soulless disingenuousness of Zone One. While not an untrammeled success and a bit murky, at times, with its message delivery, I thought this was, overall, an exceptional achievement. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him-in fact it may even save his life.Īnother example of high concept literary fiction costuming itself in the tropes, set designs and jargon of genre fiction, while striving to create something unique, penetrating and memorable.Īnd, in this case, succeeding brilliantly. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory.
When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician-part counselor, part gadget repair man-steps in.
Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. New York: Vintage, 2010.A story of a son searching for his father.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. “Doomsday Machine.” New York, August 25, 2013.
Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. “Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future.” In Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, edited by Michael D. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. “Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse.” Ideologies of Theory, vol. “Interview with Charles Yu.” Asian American Literary Review, May 24, 2013. “Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel.” Narrative 17, no.
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