How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

"I really love that text. It’s interesting to me on several levels. One is because it’s not so common to think of sci-fi as having anything in common with self-help. The title ‘How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe’ is very much invoking this tradition of time travel that you see in sci-fi literature and is usually read through that generic lens. We tend to think of sci-fi as being very escapist and fantastical, and not interested in the problems of everyday life or how to live. But what I love about this book is the way that Yu is combining the fantastical elements of sci-fi with the more practical, reflective orientation of self-help. So he’s using this conceit of time travel to think through very common and practical questions of how to deal with nostalgia, our parents, immigration , regret. It’s a really interesting take on what my book calls the ‘how-to fiction’ in the way that it’s reconciling those two traditions. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Like Sheila Heti’s book, which is a work of autofiction that collapses the distinction between character and author, Yu’s book too is blending the protagonist and the author in this heady amalgamation. It ends up that the book that the character is reading is also the one he’s writing, and so he is using the time travel conceit to offer advice to his younger self. It offers moving advice and reflections on the difficulty of managing all kinds of different emotions, ambitions, and regrets that accompany everyday temporal experience. On the one hand, I think there’s a tendency to write off the ‘how-to’ conceit of a lot of these fictional works as being an overly high-concept or overly ostentatious gimmick. Both are at play. In Hamid’s book, another text on the list, you also see that the usage of the ‘how-to’ paradigm as a kind of parody, or satire, or joke. But at the same time, in all of the books on this list there’s a recognition of the inevitability that readers will come to the book looking for self-help and looking for advice. And also a recognition of the inevitability of the author using the writing of the novel as a form of therapy or self-help. There’s the attitude that, well, this is going to happen—whether you like it or not, self-help is going to happen. So how can we think about this in the most generative way? How can the novel place itself in relation to this inevitability in a way that is actually philosophical and meaningful, and not trite or commercialized?"

"The character is named Charles and is visiting himself and having internal debates with different versions of himself. Different kinds of weird temporal anomalies start haunting his whole life. I think there’s something about time travel that invites this kind of meta-relationship with one’s self. Because that’s the other fantasy of time travel: getting to meet yourself and have a conversation with yourself, and try to figure out why you did all those dumb things. Yu is a guy who is travelling around in a time machine. There are a couple of hints about what he’s doing. He is a time machine repairman working for a company, but he might be doing things to try to fix his own life. And the narrative is interspersed with stories about his childhood, his relationship with his father – who was desperately trying to invent a time machine – and his relationship with his mother who – and this is one of the parts of the book that I love – is stuck in a time loop. She’s reliving the same moments over and over again, like she’s in a Groundhog Day trope. So she’s travelling through time also, but in a really different way to the main character. That was one of the things I loved about this book – that it’s really about time travel, and also about our different relationships with time and how psychological problems can manifest themselves as temporal anomalies. Part of the point of the book is that this main character is so haunted by his childhood that it’s kind of kicked him out of time. Like The Female Man , even though it deals with these sombre themes of loss and unrequited love – I don’t necessarily mean romantic love – it’s incredibly funny. His voice, Charles Yu’s voice, is just so hilarious. And he’s very wise, and makes lots of great pop culture references. It’s a commentary on time travel, but at the same time a very straightforward story about childhood, and how to grow up from childhood trauma. I would endorse that, for sure. A lot of it does deal with immigration and with feeling a kind of cultural dislocation. There are a couple of great moments where he talks, for example, about how his father speaks Mandarin, which doesn’t have tenses. Or, it doesn’t have verb tenses, although it has other tense markers. That causes problems for his dad, because he’s trying to think through time travel in a language that deals with time in a different way to the way English does. I really loved that detail. It’s a kind of Easter egg moment, when you hear the characters referencing that. So that’s really delightful. It’s a great literary book, for the fun he has with language and time – but also, it’s just a fun story too. A bit of a romp."