how to live safely in a science fictional universe analysis

But the boundary between the two (reality and science fiction) has become muddled in Universe 31, allowing for 'an invisible, microscopic, but highly dynamic exchange of materials at the thin permeable boundary layer between the two regions' (p. The world of the novel is literally described in terms of the genre's relationship to the real world: 'In terms of topology, the reality portions of 31 are concentrated in an inner core, with science fiction wrapped around it' (p. The idea of genre is taken very seriously in How to Live Safely. So it's difficult to find an entry point in talking about the book, even as the reading of it is absorbing and seamless. 23)-and the term fictional is problematic since so much of the novel is about fiction, and the way we view the world through a fictional lens.

The theory of time travel presented in the novel's fictional universe is-well, I could try to explain it, but already I'm entering dangerous territory by using words like 'fictional' and 'universe.' The novel's literal universe is '31,' on the small side as far as universes go-'Not big enough for space opera and anyway not zoned for it' (p. Narrator Charles has chosen to no longer live chronologically, having decided that 'existence doesn't have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other' (p. Also, he has just shot a future version of himself in the stomach. The narrator's problem: His father is gone-has been gone for some time-and Narrator Charles needs to find him. Or, more simply, he fixes time machines, a job which amounts to getting people who use time travel recreationally, as a temporary fix for life's much larger and messier problems, out of sticky situations. The narrator of How to Live Safely-incidentally, a character also named Charles Yu-has isolated himself inside a time machine, where he works as 'a certified network technician for T-class personal-use chronogrammatical vehicles' (p. Which is to say, more simply, that maybe you can't find all the answers in instruction manuals. Standard genre tropes such as time travel and its many paradoxes are explored here with a fresh perspective, and by using these concerns as buttressing to his otherwise fairly conventional central story, Yu turns his worldbuilding lens inward, focusing on the existential angst that lurks deep within our modern souls by revealing all the problems associated with thinking too much about everything. But perhaps most importantly, it's a science fiction novel about science fiction.

It's also, as the title might suggest, a sort of postmodern survival guide. Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a clever, quirky, jargon-infused debut novel about a man in a time machine trying to find his father.

How to live safely in a science fictional universe analysis