Review: Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“Can you live your whole life at zero? Can you live your entire life in the exact point between comfort and discomfort?”

This question lies at the core of Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. It manifests in the relations between fathers and sons, between time machine repairmen and their managers, between a time traveler and his slightly melancholy time machine, whose pixilated face is forever burned into the time machine’s display, “leaving, frozen into the screen, a kind of history, a sum total of her expressions fixed into a retained outline...the melancholy algorithm of her soul averaged and captured and recorded as a function of time.” Everyone in this novel is somehow lost, frozen in some way or another.

Yu’s novel was first published last year by Pantheon and recently received a paperback release in Random’s Vintage Contemporary line, and for a book that at its core is both hopeful and melancholy it maintains a relatively light tone. The novel is brief, weighing in at less than 250 pages, and if anything could have been much longer. But that is part of the charm. This is a tightly wound narrative, one that doesn’t linger for too long in the world that it creates.

Which is not to say that the world is obscure, that time travel is just a gimmick. It is integral to the telling of this tale. The novel could not exist without taking the metaphor literally. As the narrator travels through his own life, he travels through his memory. This is the nature of time travel here, for “every time a user recalls a memory, he is not only remembering it, but also...literally re-creating the experience.” At its heart, Yu’s novel is about the relationship between a son and a father, and the ways it has gotten off course enough that the father has literally become lost in time. Somehow, the novel manages to straddle the line between monologue and narrative. Yes, it lingers in its digressions, in its explorations of the “rules” of this universe. But if it lags, it lags only for a moment. If the momentum of the piece is hindered in the flashbacks, it is hindered only for a moment, and the lighthearted tone more than makes up for this.

Because the tone is where this work shines. For a novel that begins with an epigraph from Hume, that begins with a description of its narrator’s isolation, that is concerned with grief, regret and loss, the tone is surprisingly light. Page 27 of this text contains a huge chunk of fine print. The narrator’s manager is “an old copy of Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0” who “thinks he’s a real person” and invites the narrator for a beer even after finding out it’s only a program. The book revels in its metatextuality, but not in a way that offends the reader—the narrator has a conversation with what is essentially himself halfway through the book (which is unfortunately better when experienced than when described), and the book that becomes so integral to the plot is How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. This is experimental fiction at its best; irreverent, purposeful, tasteful and poignant all at t he same time. The combination of these traits is difficult to pull off, but somehow Yu manages it. And the success lies in his ability to jump from a conversation with that manager to a scene in which a girl uses a time machine to try to save her dying grandmother, who can’t succeed without fundamentally changing her entire life, the entire universe. It lies in Yu’s ability to weave together a narrative about a father and a son that masquerades as a pure science fiction novel that, at its core, is about a far more human issue—which is something not only the best speculative fiction does, but something that the best writing does.