Stuck in the present: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe puts a new spin on time travel

What would you do if you had a time machine? If you were at all like the characters in Charles Yu’s “science fictional universe,” you would most likely pay wads of cash to “relive [your] very worst moment over and over again.”

And it would be hilarious.

Yu’s first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, is a book about time travel. But it is not one that fits easily – or at all, really – into a science fiction genre category.

In a reading given at Eliot Bay Books in September, Yu, who was picked for the National Book Foundation’s Five Under 35 Award for his short story collection Third Class Superhero, said that he wanted to imagine everything as a potential time machine—a book, a character, a memory. The result is a novel that enlists the devices of genre fiction toward its own end.

Though the story takes place in corporate-sponsored (and structurally flawed) “Minor Universe 31”—and is accessorized with a whimsical array of far-future technology—it ultimately grapples with a familiar palate of literary themes: self-actualization, responsibility and the general prickliness of trying to live a fulfilling (and safe) life.

Charles Yu (also the novel’s main character) is a time machine repairman. His job is to rescue people “stuck, stuck in places they didn’t mean to go, in places they did mean to go, in places they shouldn’t have tried to go. They get into trouble. Logical, metaphysical, etc.”

Charles puts it to his clients this way: “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, you don’t have to worry, you can’t change the past. The bad news is, you don’t have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the past.” 

It is, of course, the “trying” that leads to trouble.

Read the full review after the jump. 

Despite this bleak premise, Yu’s novel is charmingly engaging and laugh-out-loud funny. The narrative involves surprisingly few actual people (outside of Charles), but does feature an original and likeable cast of non-human characters: TAMMY, Charles’s chronically insecure operating system; Phil, Charles’s “Microsoft Manager 2.0” supervisor, who doesn’t know he’s a program and affects a faux street-thug persona and Ed, Charles’s “nonexistent” (yet still “ontologically valid”) and moodily disapproving dog.

After a series of brief and amusing on-the-job episodes (one involving the rescue of Linus Skywalker, Luke’s disgruntled and patricidal nine-year-old son), Charles, too, gets into trouble.

The mechanism of time travel in Yu’s universe is much more conceptual than technical: the laws of motion are driven not by physics, but by grammar. Charles’s problem is that he has been living for too long with his time machine’s “Tense Operator” set to “Present-Indefinite”: he has essentially trapped himself in a “hidden cul-de-sac of space-time” in which nothing bad can happen to him—but in which nothing good can happen to him either.

When he is forced to check back in with temporal reality (Phil writes, “MY RECORDS ARE SHOWING YOUR UNIT IS DUE FOR MAINTENANCE. YOU FEEL ME, DOG?”), he unwittingly gets caught in a “time loop”— one which involves getting shot in the stomach by a past version of himself on a regularly recurring basis.

Since—even for Charles—there is no changing the past, the only way he can break out of this grim cycle is to change his present. This requires reconciling his differences with his reclusive mother and his estranged father (who happens to be—literally—lost in time).

Charles’s search for his father drives much of the story’s plot. But How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe also enters into heavy speculation about books and about narrative. It took me a few chapters to fully appreciate the word play in the title, but the difference between a science fiction universe and a science fictional one is important.

In Charles’s world for instance, the “foundational theory of chronodiegetical space” asserts that “[w]ithin a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.”

This leads to much play with and speculation about the act of creating stories—both on the page and off. A serious turn to the work of sussing out the complexities of this narrative world occurs in the second half of the book.

This ends up being a bit less fun to read than the easy-going playfulness of the book’s opening chapters, but what the story loses in levity it makes up for in surprises—ones which ultimately culminate in a shattered narrative space reminiscent of House of Leaves.

Though Yu borrows from Danielewski (and, in his treatment of time, from Vonnegut) his story remains fresh, creative and wholly original. This, combined with a well-tuned knack for asking heady questions while at the same time not taking himself too seriously, makes his novel both a pleasure to read and a pleasure to ponder after its closing page (which, by the way, is “intentionally left blank”).