asianamlitfans | Sep. 3rd, 2012

I've been meaning to read Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon, 2010) for awhile since

stephenhongsohn posted a review. Though I had checked out the book from the library a few times before, I always returned it without starting in on it. I finally got around to reading it this weekend, though.

I enjoyed the novel, and it was a shorter read than I anticipated, with the narrative moving at a fairly rapid pace. The novel is really about two things: the logic of science fiction narrative and the protagonist's relationship with his father. In another layer of playfulness, Yu names the protagonist Charles Yu--to what extent are we to think of this novel as autobiographical? In what ways, if at all? Since the novel deals with alternate universes, where individuals exist in many instances, some only subtly different from each other, the fact that the protagonist (who is himself an author in the novel of the eponymous How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which is in some ways a tip of the hat to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a kind of survival guide) has the same name as the author certainly seems a deliberate point. How Yu weaves together these two disparate topics is what is most interesting about the novel.

Regarding science fiction narrative, what I really found fascinating about Yu's take on time travel is that he builds up the novel-world's theory of science and time on grammatical concepts. Especially in the first half of the novel, before the second topic about family relationships takes precedence in the narrative (what

stephenhongsohn noted as the more emotionally resonant aspects of the novel), Yu plays a lot with the tenses of sentences: present, past, future, subjunctive, and probably others that I no longer remember the names for anymore... He combines grammatical tense with formal logic and physics in a geeky melange of theories that make up the science fictional universe of his novel.

I've never been married. I never got married. The woman I didn't marry is named Marie. Technically, she doesn't exist. Just like Ed [his retconned dog].

Except that she does. A little paradox, you might think, but really, The Woman I Never Married is a perfectly valid ontological entity. Or class of entities. I suppose technically you could make the argument that every woman is The Woman I Never Married. So why not call her Marie, that was my thinking.

At times, this push and pull of grammatical tense can get a bit too much, but it also is perfect in conveying the kind of ambivalence that the protagonist has towards his life (past, present, and future). I suspect that people who have read far more science fiction may have a different relationship to the metafictional quality of the novel, as would people who are more familiar with the scientific concepts about time and space that Yu reinvents.

I read the book on an ebook reader, which was slightly frustrating because the novel makes use of footnotes, endnotes, and some figures that probably were rendered slightly different on the screen than they are in a printed copy. It's interesting to think about the experience of reading this particular book on an ereader, though, because of the novel's preoccupation with how narratives and genre conventions unfold in our experience of them. In the latter part of the book, the protagonist reads, writes, dictates, revise, and otherwise produces while consuming the book How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and Yu describes the recursive, somewhat paradoxical process, in quite a bit of detail as the protagonist uses a device that can record his eye movements, his virtual typing, and even his thought patterns.

I ultimately liked this novel better than Yu's debut short story collection, Third-Class Superhero (there's a nod to that title story in this novel when the protagonist as a kid browses comic books), because it sustains a narrative perspective and story over a longer span. One of my difficulties with that earlier collection was that the narrative voice felt identical to me across the stories, even though the characters were meant to be different people in different stories (and even worlds). I do look forward to reading Yu's new collection of stories, Sorry Please Thank You, though, because I think he is really settling in to a particular kind of hyper-self-conscious narrative voice that is very interesting when it is executed well.

There's another book cover image floating around online. I like it better than the one I've seen (above) with the multiple guns. For one thing, guns aren't really a major part of the narrative. But I also like this other cover's illustration of the protagonist and his dog Ed! It also has a kind of kitschy quality, like the kinds of illustrations that might come with pulp science fiction.