Book 30: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu

Charles Yu has a lot of very interesting, and reasonably novel, ideas about time travel. Unfortunately, access to those ideas in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is restricted to those who can wade through an uncomfortably prickly thicket of over-wrought, self-important prose at the same aimless pace as the plot (such as it is) dictates. There's cleverness, to be sure, in Yu's use of his own novel within the plot, but it is played for trite, self-serving ends instead of contributing at all to the story (such as it is) or characters (such as they are). There's nothing wrong with mixing science fiction and very literary fiction, as Yu does in his novel, but this book exemplifies the way that each genre can individually go wrong; the synthesis fares little better. On the "literary" side, Yu's main character is the most transparently Mary Sue of them all, the plot plods at a pace that would make glaciers feel like gazelles, and the prose is woefully overwritten with a haughty and alienating holier-than-thou attitude. As for science fiction, this book provides a labyrinthine, half-constructed world that celebrates its incompletion and embraces a nonsense theory of time travel that is hastily, though not at all effectively, retconned in the book's final act. The science in science fiction needn't be hard, or plausible in the real world, but surely it isn't too much to ask that it is more than a convenient excuse for an author to feign seriousness and plead for nerd credibility. Surely it isn't too much to ask that it kind of makes sense?

And then there's the author himself. Yu seems to use the novel as a vehicle through which to examine and, possibly, repent for his own sins. Unfortunately, it reads as an in-joke. Everywhere Yu has a possibility to resurrect the interesting bits and cast aside his apparently insatiable need to focus endlessly on himself, he takes the book in yet another incomprehensible direction. The novel commits the worst of all possible sins: it is deliberately obtuse, constructed to make self-congratulating critics writhe with pleasure after forging some fabricated sense of meaning out of the intentionally obscure. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is alienating, insulting, and a horrific insult to literary fiction and science fiction, unifying them in a Frankenstein's monster of everything that's wrong with literature.

Grade: D