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Health & Fitness

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

A book about a book.

Reality can be a drag. Wouldn’t it be nice to trade the laws of science for the laws of science-fiction and be able to, say, travel back in time? Surely escaping Father Time’s iron grip would make life easier.

Charles Yu begs to differ. His new novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, shows that even fictional science has unbreakable laws. With dry wit and a meta-plot, Yu shows that being a sci-fi character isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The plot centers on Charles Yu, a time machine repairman in Minor Universe 31. After his father mysteriously disappears, Yu settles into this middling job and, by jury-rigging his time machine, spends years living outside the space-time continuum. The only way for Yu to find his father and move on with his life is to write a book called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

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That may sound repetitive, but that’s the point. Yu’s novel is meta-fiction; a story about stories. The concept is a refreshing one: it’s hard to think of a sci-fi story that hasn’t been done, but it is interesting to see what happens between scenes, before (and after) the hero/heroine makes his/her appearance.

Yu looks under the hood of science-fiction with dry humor. The writing is minimalistic and jokes are uniformly deadpan. His most devastating trick, however, is his use of the mundane. Science-fiction is full of rules like “retconning” (the practice of changing details about a character’s past), and Yu ridicules them by comparing them to bureaucracy. 

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The narrative is interrupted by excerpts from its eponymous how-to book detailing procedures and rules such as the necessary qualifications for main characters. It all makes the genre of H.G. Wells and George Lucas seem ... kind of boring. It’s funny to think of a science-fiction universe being run like a corporate office.

You won’t see any heroes in this story, just the minor characters that make up the majority of any sci-fi cast. Like regular people, they have problems: unfilled dreams, social awkwardness, family trouble. They have more in common with the people that write and read science-fiction than they do with Luke Skywalker or James T. Kirk.

Science-fiction often serves as an escape from reality, but for Yu’s characters, that isn’t an option. Even with time travel, they can’t solve their problems. That is incredibly depressing to think about, but it’s important not to take this novel too seriously.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a humorous riff on science-fiction. Yu satirizes the conventions of sci-fi in a way that seems very appropriate in an age where spoofing Star Wars can net millions of television viewers. If you think you’ve seen all that science-fiction has to offer, take a look at this.

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