How To Live Safely In A Science Fiction Universe

[RPG Post]

How To Live Safely In A Science Fiction Universe

How To Live Safely In A Science Fiction Universe (HTL from here on out), by Charles Yu, is not a simple book. The theme, the characters, the plot are simple enough. A man searches for the father who left him, bemoans the choices he made in life and seeks some sort of family reconciliation. The language is what's complex. And it's complex, weaving in and out of time and tense, moving into metareflection and, in one footnote, meta metareflection.

The protagonist, named Charles Yu, is not a bright character. He's not heroic, nor ambitious nor particularly likeable. Which creates a problem when everything, no matter how clichéd or banal feeds through his thoughts. If a small person, a petty mind, reflects on great events that change history, events we have some other source of information about, the reflections can be poignant. We see what they have missed and it gives greater insight into their minds, allowing us to reflect upon our own. But in HTL, the feel was mainly one of stop whining and get on with it.

Gertrude Stein, Nicholson Baker and Marcel Proust Walk Into a Bar

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What The New York Times has to Say

The reviews for the book are mixed but the one from the New York Times is indicative of the general flavor. It is excerpted below. The full review and a short interview can be found here.

Originally Posted By: The New York Times

Lev Grossman Reviews How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

The science-fictional universe in question in this marvel of a novel is Minor Universe 31 (MU31). It's something of a second-rate universe, having been left unfinished by whoever was constructing it--the laws of physics were abandoned only 93 percent installed, Yu tells us, and the human inhabitants "seem to have been left with a lingering sense of incompleteness." This is a universe you need to visit. If by some happy chance you don’t already live there. ....

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a triumph, as good as anything in Calvino or Stanislaw Lem. I wish I could travel back in time with a copy and fraudulently publish it under my own name. Like most people, I thought I learned everything I needed to know about time travel from H.G. Wells and Star Trek, but I thought wrong: In Yu's skillful hands a worn-out science fiction plot device becomes a powerfully expressive metaphor for how we experience the flickering, ineffable, ungraspable spatio-temporal phenomenon of life. Because after all, we're all time travelers, blundering forward into the future at the rate of one second per subjectively experienced second. ...."

Stanislav Lem This Is Not

It's an odd comparison. Yu's book is slender, 230 pages or so, attempting to understand the ordinary, through the eyes of the ordinary, without any greater appreciation of life. Lem looked at the alien, the ineffable and the utter inability of humanity to come to grips with anything outside of their experience. Solaris was a psychological exploration of communication, memory, emotional connection and the eldritch. Yu reminds me much more of Nicholson Baker's self indulgent inflation of the everyday into the revelatory (which he sometimes achieves) combined with Proust's layering of multiple layers and empty verbiage upon the simplest of acts. Sometimes waking up is just waking up.

Yu's language is convoluted and dense. I found myself inserting dreams and hallucinations within paragraphs to enliven them, my mind wandering more often than investing itself in the tale. I find myself more willing to read Wittgenstein again than to traipse back through what feels like failed literary exercise, one that the Iowa Writer's Group or an academic review might find new and refreshing in a condescending way: "Oh look, he did something with science fiction and the language is thick and sticky, like tar. We must award him."

This is not new material, the language, t

hough it strives for playfulness, is the work of an immature writer and someone who seems to be not particularly well read. The masturbation and sex-bot references are stale.

Click to reveal..

The one event, that the main character finds amazing at the end, is, quite simply, stupid. It is akin to expecting the audience watching a Looney Tunes feature to be surprised that the cigar blows up. Who of the intended audience, exactly, does Yu expect to have not seen the truth, minor as it is, and to have gone on? Surely not many preschool students will have this read to them.

Reviewing art is always difficult. A lot of people on Amazon, IO9, GeekDad and other boards like this book. They found it new, refreshing, insightful. I found it none of those and, on a higher level, am insulted that it is held up as an example of literary achievement within speculative fiction. If the bar is set at TV serial novels, and one has no clue of the existence of Ellison, Letham, Vonnegut, Le Guin, Kress, Powers and the thousands of other authors who manipulate language like origami masters, then perhaps HTL is a discovery.

I wish I had my time back.

[Mr Fox]

I feel much the same way about the Wizards' First Rule series by Terry Goodkind. The first book was pretty good. They go downhill from there at an accelerating rate. He uses his books as nothing more than a vehicle for his spreading his philosophy. He is strongly Liberatarian (there's nothing wrong with that). I actually happen to agree with much of his philosophy and yet I still felt like I was being bludgeoned with it page after paged, book after book. It's pretty sad when someone who agrees with you (mostly) still finds your works to be tiresome and pedantic. (oooh, I used a fancy word!)

I want my time back! Shame we can't demand a refund on our time spent....

[Titan]

+1 Fox- Terry Goodkind is not a fun read anymore. I get it.

[SalmonMax]

I honestly found it tiresome even getting through the first book. I never even tried any others. It's as wordy and occasionally plodding as Wheel of Time, only with the occasional entertainment value replaced with etho-political lecturing. Oh, and uncomfortable-to-read fetishism.

Kinda like I found Heinlein in Starship Troopers. One of the most overrated books ever...and similarly, Wizard's First Rule has a solid rep as being a work of genius.

Weird.

[Mr Fox]

I actually liked Starship Troopers, but that was partially due to the fact that I was reading it thinking, "wow, I can't believe he's saying this stuff." It too was ideologically oriented but unlike Wizard's first rule, it seemed to have some entertainment value, at least to me. But I agree that it wasn't anything special and doesn't really deserve the acclaim it has gotten.

That said, I do like Heinlien. It's good to keep in mind when reading his stuff that he was from an earlier generation and was a pioneer in the SciFi field and everything he and Clark and Tolkien and the those guys were doing back then was breaking new ground. So I tend to cut them some slack for not being as polished as some of the modern authors that have had the works of these guys to stand on.

[SalmonMax]

I like some of Heinlein. He's at his best when he's just writing "space fantasy," IMO...not taking the story or himself too seriously. He has several stories that are like that. When he tries to do Very Important Things though, he gets bogged down.

My issue with Tolkien isn't the polish, it's just that the man doesn't know how to tell a story. He has no real sense of pacing or dialogue. Don't get me wrong...he has a hell of an imagination, and that alone gives his vision power...but I usually enjoy reading books ABOUT Tolkien and Middle Earth more than I like actually reading Tolkien himself.

But I don't make it a value judgement on the man himself. Tolkien started out a linguist, not a novelist.

[Mr Fox]

Yeah, that's the thing to remember about him. He wrote the stories because he loved coming up with the languages that are in his world. Really wish I'd taken the time to learn Quenya or the other elf language, they are very beautiful sounding.

Reading Tolkien's stories was a major factor in who I am today. If I hadn't started reading fantasy as a result of reading the Hobbit in 7th grade, I'd be a different person.