how to live safely in a science fictional universe

The best SF is extravagant, prone to creative incongruities and hyperspatial jumps of comprehension, just as jokes are.

After all, there's something inherently playful about the genre, predicated as it is upon mucking about with the premises of reality. But I sometimes wonder if the default mode of SF isn't comic. Now SF comes in all flavours and many fans take their genre very seriously indeed. Yu's möbius loop doesn't spin free of the pains of living and we never lose sight of the vertiginous truth Yu memorably articulates (in theorem form) as 'at some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything for ever.' The thing is, the novel's brilliant stylistic and formal larking about grounds rather than contradicts its emotional truth. Han Solo, the narrator notes, was 'a hero because he was funny' Yu's 'phone booth sized' time machine is as much Bill & Ted as Tardis. It also understands that levity is the best way to get at some of life's most serious truths. But it is all redeemed in the telling by the charm and skill of Yu's voice, pitched somewhere in that interDouglas space between Coupland and Adams.īecause it is a novel fundamentally about a young man's relationship with his father, its frame of cultural reference is biased towards such SF as the original Star Wars trilogy or Philip K Dick. All this could easily have been up-own-fundament annoying, and is sometimes a touch too cute for its own good. The short-circuit of time travel, a familiar SF conceit from Heinlein's ' By His Bootstraps' to the Terminator movies, becomes an eloquent metaphor for the action of memory in our lives.Īppropriately, pages are busy with the tricks of self-referential game-playing: diagrams footnotes pages left blank excursions into 'the interstitial matrix' that 'fills up the space between stories' and the like. Yu's great skill lies in translating this intriguing but abstract notion into genuinely affecting emotional terms. The book is a perfectly stable physical object that actually exists, despite the fact that it seems to come from nowhere.'

The book is then published, and after its publication the man buys the book, gets in a time machine and starts the cycle all over again. More, he's not writing his own narrative so much as transcribing it from a copy given to him by his future self: 'A man brings a book with him back in time, giving it to himself and instructing himself to reproduce the book as faithfully as he can. All this happens within a sort of möbius narrative framework: for Yu has shot a future version of himself dead, trapping himself in a temporal loop. Charles spends most of the book lurking in his machine, bunking off work, interacting with various synthetic personalities and dwelling on his childhood relationship with his dad. The novel is not plotted in a linear manner.

How to live safely in a science fictional universe