52 pages • 1 hour read
How To Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe
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Themes
Fate Versus Free Will
Charles Yu implies that one can have agency even in the context of a predetermined fate. Ultimately, Charles the protagonist faces his fate: being shot by his past self. His decision to confront his fate head-on illustrates that he still possesses free will.
Initially, Charles doubts that he possesses agency. When he encounters his future self and shoots him, it traps him in a time loop. He also questions whether any effort to escape the outcome is futile. If the time loop can only ever end with Charles’s shooting, then nothing is stopping him from going straight to that moment and accepting his fate. If he does accept his fate, however, it means that his life has no resolution or meaning. The unresolved thread of his father’s disappearance will always remain a mystery with no one left to solve it. In the context of the time loop, Charles sees life as a meaningless, useless endeavor.
The book empowers Charles to escape the time loop and find meaning. The only thing future Charles says before getting shot is that the book is the key. While this statement is later proven to be literal, its figurative meaning extends to fate, and the pall it casts over Charles. The book contains information about Charles’s life, which means that he has to learn something about himself. Charles does not immediately know what he is supposed to learn, only that it must be important if his future self expressed it. This gives Charles something to live for. Rather than submitting to the inevitability of his death, Charles endeavors to obtain information before his time has ended. He hopes that newfound knowledge may save him. The novel implies that, no matter what, one still has the agency to prepare for challenges, possibly even overcoming them in the process.
The question of free will and fate arises in the writing of the book that future Charles gives present Charles. Charles wonders who the real author is. Can it really be him, or does he derive the book’s text simply from the book his future self gave him? The more he distances himself from the idea that he has authored the book, the closer he gets to concluding that the book is a paradox, having come from nowhere. Ultimately, the shuttle driver urges him to accept that he is the writer of the book because he is choosing to follow its story to the end. Charles can’t help but become the book’s author because the book is the story of the quest he has chosen to pursue. By embracing the quest, he has embraced agency.
Once Charles learns that the book is meant to help him resolve the mystery of his father, Charles lands upon a valuable insight. He can’t find his father unless he closes the loop: He has to experience being shot by his past self and survive. In the last moments before his shooting, Charles considers avoiding his fate in an alternate universe or the Present-Indefinite but realizes that these choices will only prolong the loop and heighten his sense of meaninglessness. He concludes that in the face of a fated outcome, he can at least control the way he reacts to that outcome. He defies the idea of fate by choosing to accept it, living in the hope that if he experiences his shooting, he can convey the information that saves his past self’s life.
The Dynamics of Identity, Regret, and Potential
When Charles first looks at the finished copy of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, he distances himself from the idea of authorship. He supposes that he will write the text, but only considers it in the context of his future self’s instructions. Charles cannot reconcile his present identity with his apparent future as a writer. This points to the tension between the static and dynamic qualities of human identity.
Charles isn’t the only character who raises the idea of potential. His father approaches the possibility of becoming someone who matters in the universe when discovering a functional version of time travel technology. He then becomes defined by his failure, which trickles into his relationships with his family. Likewise, Charles meets a version of his mother whom he calls The Woman My Mother Should Have Been. He thinks that the idealized version of his mother is one who lives without attachment and anxiety. It’s an ideal that exists in his mind, irrespective of the life his mother wants to lead. From his mother’s perspective, her anxiety is an irrepressible part of her identity. Charles is uncomfortable engaging with this part of his mother, which is why he can’t make sense of what she really wants from him.
The novel grapples with regret. Chronodiegetics, the central theory that explains the narrative rules of Yu’s speculative universe, is often described as a theory of regret. Charles wants his life to align with his expectations. However, he can’t control his relationships with his parents, TAMMY, or Phil in a way that satisfies the regrets he feels with his life thus far; Charles pulls himself out of time, living in its fringes in the Present-Indefinite mode. Whenever he reenters time, it is primarily to prevent his clients’ misuse of time travel technology. Charles’s interventions often involve cautioning people against changing the past. He explains to one client that trying to alter the past won’t change what happened, only trap them in an alternate universe where the outcome they desired did happen. In the short run, the time traveler may feel that they have achieved their goal, but in the long run, they will become increasingly alienated from their new universe as they realize they don’t belong in it. Charles remains in the Present-Indefinite, as his regrets make him feel like he doesn’t belong in his own universe.
Charles eventually learns that acceptance is the antidote to regret. The shuttle driver who exists in the interstitial space between stories urges him to be brave enough to accept that he is the author of his own story, referring not only to the book Charles writes but to the story of his life. Charles not only accepts his shooting as a given outcome, but comes to accept that he cannot force his relationships with others to cater to his feelings. The most he can do is to adjust his reaction to things, which becomes the first step for him to move forward with his life.
Reckoning with Family Trauma
The novel shows how trauma can manifest across a family unit in complex ways. Charles primarily deals with the fallout of his strained relationship with his father, while navigating the impact that this strain has on his relationship with his mother.
Charles’s relationship with his father is the emotional anchor of the novel. As an adult, Charles keeps relitigating the way his father behaved during his childhood to find clues for dealing with his own sadness. At one point, Charles realizes that his father experienced generational trauma, mourning the loss of his own father, whom Charles never knew. Charles’s father keeps trying to live up to a standard of success. Charles, on the other hand, imagines that when he finds his father again, he will confront him for all the time they’ve spent away from one another. What Charles wants, beyond the pain he feels, is to reconnect with his father and find a way through his melancholy.
In the absence of his father, Charles accidentally estranges himself from his mother. Charles’s mother is kept in a time loop where she is forced to live through a hologram of idealized family life. She alludes to living outside of the time loop, signaling that she doesn’t want to live in an illusion. She keeps asking Charles to call and visit her, suggesting that she really values his presence. On the other hand, Charles cannot bring himself to engage with her and open up about how he feels. He’s afraid that if he does so he will accept his father’s disappearance as something that he can never resolve. He willfully represses himself and maintains his distance to hold back from dealing with his issues as much as he can.
The epilogue of the novel, which sees Charles reuniting his family, is labeled as an appendix. This hints that the resolution of the family’s estrangement is not as important to the novel as the self-awareness that precedes it. Charles’s realization that his father will not save him from the time loop is a major turning point in his journey as someone who has been deeply affected by family trauma. He understands that to find his father, he needs to resolve his emotional issues on his own first. He needs to accept the difficult facts of his life and move past them, the way he comes to accept the event of his own shooting.
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