How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

The books in his study, with their rigid cloth spines and their impenetrable titles, they seemed daunting and impossible back then, but now, thinking back, I can see how the books were all related, I can see how they were, collectively, a bibliography of a career in striving, in aiming, in seeking to understand the world. My father searched for systems of thought, for patterns, rules, even instructions. Fake religions, real religions. How-to books. Turn Three Thousand into Half a Million. Turn half a million into ten. Conquer Your Weaknesses. Conquer yourself. Inventory of Your Soul. Take an inventory of your own failings. Higher mathematics and properties of materials, somber, gray monographs on single, esoteric subjects were side by side with books with bright red titles, titles dripping with superlatives, with promises of actualization, realization, books that diagrammed the self as a fixable lemon, self as a challenge in mechanics, self as an exercise in bullet points, self as a collection of traits to be altered, self as a DIY project. Self as a kind of problem to be solved.

I don’t miss him anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. I wish I could but unfortunately, it’s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

My first understanding of grammar came from her, which is to say, my first understanding of chronogrammatical principles, of the present, the past, the future. I fall/I fell/I will fall. I am a good boy. I will always be her boy. I don’t know what I would do without you. I don’t know what I will do without you. I learned about the future tense, how anxiety is encoded into our sentences, our conditionals, our thoughts, how worry is encoded into language itself, into grammar.

One potential structure that can occur in a closed time-like curve, or CTC, is a worldline that is not continuously joined to any earlier regions of space–time, i.e., events that, in a sense, have no causes. In the standard account of causality required by a chronodiegetical determinist, each four-dimensional box has, immediately preceding it, another four-dimensional box that serves as the emotional and physical cause. However, in a CTC, this notion of causality has no explanatory power, due to the fact that an event can be concurrent with its own cause, could be thought of as perhaps even causing itself.