How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

The base model TM-31 runs on state-of-the-art chronodiegetical technology: a six-cylinder grammar drive built on a quad-core physics engine, which features an applied temporalinguistics architecture allowing for free-form navigation within a rendered environment, such as, for instance, a story space and, in particular, a science fictional universe.

master’s in applied science fiction—I

My mother would do this, too, all that liquid emotion just filling her up, right up to the top of her tank, a heavy, sloshing volume, which at any moment could be tipped over, emptied out into the world.

He’s trapped in his whole dark-father-lost-son-galactic-monomyth thing and he doesn’t know any other way.

My mother, the Buddhist, who used to believe that through meditation it is possible to escape the temporal prison of myopic self-consciousness, has chosen to spend the rest of her life trapped in an hour of her own choosing.

Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.

It’s* old light,* it’s* new light,* it’s* all* the same age, it’s* all* the same light.*

I see a lot of regular offenders. People who can’t stop trying to hurt themselves. People who can’t stop doing stupid things because of their stupid hearts.

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.

We may not be able to change the past, but nevertheless, we still manage to screw things up fairly well.

could be half the person my dog is, I would be twice the human I am.

Worry was my mother’s mechanic, her mechanism for engaging with the machinery of living. Worry was an anchor for her, a hook, something to clutch on to in the world. Worry was a box to live inside of, worry a mechanism for evading the present, for re-creating the past, for dealing with the future.

What was I thinking? Because, if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I would even know what I do with myself. Even if you could skip to the end of it all, what would I do the next day with my life that would be so different from all the days that came before? What miraculous change would I make, after getting out of this rut, what new kind of person would I choose to be that next day? And the next? And how about the day after, and all of the days after that?

At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.

Holy Mother of Ursula K. Le Guin. She’s right again.

“See that? See how the little squib there just coincidentally happens to thematically match what we’re talking about now? Don’t you think that’s weird? The book, just like the concept of the ‘present,’ is a fiction. Which isn’t to say it’s not real. It’s as real as anything else in this science fictional universe. As real as you are. It’s a staircase in a house built by the construction firm of Escher and Sons. It’s fiction, not engineering. It’s a self-voiding fiction, an impossible object and yet, there it is: the object. The book. You. Here it is. Here you are.

How to order the thin slices of your life so that they appear to mean something?

What I do have control over is my own intention. In the space between free will and determinism are these imperceptible gaps, these lacunae, the volitional interstices, the holes and the nodes, the material and the aether, the something and nothing that, at once, separate and bind the moments together, the story together, my actions together, and it’s in these gaps, in these pauses where the fictional science breaks down, where neither the science nor the fiction can penetrate, where the fiction that we call the present moment exists.

Listen to him explain how he never meant to leave. He did leave, though. What he means, and listen to him good, is that he left and by the time he figured out he wanted to come home, it was too late. His time machine broke down, and he got trapped in the past. Tell him you understand. That’s what happens to all of us, you should say. The path of a man’s life is straight, straight, straight, until the moment when it isn’t anymore, and after that it begins to meander

around aimlessly, and then get tangled, and then at some point the path gets so confusing that the man’s ability to move around in time, his device for conveyance, his memory of what he loves, the engine that moves him forward, it can break, and he can get permanently stuck in his own history. When he says this, you just nod.

Move forward, into the empty plane. Find the book you wrote, and read it until the end, but don’t turn the last page yet, keep stalling, see how long you can keep expanding the infinitely expandable moment. Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it. [this page intentionally left blank]