How To Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe

“The good news is, you don’t have to worry, you can’t change the past.

The bad news is, you don’t have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the past.”

Charles reminds each of his clients that the past is impossible to change, emphasizing the impact that this could have on their lives. While this may not feel like a good thing, Charles hints at a kind of freedom; if one can’t change things, one is not responsible for trying. The quote also hints at Charles’s journey through the father-son axis, where he watches his memories of the past but starts to change his understanding of them. Insight into the unchanging past can prove useful to one in the present.

“We drew on boxes, in boxes, we graphed on graph paper with the world subdivided into little boxes. We made metal boxes and put smaller boxes inside, and onto those boxes were etched little two-dimensional boxes, circuits and loops and schematics, the grammar of time travel. We made boxes out of language, logic, rules of syntax. […] He was trying to make the perfect box. A vehicle to move through possibility space, a vehicle to happiness or whatever it was he was looking for.”

In this passage, Charles Yu establishes the symbolic function of boxes in the novel. Boxes do not only manifest physically like the TM-31, but as language. Words serve as containers of thought and memory, which supports the novel’s larger suggestion that narration and memory are forms of time travel.

“Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.”

Science fiction stories conventionally rely on physical conditions to inform elements like time travel. Yu, on the other hand, focuses on The Dynamics of Identity, Regret, and Potential; emotion and remorse provide the physics for moving about through time.

“‘If you bend too much and for too long, the porthole becomes an actual hole, and you might end up over there.’

‘Maybe that’s what I want.’

‘Trust me. It’s not. That’s not home. I know it seems like home, everything looks the same, but it’s not. You weren’t there. It will never be the case that you were.’”

In this passage, Charles introduces the idea that alternate realities—though they may look familiar—are not the same as one’s actual reality. If a person tries to change the past, they will inevitably feel alienated by their own environment.

“A typical customer gets into a machine that can literally take her whenever she’d like to go. Do you want to know what the first stop usually is? Take a guess. Don’t guess. You already know: the unhappiest day of her life.

[…]

They don’t want trouble, they just don’t know what else to do. 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.”

Charles explains the motivations of his clients. He suggests that people are typically inclined to revisit their regrets because it is instinctive. The passage comments on human irrationality and the influence of emotion.

“[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.”

Yu expands on the adage that “time heals all wounds” by looking at it through the lens of his science fictional universe. He explains the impact of time on human experience: Time itself acts as a “machine.” In retrospect, people understand the events of their lives in a more rational, methodical way. This provides insight, but the visceral emotion of the experience is lost.

“My father had originally come from a faraway country, a part of reality, a tiny island in the ocean, a different part of the planet, really, a different time, where people still farmed with water buffalo and believed that stories, like life, were all straight lines of chronology, where there was enough magic left in the real, in the humidity of August and the mosquito and the sun and birth, enough magic and terror in the strangeness of family itself, that time travel devices were not only unnecessary, but would have diminished the world, would have changed its mechanic, its web of invisible dynamics. The technology of the day was enough, the technology of the sunrise and sunset, the week of work and rest in cycles, in rhythm, sixteen hours of hard rice-farming labor, the remainder of time in a day left for eating and sleeping, the seasons, the years passing by, each one a perfect machine.”

Charles discusses his father’s background as an immigrant, distancing the simpler, rural way of life in his father’s home country from his own. Charles makes a subtle commentary on how Western civilization is built on memory and regret, making time travel necessary to continue living. The passage uses long sentences with multiple clauses, creating a sense of lyricism.

“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.”

Charles’s mother is characterized by her sense of anxiety, which informs her dynamic with Charles. Charles sees her anxiety as negative, which is why he tries to assuage her with a commercial time loop. His mother, however, cannot completely erase her anxiety; it is the mode that she uses to survive in the world. The passage repeats “Worry” for emphasis.

“I am making the book my own, in retyping a book that already exists in the future, producing the very book I will eventually write. I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense, am currently writing, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write.”

In this passage, Charles describes the paradoxical experience of writing the book he has received from his future self. Charles distances himself from his future self by describing the process as one of transcription. He struggles to reconcile who he is in relation to his future self and the act of writing the book. He also alludes to the nonlinearity of time in his universe, with the past, present, and future conflating.

“It is unclear what the function of this self-referentiality is, other than to raise doubts in my mind as to the actual provenance of this manuscript, although I do note that this third sentence, just like the rest of this footnote, is also in the text I am copying from, verbatim, which makes it seem almost as if I am, in a way, telling myself what to think, that my future self has produced a record of the output of my consciousness, of my internal monologue. Or rather, a dialogue, between myself and my future self, in which my future self is telling my present self what I have already finished thinking but have not yet realized I thought.”

The novel deepens its metafictionality by making the character of Charles interrogate his own intentions as the writer of the book that appears within the novel. As Charles raises questions about the function of his authorial decisions, Yu, the writer, is simultaneously raising questions about his own authorial process, exposing the absurdity of writing as an endeavor.

“This is a document that came from nowhere. This is a chunk of information created spontaneously out of nothing, filtered through my interpretation and memory.”

This passage explores the endeavor of creative writing: Writers create books out of nothing, fusing together elements taken from different cognitive processes to make something tangible and concrete. The Book from Nowhere is a literalization of this concept; even more than other works, it literally is born from nothing.

“Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.”

Charles explores The Dynamics of Identity, Regret, and Potential, centering disappointment as a hallmark of his future. Charles believes that his future self has come back to warn him about how he will fail over the years. However, it is later revealed that his future self has come back to share what he knows with himself as an act of hope. Charles’s character arc will show a movement from stasis and pessimism to action and redemption.

“[All] I can do is read it to see what happens to my father, what happened to him, to us, to see if it is true, to learn what I am apparently thinking right now, to learn what I will think, to see if I can make any sense out of his life. Which is what sons do for their time-traveling fathers, act as biographers for them, as science fictional biographers, as literary executors, taking the inheritance of the contents of their fathers’ lives, given to them in an unprocessed jumble, out of order and nonsensical.”

Because his father plays such a significant role in the narrative, Charles acknowledges that his story is also the story of his father. Yu uses this passage to comment on the ways writers who write about themselves cannot divorce their work from their relationships.

“The present incense will become the very stuff that props itself up, and allows other, future incense to stand vertically, for a time, each current incense unable to stand alone, only able to perform its function with the help of all other past incense, like time itself, supporting the present moment, as it itself turns into past, each burning stick transmitting the prayers sent through it, releasing the prayers contained within it, nothing but a transitory vehicle for its contents, and then releasing itself into the air, leaving behind only the burnt odor, the haze and residue of uncollectible memory, and at the same time becoming part of the air itself, the very air that allows the present to burn, to combust, to slowly work itself down into nothingness.”

In this passage, Yu again uses long sentences to create a sense of lyricism. He describes Buddhist philosophy in a way that resonates with the novel’s discussions on being and nothingness. Incense can be seen as a mirror for Charles in the time loop. The sticks burn down into nothing to create a foundation for future prayers. Likewise, the future Charles comes back to be shot so that past Charles can grow and move forward with his life.

“Who do you think you are? […] You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think. You are the only version of you that is you. There are less of you than you think, and more. There are a million versions of you, half a trillion. One for every particle, every quantum coin flip. […] You can’t trust a guy who gives you a book and says, This is your life. He might have been your future, he might not. Only you know how you get there. Only you know what you need to do.”

In this passage, the shuttle driver alludes to The Dynamics of Identity, Regret, and Potential. He suggests that identity is a fictional concept and that people are always different from what they think they are. It is futile to imagine an ideal self because one cannot really account for how close they actually are to being that self.

“I remember how I would sit there thinking, Who am I trying to fool, sitting there as if I wasn’t fazed by it, every day, for years, ever since I was a small child, as if it had no effect on me, as if it didn’t hurt.

[…] [What] I didn’t realize then was that there was an observer, and in fact, it was me, it’s me now, looking back at myself from inside this time machine.”

In this passage, Yu portrays retrospection as a moving, intimate encounter with the self. The young Charles might have been performing normalcy without an audience, but the adult Charles is examining him. Charles was performing to convince his older self that he was okay, even if all other signs pointed to the opposite being true.

“Living is a form of time travel. Time travel is a physical process.”

In this passage, Charles’s father arrives at a functional theory of time travel, which reduces the act into a mundane process. He suggests that everything is traveling through time by default. This brushes against the novel’s heavily technical discussions on time travel theory and speculative science.

“Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is a time machine. It’s just that most people’s machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines. We are all perfectly engineered time machines, technologically equipped to allow the inside user, the traveler riding inside each of us, to experience time travel, and loss, and understanding.”

Charles’s father expands his initial theory of time travel by suggesting that everyone already has a natural capacity to move into the past and the future at will. In this passage, Yu emphasizes that time travel is an overarching metaphor for the human ability to think outside the present and assign value judgments to the past and the future.

“This man is someone for whom the world isn’t a mystery. The world is a boulder, but it has levers and he knows when and where and how to apply just the right amount of force, and it moves for him, while my father and I, pushing up against it, don’t have any angle, any torque, no grip or traction or leverage.”

In this passage, Charles compares himself and his father with the research director of the Institute of Conceptual Technology. The director is characterized as someone who doesn’t find the mystery of the world challenging. He can easily manipulate it, unlike Charles and his father. In this way, the passage is a commentary on privilege and access to resources in scientific fields.

“This is a day when my father is everything he has always wanted to be. Everything I have always wanted him to be. Everything he normally isn’t. But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.”

Charles extends his insight on the inexplicability of human identity to his father. He realizes that his father’s identity as a person is so much more than his identity as a parent. When his father speaks about his passions, Charles catches a different glimpse of him, allowing him to realize that people contain multitudes within them.

“Failure is easy to measure. Failure is an event.

Harder to measure is insignificance. A nonevent. Insignificance creeps, it dawns, it gives you hope, then delusion, then one day, when you’re not looking, it’s there, at your front door, on your desk, in the mirror, or not, not any of that, it’s the lack of all that. One day, when you are looking, it’s not looking, no one is. You lie in your bed and realize that if you don’t get out of bed and into the world today, it is very likely no one will even notice.”

Charles describes his father’s lack of significance as the root cause of his family unit’s estrangement. Yu evokes the mirror reflection, which he deployed in the first chapter, to stress the empathy that Charles feels for his father as an adult. Charles inherits his father’s sense of insignificance, which he perpetuates by living in the Present-Indefinite.

“My father was such a practical man, and this kit no doubt seemed silly to him, which makes the fact that he bought it mean that much more to me. Laid out like this, the contents of the kit remind me of times in our garage laboratory workshop, our version of the director’s fancy research institute on the hill, our makeshift center for father–son studies filled with dollar items from the plastic bins at the hardware store. Maybe this is what he wanted me to see. Maybe looking at these items himself, he came to some kind of acceptance himself of why we never made it, the destined-to-fail nature of our little future enterprise. Still, it’s hard to believe that he got this kit just so I might someday think back about our work together.”

Charles reacts to the Chrono-Adventurer Survival Kit by considering it against the context of his father’s priorities and personality. Knowing that his father got him the kit in spite of his practicality and lack of resources, Charles is moved to believe that his father desired reconciliation.

“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 self-voiding fiction, an impossible object and yet, there it is: the object. The book. You. Here it is. Here you are. They are both perfectly valid ideas, necessary, even, to solve the problem your human brain has to solve: how to determine which events occur in what order? How to organize the data of the world into a sequence that appeals to your intuitions about causality? How to order the thin slices of your life so that they appear to mean something? You’re looking out a window, a little porthole in fact, just like the one on the side of this time machine you’re in, and out your window you see a little piece of the landscape, and you have to somehow extrapolate from that what the terrain of your life is like. Your brain has to trick itself in order to live in time.”

In this passage, TAMMY points out that the function of fiction is not to arrive at a perfectly constructed object, but to experience time in such a way that both the writer and the reader arrive at an important insight. She brings together the image of reading a book and the TM-31 through the porthole window to show how Charles’s travels through time have represented the experience of fiction all along.