52 pages • 1 hour read
Charles YuHow To Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Metafiction
Metafiction is a genre of fiction characterized by awareness of itself as fiction and of the reader’s experience of the text. Metafictional works typically refer to their own narrative structures, pointing out patterns that engage with the reader’s expectations of how the narrative is supposed to progress. This literary genre became especially popular with the rise of postmodernism. It often relies on the reader’s knowledge of literary conventions to leverage critiques on the function of stories and art.
The American writer William H. Gass first proposed the concept of metafiction in Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970). Some of the best-known examples of metafiction date as far back as English author Geoffrey Chaucer’s work The Canterbury Tales in the late 14th century. Metafiction found its apex in the 1960s and ’70s with global authors commenting on literary structure, textual validity, and the social function of literature through their stories. Italian author Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler begins by directly addressing the reader as they engage with the novel and discover other novels hidden within it.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is primarily a work of metafiction. It features a protagonist/narrator who shares his name with the book’s author, Charles Yu. Later, it is revealed that the protagonist has written a book that shares its title with the novel. This creates the illusion that the reader is not only reading the novel that Yu wrote as the author of the text, but also the text that appears in the book. The novel often plays around with its own structure. At one point, the protagonist Charles Yu decides to skip forward to the end of the novel. At another point, a computer interface named TAMMY comments on the appearance of narrative interludes that are thematically aligned to the events of the novel.
Authorial Context: Charles Yu
Charles Yu is an American author who often employs metafictional techniques in his work. His style enables him to engage in larger critiques of culture, exposing the ways people make meaning in a capitalist world saturated by media and entertainment.
Yu’s story “Third Class Superhero” interrogates comic book tropes and superhero mythmaking by focusing on a superhero whose value to society is dependent on the quality of his powers. Another story, “My Last Days as Me,” follows an actor whose life is upset by the recasting of the actress who plays his mother on a hit television show. Yu’s second novel, Interior Chinatown (2020), expands his criticism on media and entertainment by following an actor who is typecast as the “Generic Asian Man” on a television police procedural. The novel uses screenplay formatting to render its narrative, underlining the protagonist’s sense of dread as he struggles to break away from Hollywood’s fraught relationship with the Asian American community.
In How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Yu gives his name to the protagonist to create a sense of verisimilitude, immersing the reader in the narrative’s reality. Part of the plot involves the protagonist Charles finding, reading, and writing his own novel, prompting the reader to question whether Charles Yu the character can be distinguished from Charles Yu the author.
Yu relies on the technical language of scientific writing and undermines it by using it to describe speculative or nonrealistic concepts like time travel and paradox. Because these concepts can feasibly exist in the genre of science fiction, the novel’s use of a science fiction setting advances Yu’s metafictional approach.
