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.
Character Analysis
Charles Yu
Charles Yu is the protagonist and narrator of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. The name Charles Yu points to the metafictional aspects of the novel, as Charles Yu is also the name of the book’s author. The novel’s use of metafiction deepens when Yu introduces the novel itself as an object in the narrative. Charles finds the book after impulsively shooting his future self. The future Charles urges him to trust in the book as a key.
Charles works as a time machine repairman, having taken science fictional studies in college. His job requires him to rescue clients from getting trapped in alternate universes, which usually occurs whenever they attempt to change the past. Because he has been working as a repairman for nearly 10 years, Charles is depicted as being insightful and reflective about the human motivation to change the past. Through Charles’s vocation, the novel suggests that the past can never be changed, though this is often people’s strongest desire.
Charles is stuck, emotionally and literally. He can’t move on from a past that he doesn’t want to face and lives in a kind of limbo. He lives inside his time machine, the TM-31, which is set to cruise in the Present-Indefinite mode. This mode means that while Charles is living in the present, he is living in a passive way. When Charles suspects that the machine’s Tense Operator is breaking down, he begins to slip into recollections of his childhood. It is hinted that one of the reasons he has lived outside of time is to avoid these recollections, which cause him to miss his missing father.
Charles is afraid of engaging with the present world on a deeper level, which is represented by his relationship with his mother. Charles puts his mother in a commercial time loop to simulate the illusion of a family dinner.
Charles is a dynamic character who changes throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, he is static. As the book progresses, he claims agency. When Charles traps himself in the time loop, he begins to question whether any of his efforts are worthwhile. He meets another version of himself, the shuttle driver, who urges him to take control of his life. The shuttle driver indicates that Charles’s destiny isn’t to become his future self, but to write the book. As Charles approaches the moment of his shooting, he realizes that in spite of fate, he has control over his reactions. He concludes that free will must exist if he can make the choice to accept his fate.
Charles’s Father
Charles’s father is a prominent figure in Charles’s backstory and memory. He functions as the object of Charles’s external quest for most of the narrative. Charles believes that he can feel a sense of resolution if he can find out where his father disappeared to and confront him for vanishing. Charles’s lifelong desire has been to please his father and avoid disappointing him.
Charles’s father is a first-generation immigrant who hails from a rural town in Taiwan. In the United States, he has an exhausting desk job but maintains a deep passion for speculative science. He develops a theory of time travel and invents a prototype time machine based on the human cognitive experience of time. Charles and his father bond over the construction of different prototypes throughout his youth. However, Charles’s father breaks off contact after he fails to pitch his time machine to the research director of the Institute of Conceptual Technology. He becomes increasingly estranged from his family, drifting further into the past as he relives the moment of his failure over and over again. Ironically, his disappearance into the past validates his theory of time travel. It is hinted that Charles’s father disappeared sometime after the failed pitch.
Charles’s father leaves clues for Charles to find him. He buys Charles the Chrono-Adventurer Survival Kit he always wanted and hides a diorama of their family kitchen, displaying the time coordinates Charles should travel to in order to find him. He also travels outside of time to the Buddhist temple where an idealized version of Charles’s mother resides. Charles later finds his shoes there. The idealized version of Charles’s mother suggests that Charles’s father realized that he wanted to return to his family at the temple, but felt that it was too late to do so. He echoes this sentiment when Charles finally locates him at the end.
TAMMY
TAMMY is the user personality interface of the TM-31. She also functions as a proxy romantic interest for Charles. When Charles first uses the TM-31, he chooses TAMMY over the TIM personality interface because he is attracted to TAMMY.
TAMMY is a flat character. She is incapable of lying and expressing real emotions. She simulates emotional responses, however, as part of a built-in user feedback loop that Charles engages with. This implies that all of her reactions are tailored to support Charles’s behavioral patterns. In the Present-Indefinite, she regrets not being a better computer for Charles. In the father-son axis, she expresses sympathy for Charles’s childhood traumas. When Charles realizes that TAMMY is his ideal romantic partner, she reminds him of the feedback loop, implying that Charles’s ideal partner is himself. Charles later cherishes his relationship with TAMMY, if only because it reminds him to respect himself as he pursues a real romantic interest.
