![]() ![]() ![]() Charles is comic in the same way that Douglas Adams’s Arthur Dent is a comic figure because he never gets the joke. We feel sorry for his boss, an affable AI, unaware of his artificiality, when Charles cruelly tells him he is an AI and that his wife is a spreadsheet program. Fictional Charles takes himself seriously, as do the rest of the characters. His father once told him that an unappreciated problem of time travel was that it created a whole new set of decision points about “what to do yesterday.” A dilemma indeed, especially if you shot your yesterday self. ![]() It takes you to other places, different times.” Fictional Charles spends his time in the box thinking about his father, a mad-scientist type who experimented with time machines in his basement until he disappeared in one. His machine is “a base model TM-31” that employs “state-of-the-art chronodiegetical technology,” a description undercut by this: “Or as Mom used to say: it’s a box. He gets caught in a time loop in “story space” when he shoots a future version of himself, who of course knows that he is about to be shot and hands him his completed memoir to copy/write. Fictional Charles Yu is a time-travel machine repairman in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. I laughed out loud because the answer was so much like something fictional Charles Yu would say. ![]() He said, no, he needed a boss to provide structure to his life. In the Q&A of a 2011 talk at Google, Charles Yu was asked if he would give up his day job as a lawyer to become a full-time writer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |