How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks are not enough but I offer them anyway for now, in lieu of a drink:
To Gary Heidt, all anyone could ask for in an agent. Your creativity keeps me going. I would have given up a long time ago if not for you. It would be nice to actually meet you in person one day.
To Tim O’Connell, my editor at Pantheon, for about one hundred thirty-one different things. I showed you an area in the ground; you showed me where the book was buried. Then you took it out of the ground, dusted it off, and handed it to me. Then you explained what I was supposed to do with it. Basically, you did all the hard work.
To Josefine Kals, my publicist at Pantheon. We just started working together when I wrote this, but my future self says it’s going to be awesome.
I am also very grateful to:
Marty Asher, for his invaluable insight, help, and guidance, as well as Andy Hughes, for his production vision and helping to make the Book from Nowhere a reality.
As well as Dan Frank, Patricia Johnson, Chris Gillespie, Edward Kastenmeier, Marci Lewis, John Gall, Wesley Gott, Altie Karper, Catherine Courtade, Kathleen Fridella, Florence Lui, Jeff Alexander, Zack Wagman, Danny Yanez, Harriett Alida Lye, W. M. Akers, Peter Mendelsund, Joshua Raab, and all the others at Vintage/Anchor, Pantheon, and the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group who have lent their wizardry and wisdom to the making of this book. In the U.K. universe, Nicolas Cheetham, Rina Gill, Becci Sharpe, and Adam Simpson at Corvus have created an alternate and equal version of the TM-31. It is a privilege and an education to work with so many gifted people.
And to Richard Powers, Leslie Shipman, Harold Augenbraum, and the National Book Foundation for encouragement that is difficult to overstate. This weird, mumbly guy scribbles alone under a damp rock, and then, out of nowhere, people like you notice him? Still unbelievable to me, and it always will be.
And I must not forget to thank:
Val Jue, for the gifts of time and peace of mind, Robert Jue for computer expertise, and Rose Lowe. Also, Howard Sanders, Sarah Shepard, Tyler Johnson, the Taiwanese United Fund, and Taiwanese American Citizens League for enthusiasm and support.
Admiration for and apologies to:
Douglas Hofstadter for Gödel, Escher, Bach, a book I will never get over, and never stop reading.
And to David Deutsch, for writing The Fabric of Reality, a book so fascinating that the only way I could even attempt to get over it was to write a novel based on a complete misunderstanding of your ideas.
I wish I had:
A time machine while writing these acknowledgments so I could go into the future and see who else is going to help make this into a book. I’m sorry I can’t thank you by name, but please accept my categorical gratitude, all you wonderful future-people.
Finally:
To Kelvin, for always being so good to me, and for teaching me new things about stories. To Sophia, for reminding me how to enjoy a story. To Dylan, for being a great sleeper and a great guy all-around. To Mochi, for your sad-eyed company. To my father, Jin Yu, a very good engineer and an even better dad, and my mother, Betty Yu, for her inventiveness and fire. And to Michelle, for always being the best version of yourself, even when I’m my worst.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Yu received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his story collection Third Class Superhero, and he has also received the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. His work has been published in the Harvard Review, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. This is his first novel. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Michelle, and their two children.
ORIGIN STORY: UNIVERSE 13
I turned thirteen the summer the world fell apart. I was taking an early morning physics course at the high school that got out every day at eleven. Afterward, I’d swing by the park and pick up my kid brother and we would walk over to the community pool and jump in, just as the day was turning hot. We’d race end to end, seeing who could hold his breath longer, and when we got bored, we would beach ourselves on the concrete lip, feet and calves still in the water, and stay as still as possible, trying to stay within our own water shadows, avoiding the hot surface around us, protected by the regions under us, our damp shaded self-outlines our only defense against the rest of the world.
One day at the end of the summer, two weeks before the fall, we came back from the pool and my mom and dad were both home from work. It was the middle of the day. They were sitting at the kitchen table across from each other, neither of them looking at one another. The air was heavy and still, and filled with whatever they had been saying to each other just as we’d come through the door. I didn’t say anything but my brother (being younger and braver than I was or ever will be) said, it’s never going to be the same again, is it. My father picked him up and put him on his lap, and, in some awkward attempt to be part of that exchange, to show my father that I was thinking of him, I pointed out to my dad that my brother’s trunks were all wet. My dad looked at me, evenly, without the warmth he reserved for my brother, and said, no one cares. No one cares about that.
That night my mother let us order a pizza and eat it in front of the television. She tied her hair up with a small scarf, which made her look every bit as pretty as she actually was, and she wore shorts.
“Mom, you look like a girl,” my brother said. “Are you?” My mom laughed and took a sip of what she was drinking. We watched the TV together quietly for a while. She looked at me and I must have looked like I was wondering if I’d ever see my dad again, because she tugged on my ear and said, hey bud, it’s not the end of the world. But it was. Just then, the program was interrupted by a news flash. They were showing how the city had split itself in two. The reporter was standing at the faultline, explaining that it was not like an earthquake, in that there was not an actual line you could draw showing where the schism had taken place. It was not land, or a tectonic plate or even the whole world splitting. It was space and time itself, it was reality itself. I didn’t understand it at the time, of course, but it was more a conceptual event than anything. It was also not like an earthquake in that it would not be violent or sudden. It would be invisible and silent and take place over years. The perceptible part of the process had just begun, but in reality, it had happened gradually, and then all at once. A fissure, a tiny crack somewhere, unnoticed, and then it grew, micron by micron, along the path of least resistance, and then it spidered out into an uncountable number of capillaries and then, in an instant, the first world, the undivided city, broke apart into two, the low world falling out of the high one.
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Dr.Polchinski shortly after inventing the 650 time loop, pictured here on a beach in Florida.
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Home Base, where we decide who gets to be Han Solo for the day.
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Unincorporated region between SF and reality, in close proximity to Charles Yu’s childhood home.
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ4nwTTmcgs
A YouTube video on time travel from an alien universe. Concepts may not apply in MU-31.
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The park where my father attempted to sell his time machine prototype.
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As the theory of the atom, quantum mechanics is perhaps the most successful theory in the history of science. It enables physicists, chemists, and technicians to calculate and predict the outcome of a vast number of experiments and to create new and advanced technology based on the insight into the behavior of atomic objects. But it is also a theory that challenges our imagination. It seems to violate some fundamental principles of classical physics, principles that eventually have become a pa
rt of western common sense since the rise of the modern worldview in the Renaissance. So the aim of any metaphysical interpretation of quantum mechanics is to account for these violations.
The Copenhagen interpretation was the first general attempt to understand the world of atoms as this is represented by quantum mechanics. The founding father was mainly the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, but also Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and other physicists made important contributions to the overall understanding of the atomic world that is associated with the name of the capital of Denmark.
(plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen)
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The fundamental idea of the MWI is that there are myriads of worlds in the Universe in addition to the world we are aware of. In particular, every time a quantum experiment with different outcomes with non-zero probability is performed, all outcomes are obtained, each in a different world, even if we are aware only of the world with the outcome we have seen. In fact, quantum experiments take place everywhere and very often, not just in physics laboratories: even the irregular blinking of an old fluorescent bulb is a quantum experiment.
(plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/)