A young author combines brains and science fiction knowledge – and a law degree – to produce innovative and arresting fiction. Excerpt from “How to Live Safely in the Fictional Universe,” July 26, 2012.

CHARLES YU, Author, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Sorry Please Thank You: Stories

In conversation with ELI HOROWITZ, Former Managing Editor and Publisher, McSweeney’s; Co-author, Everything You Know Is Pong

HOROWITZ: The first story in this book, “Standard Loneliness Package,” is about an engineering firm in India. Do you want to describe it?

YU: The premise is that this is Earth, it’s near-future, and you can for a fee outsource the bad parts of your life. It’s almost like you call your broker and say, “I’ve got an hour’s dental appointment coming up; I don’t want to do it. Someone else will experience this pain for me.” But in the story, it’s not just dental appointments. It’s funerals, even experiences that you’d think were sort of central to life – people just outsource it, because why go through it if you don’t have to?

This explores it from the perspective of somebody who is sitting in a call center in India. They open their screen. Basically, at the time of the switch, the technology shifts the paying customer into some kind of false memory. It’s sort of like a mental waiting room; they just sit there for an hour and read a magazine or have a drink. Then the bad experience, the qualia [the property that is experienced by someone] gets shifted to the worker who has to then experience it.

HOROWITZ: All of the stories in this collection feel weirdly personal. Almost all are first-person. Do you find that that first-person angle makes it easy to get at that emotional core of a story?

YU: That would be a generous way of putting it. That’s like, I know how to drive in one-and-a-half gears right now, and I’d like to learn how to drive the whole car. But I think I’m writing around my limitations.

HOROWITZ: Your novel [How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe] of course had Charles Yu as the protagonist. What draws you to those concerns?

YU: I’m interested in looking at the conventions of genre – in that novel, at the conventions of science fiction – as a way of thinking about assumptions that we make about ourselves and how we go through life, if that makes any sense at all. The embedded assumptions of science fiction are interesting to me: How do we tell stories about ourselves? And why do we make these rules about stories, versus other rules?

HOROWITZ: To the extent that you are thinking of identity and self, and almost existential crisis, I would say most of [your] books are existential crises in one way or another. A role-playing character trying to find out where he is in his quest. Other stories are more obviously and nakedly about someone wrestling with their identity. What is it about science fiction and fantasy that makes you feel that it’s useful for addressing those things, which in some sense have been around since Socrates or Rousseau? Why go futuristic to address those?

YU: Because it’s fun for me. I don’t think Socrates played video games, so in two senses a video game is interesting. One, as a new way of exploring very old things. Maybe. [Two,] a video game has a certain kind of visual layout, but it also has a conceptual layout, right?

My mom has played video games, but if I tried to explain to my mom’s mom how to play a video game, it would not compute. It would eventually. Whereas I’ve got kids, my four-year-old and my three-year-old, and if I showed them a little guy on a screen, they would know that that guy probably jumps. That guy probably is supposed to jump over the hole – the hole being a two-dimensional gap on a two-dimensional [screen].

These are artificial environments. They are cartoonish by definition. But they are also places where we spend a lot of time.

The other part of it is that that’s what I grew up with, so those are environments that I feel comfortable navigating.

HOROWITZ: It’s interesting in the title of your novel – How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe – that’s obviously set in some future time. Are we in a more science fictional universe than when the classic science fiction was written?

YU: If you could draw a world history curve, if there were such a thing, a technology curve, is there some inflection point past which it’s always going to feel like we’re living in a crazy sci-fi universe, more and more?

My one sort of partial stumble on an answer to that is that I think there is. I think we’re at a point now where the pace at which technology advances [is] so fast in a human lifetime that you are now guaranteed to be mystified by what your grandkids are looking at. I’m not sure that was true before. Like [A.D.] 1400 to 1500: battle axes and battle axes, right? 1900 to 2000, and then 2000 to 2100, I just think that gap [increases]. Unless there’s an apocalypse, it’s going to be worse. So I can’t even imagine what my kid’s kids are going to be using.

HOROWITZ: You’re a lawyer by training. In this book and your novel, there’s a lot of mundane workplaces as the setting for these things. But there’s no law. Are you embarrassed to be a lawyer? [Laughter.] What kind of law do you practice?

YU: I work in-house at a company that does visual effects for movies and TV commercials. So I am sort of a generalist; I get to do all kinds of stuff.

HOROWITZ: Intellectual property and things?

YU: Yeah, everything else that comes in day to day. That’s just a huge part of my experience. I work 10 hours or more a day, and the people I deal with and the kinds of things I think about, and just having that routine every day, that’s why the workplace turns up so often in my stories. I think that in a way law has crept in there. I do like my job. But I have worked at law firms where you bill your time by the hour. When you bill your time by the hour, you do think about your day differently. It’s now been chopped up into economic units. So that transmutes into a story about a guy who literally is paid to feel other people’s pain. You’re sitting in an office and, “This is not my problem. Someone is going to pay me to make it my problem.”

HOROWITZ: There was a line I liked on page 42: “It’s like all technology, either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do.” That tends to be the kernel of all of your concerns and maybe of all science fiction in general. Is that something you feel playing out throughout our modern world?

YU: I don’t know. That story, in particular, is called “Troubleshooting.” It’s not a long story, but within the course of the story you come to understand that it’s a kind of hand-held wish-fulfillment device. You punch in some characters, and you basically put a wish in there. The machine will transform your intention into results in the world.

In the context of that story, the line was about how what we want is never exactly what we want. But you’re right to hold it to the actual words; it was also about the technology. I don’t know if technology never matches up to what we want. I think some of it does.

HOROWITZ: How much do you think of science fiction as a genre?

YU: I think about it a lot, because it’s so pervasive. I think about that actually, the fact that it’s so pervasive. Even basically all superhero movies – which in the summer is all movies – that’s science fiction, essentially, isn’t it? So it’s on my mind in the sense of how much of pop culture it is. In terms of the actual genre and people writing in science fiction, I read it. I do think of myself as an outsider, because I feel like one, but I hope a respectful outsider and one who is interested in the genre and the conventions, not in a judgmental and exploitative way but like some people work this way in the genre, some people stand on the edge and kind of play around with the edge. That’s what’s interesting to me.

HOROWITZ: Do you want to talk about your next work?

YU: It’s going to have at its core a relationship of a father with his children, told from the perspective of the father. It will be about storytelling and metaphor and how we learn it and how pervasive it is in seeing the world.