An Interview with Charles Yu

There are a number of minor universes in Charles Yu's literary landscape. Or, to be more exact, at least thirty-one.

Yu is the author of three acclaimed books of fiction, all hauntingly portraying the absurdist hyper-reality of contemporary life. He was named one of the "5 under 35" by the National Book Foundation in 2007 for his first short story collection, Third Class Superhero (2006), a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010) was named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. The New York Times deemed the novel a "complex, brainy, genre-hopping joyride of a story" (2010). Depicting a time machine repairman named Charles Yu (or Protagonist Yu) whose inventor father becomes lost in an alternate time-loop in "Minor Universe 31," How to Live Safely becomes a metafictional meditation on regret and human connectedness. Contemporary Literature poetry editor Timothy Yu called it a novel of "astonishing power—and brilliant humor … infusing literary fiction with the tropes of genre fiction" ("Charles Yu's Minor Universes," Asian American Literary Review). Charles Yu's second short story collection, Sorry Please Thank You (2012), garnered accolades from established culture mavens such as NPR, but likewise from the alternative techy geek sector, Wired and the A. V. Club. The latter marked him as a literary "heavy-hitter" along the lines of Junot Díaz and George Saunders.

With style and content deeply indebted to the work of Saunders, Yu's fiction also recalls the influences of Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, and Donald Barthelme. Yet while reviewers praise the "glittering layers of gorgeous and playful meta-science-fiction" (New York Times 2010) that appear in his work, his fiction is not easily categorized as dystopian, speculative, or science fiction. His stories invoke magical realism in their depiction of fantastical scenarios that cause barely a ripple in everyday life. In Sorry Please Thank You's "First Person Shooter," for example, a zombie shops for cosmetics at a big box retailer while the clerk-narrator ponders the more momentous event at hand: asking his coworker out. Yu's work also excels at the inverse: he invokes imagined settings in order to explore banal, yet deeply resonant human dilemmas. "Yeoman" depicts a hapless petty officer chosen for a dangerous away mission in a story that invokes Star Trek, not to explore strange new worlds, but rather the tensions in being caught between the job and family. To Yu, what's Kafkaesque is the bug trapped in a man suit; his work explores the marvelous real, but also what might be called the mundane fantastic.

What stands out in Charles Yu's work is its meta quality, its often self-conscious awareness of both the story's telling and the constructedness—fakeness—of social constellations. As he has noted, the title of his novel invokes a "science fiction-al universe" as a nod to its intentionally metafictional bent. The key word here is "fictional," not "science": Yu's work mines an array of conventions that script life according to established genres and rules, all of which algorithmically limit choices and possibilities. Thus, calculus equations, logical probability, narrative conventions of the sitcom, rules of video gaming, or social etiquette are invoked to (overly) structure the lives of his characters. As they live according to predetermined scripts rendered hyper-real in Yu's imagination, we witness his characters chafing against artificially imposed constraints. In his world, dating represents a "risk analysis and assessment in an environment of asymmetric imperfect information flow" that can be codified by a "field of study best known as emotional statistics." Yu is a master at externalizing the arbitrary or inane simulacra that govern contemporary bourgeois existence.

Yet at the heart of Yu's fiction lies an affective and relatable core. While his books are inspired by the world-building of science fiction and fantasy—witness Minor Universe 31—Yu slyly evokes the slow time and expanse of deep space in order to render emotional distance...