How to Write a Novel in the Present-Indefinite: Charles Yu, Mohsin Hamid, and Science Fiction as Critique

Abstract:As we are no doubt tired of being told, ours is a homogenous future-canceling present. Against this brand of doomism, in which the possibility of just and sustainable futures is steamrolled by the linear temporal progression of imperial and capitalist domination, this essay argues for the minor utopian function of the novel. It reads Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2011) and Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) to elaborate a present internally riven by the temporal dynamics of racialization, empire, and capitalism. The essay examines these novels' generic manipulations of science fiction and the how-to book to show that the homogenous time of the present is anything but. In both novels, the crises of our present—first embedded in our timeline by colonial and imperial domination—contain within them an immanent future that "only appears when you think about it, like the text of a book" (Yu 2011, 228). These how-to books have a distinctly science fictional lesson for us and for the contemporary novel: when time appears to come to a standstill, the labor of the novel becomes to speculate on, and cultivate our desires for, the possibility of cooperative life. In making this case, the essay adds to a growing body of academic literature that grasps dialectical critique as an endemic feature of the novel form.