My first pieces were very short, weird experiments. So I started writing little things in the margins of notepads, or sending emails to myself with scraps of language. Going into a new career as a lawyer, I think I was searching for a creative release valve, some private headspace I could carve out. Instead of studying for the bar exam, I found myself at the bookstore every day, reading story collections. But I didn’t make a sustained effort at writing until my mid-twenties, after graduating from law school. I’d written poems as a kid, and I took poetry workshops as an undergrad at Berkeley. How did reading become writing for you, and what was the journey to breaking in like for you? So, yes, I’d say both series have had influence, both general and specific! One of the things I find myself coming back to in my own writing is weird jobs: third class superhero, time machine repairman, generic Asian man. In the first book of the Incarnations series ( On A Pale Horse), being Death is basically a job. But the idea of making up a field of study, coming up with theorems for it, that was really fun and helpful in constructing Minor Universe 31. It’s not really like psychohistory, which is much harder sci-fi, whereas my sci-fi is definitely on the fluffy side. In my first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, I invented my own made-up discipline (chronodiegetics). The impression those two series left is still with me and I don’t know if I should mess with that.ĭoes the influence of those stories show up in your writing in any noticeable ways? On the other hand, maybe I don’t want to know. I haven’t gone back to re-read either in a long time, and I’m sort of curious how my memory of them would match up with reality. I also read the seven books of Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality around the same time. The concept of a quantitatively precise social science (psychohistory) was so cool to me as an eighth-grader. What books were important to you when you were younger and just getting into science fiction and fantasy, and have your feelings about those titles changed?Īsimov’s Foundation series. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a number of publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, Time and Ploughshares. He has received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, been nominated for two Writers Guild of America awards for his work on the HBO series Westworld, and has also written for shows on FX, AMC, Facebook Watch, and Adult Swim. Charles Yu is the author of four books, including his latest, Interior Chinatown, which won the National Book Award for Fiction and the Le Prix Médicis étranger, and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
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