Celebrity Chekhov

When a man in the audience asked [Charles] Yu if the pistol he referred to in the novel is "Chekhov's gun," Yu is at first dumbfounded. "I guess it could be," he stammered. After the questioner clarified a bit—explaining Anton Chekhov's rule that if a gun is mentioned at the beginning of a story, it will have to be fired by the end—Yu laughed and shook his head. "I thought you were talking about Chekov from Star Trek," he said, relieved.

—Paul Constant, The Slog

N.B.: The original title of this post was: "Who are Yu?"

I already wrote it

My latest Astral Weeks column is a review of Charles Yu's excellent new novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Here's a bit from the book:

Apparently, I'm going to write this book, which appears to be, as far as I can tell, part engineering field manual and part autobiography. Or rather, I already wrote it. Now I just have to write it, which is to say, I have to get to the point in time when I will have written it, and then travel back in time to get shot and then give it to myself, so I can write it. Which all makes sense to me, except for one thing: why the hell would I want to do any of that?