The Only Living Girl on Earth
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Average rating3.6
From the genre-defying, critically beloved author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Interior Chinatown and one of the creative minds behind HBO’s Westworld comes a sweet and searing, unexpected and delightfully absurd vision of life on Earth a thousand years in the future.
Jane is the only person left on the planet, minding the only business left: a gift shop. She wasn’t born on Earth, but her ancestors were; they lived there before the AI in charge of geoengineering failed and the oceans got too hot to sustain the terrestrial food web and before humans took off to colonize other planets.
She’s heading to college on Jupiter in the fall of 3020, so her days on the home planet—selling “American Epoch” postcards, “History: The Poster!” and “War: The Soundtrack” to tourists from the suburbs of Europa—are numbered. But as the looping promotional ad for Earth details, in the planet’s more recent past there was an amusement park, a museum, and even a model American town to draw visitors: all shuttered now, abandoned. When a man and his son crash-land their rocket and need assistance, as well as some diversion, Jane learns that the other attractions on Earth are not so defunct after all and may have taken on a life of their own.
Told, fittingly, in interconnected fragments, The Only Living Girl on Earth captures a place where only fragments of its landscape remain. At once dead serious and playful, recognizable and as otherworldly and unsettling as Yu’s other sci-fi reinventions, it is a cautionary tale about all that we could lose—are losing—by failing to live sustainably and about what we hope to leave behind for future generations. It is also a love letter to what it means to be human, how connected we are to a place and one another, and how we must fight to preserve these gifts. In this, Yu expresses his unique brand of cosmic humanism, that even in the face of dire circumstances, when we feel the most estranged from who and what we are, there is still hope.
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The Only Living Girl on the Earth by Charles Yu is a novella-length novel consisting of three interrelated short stories. The stories have featured Jane, the customer service representative/short-order cook/hotel manager of the Earth's only gift shop. Well, the Earth's only “anything” as everything else was destroyed a thousand years ago. Mostly from vaguely referenced devastating climate change and a rueful AI robot that scorched the skies.
Jane is like most 18 years old's in many ways. She is trying to figure out what to do with herself—thinking about college. She is dealing with the after-effects of very grown-up issues with her father and the general futility of being the only girl on an entire planet.
In the first story, Jane talks about the history of the Earth's giftshop and how it started as a museum, then an amusement park, and finally became just a gift shop selling souvenirs of a time gone by. There is a specific tone that Wu takes during the story the belies the solemn subject matter. Jane is funny as a character and allows for fun while still maintaining the deep subject matter. Without that, this collection of stories would be too much.
The first story talks about how human history has been boiled down to something consumed at a gift shop or an amusement park. Oddly enough, the first story reminded me a bit of Percy Shelley's “Ozymandias.”
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The second story is from a different perspective of someone living in a Smalltown, USA type before the decline of civilization. It is from the standpoint of people trapped on an amusement ride that makes all choices for them from birth to death. There are obvious nods to the problem of mass consumerism and the hamster-wheel-like existence people get trapped in, birth, learn, work, consume, end. This story treads no new territory as this topic is a huge one in science fiction of capitalism run amok. Still, the imagery that Yu creates as people trapped on an amusement ride is actually pretty horrific.
The third story is from Jane's perspective again, except this time it is how two travelers had to stop at the Earth because their spaceship was malfunctioning. This story reminded me of the bygone era of people traveling on freeways and having to get off and end up on route 66 in a town that had seen its heyday. But, now it was a bit past its prime because no one stopped there anymore. All three of the characters, Jane, the dad, and son, end up inside the boarded-up amusement park/Smalltown USA and discover something sinister and rather sad. Again, the story nods to much deeper topics than the dialog and bantering.
The Only Living Girl on Earth is an unusual take on the decline of civilization. All of the stories unite to make this a cohesive narrative and a with Yu's exceptional writing skill, a definite worthwhile read.
