John Chu Bends Reality in 'The Subtle Art of Folding Space'

In The Subtle Art of Folding Space, metaphysical science fiction writer and microprocessor architect John Chu presents his debut novel about Ellie, a young Chinese girl, whose mother is in a coma while her sister, Chris, who is caring for their mother, is also trying to assassinate Ellie on a regular basis. According to Chu, “…every universe has something called the skunkworks that generates the physics of that universe… and consequently there are these people called maintainers whose job is take make sure that the machinery that keeps the universe running keeps running because otherwise, there’s no universe. So, at the start of our novel, my main character, Ellie, she’s not in a great place… and it turns out that weird things are happening in the universe, like the definition of the kilogram is suddenly unstable… so she has to go into the skunkworks to figure out what is happening and she finds a device that is intended to keep her mother alive… it’s also causing other weird things to happen in the universe… she removes this device and in doing so she sets off a chain of events that is going to have to force her to confront her past… and at the end of the day she has to decide between honoring her mother’s final wishes or saving the universe.”

In regards to his writing process, Chu took an unconventional approach to writing this novel, creating the outline after he had already written the manuscript. He explained that this technique, called reverse outlining, is actually a strategy that is discussed by several of the authors he admires. He explained, “I wrote the novel, and then I outlined it to see, well, did I get everything, is there anything missing, and then I rework the novel to some extent based on the outline…” And when it came to finding a publisher, Chu was uncertain whether his previous successes with short fiction and novelettes helped in his favor. He recalled, “I got a bunch of rejections that basically started off by saying how much they enjoyed my short fiction… but my point is a certain amount of short fiction success doesn’t guarantee a sale. I don’t think it hurt but I don’t know how much it helped, and I will point out that plenty of people sell novels without having a short fiction track record.”