Yeoman

by Charles Yu

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection Who explores the final frontier? The ship has reached the last world.  Beamed down from the transporter bay is the captain, the XO, the medic, the security chief, the ethnographer, and finally an unnamed yeoman, the narrator of Charles Yu’s mind-bending journey into the science fiction unknown. And the yeoman knows one thing, if he knows anything at the yeoman always dies.  In the tradition of Jonathan Lethem and Douglas Adams, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award winner Charles Yu presents a story of searching (not wandering) and the galactic limits of home, from the utterly original collection Sorry Please Thank You. An eBook short.

Genres: Short Stories, Science Fiction

26 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 15, 2015

About the author

CHARLES YU is the author of four books, including his latest, Interior Chinatown, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for Le Prix Médicis étranger. 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. 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. You can find him on Twitter @charles_yu.

Reviews

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn't quite get the ending, but really enjoyed it. A slightly different look at the whole "red shirts" space phenomenon. 3.5 stars, rounded up, because I would read more by this author and I liked the female character. She had agency.

[Santhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extra star for the win-win ending

[Nadine in California · Rating 4 out of 5]

I needed something to wet my Yu whistle while I wait for his new book to come out this month. A few pages in I realized that I had already read this story in his collection Sorry Please Thank You (I should have looked closer at the cover), but it was a pleasant revisit. Not my favorite from the collection, but still just fine.

[Creative Person Wren · Rating 3 out of 5]

"You're an idiot", she said.

A quick, light read about emptiness, of space travel and other forms. Sort of. Or maybe it's making a statement: that space travelling husbands are daft, and only someone carrying a child in this story, a woman, has a reason for carrying on. Perhaps it's a story about the pointlessness of pointless employment, even if it's all there is on a lost spaceship. Daisy, daisy...

[Liza Robertson · Rating 2 out of 5]

A goofy tale of space travel that makes no sense whatsoever. At least it had a sort of happy ending.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun, but cynical, take on the Star Trek red shirt trope. (Nice non-cynical ending though.)

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short story about an unnamed yeoman on a starship exploring the universe. Plays on the same trope as Redshirts by Scalzi, but has a more satisfying ending.

[Matty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly my favorite short story. Absolutely loved the deadpan humor. Like Star Trek written by Jared Hess.