The Hemingway Hoax is a short novel by science fiction writer Joe Haldeman. It weaves together a story of an attempt to produce a fake Ernest Hemingway manuscript with themes concerning time travel and parallel worlds. A shorter version of the book won both a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1991 (for stories in 1990). [1] [2]
In 1921, Hemingway's writing career suffered a setback when his first wife, Hadley, lost a bag containing the manuscript and all the carbon copies of his first novel as well as most of the short stories he had so far written on a Parisian train. Since that time there has been speculation about the nature of the novel and whether the manuscript survived and may turn up one day.
Seventy-five years later in 1996, John Baird, a Hemingway scholar with a completely eidetic memory, is persuaded by Sylvester "Castle" Castlemaine, a grifter in Key West, to create a fake manuscript to be passed off as one of the lost copies. Initially reluctant, he goes along with this because, with some legal trickery, it may be possible to do it without attracting the attention of the authorities.
However, instead he attracts attention from an altogether different quarter. Somewhere, or somewhen, there are entities who control the paths of destiny in the multiple parallel versions of our world that exist. Anything that affects the cultural influence of Hemingway is a threat to them. We eventually learn that many of the timelines are supposed to end in 2006 with a catastrophic nuclear war when two macho superpower leaders, both influenced by Hemingway's stories, refuse to back down in a crisis. If even a few timelines fail to reach this point, then the reverberations across the Omniverse will be fatal.
Baird carries out research in the Hemingway collection at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and attempts to get aged paper and the exact model of typewriter that Hemingway used. He gets three surprises. First, Hemingway appears to him on a train back from Boston to Florida, and warns him to give up on the scheme. Second, the Hemingway, as he comes to call it, kills him by inducing a massive stroke when he refuses. Third, he wakes up on the same train - or is it the same? He is slightly different himself, with two sets of similar but conflicting memories. The Hemingway entity is surprised as well. Humans are supposed to stay dead. Instead this one shifted to a parallel timeline.
Back in Florida, life continues roughly as before. Castle brings in a seductress to bedazzle the scholar even as he has an affair with his wife Lena. Here the themes of the novel begin to parallel those of Hemingway's own stories. Through multiple encounters with the Hemingway entity, and multiple deaths, Baird stays with the scheme, as much to defy this mysterious tormentor as anything else. Each new world, however, seems a little worse than the last, especially when it comes to Castle's personality. In the final universe, Castle is a psychotic killer whom they attempt to have arrested on an out-of-state warrant.
The Hemingway entity comes to Baird and offers to show him what happened to Hadley's bag, in exchange for giving up on the hoax. Travelling back in time, they see the thief is Hemingway himself, but he speaks to Baird and the entity before vanishing.
Without knowing how, Baird finds himself back in his own time, with the bag. At that point Castle, having escaped arrest, violently kills all his co-conspirators with shotgun blasts. The scholar's awareness persists, and he is able to reverse the flow of time and rearrange events so that the women survive, even as he shoots the grifter and takes a shotgun blast in the mouth, imitating the real Hemingway's suicide.
Now freed from his body, Baird has become like the entity that pursued him. He experiences Hemingway's memories, backwards from the end. Reaching the point where the young Hemingway, devastated and enraged by the loss of the manuscripts, crystallizes his masculine outlook and turns to face his future, Baird's awareness separates and comes to consciousness of his abilities. He moves back in time, steals Hadley's bag, allowing himself to be seen doing it in the person of Hemingway. He drops it off for himself to find in the present, before abandoning time for the spaces between. Thus, the "Baird entity" creates himself out of Hemingway's psychic trauma, and it is implied that he actually creates all the other entities we have encountered in the story.
The novel ends with Hemingway writing the short story "Up in Michigan" in Paris in the 1920s, and suddenly experiencing an odd premonition of doom. [3]
Around 1991, Haldeman wrote: ""What is the book about? The subtitle A 'Short Comic Novel of Existential Terror' is accurate. In a way, it's a horror novel tinged with ghastly humor, as the apparently insane ghost of Ernest Hemingway murders a helpless scholar over and over; the scholar slipping from one universe to the next each time he dies, in what is apparently a rather unpleasant form of serial immortality. The tongue-in-cheek explanations for how this could happen qualify the book as a science fiction novel.
... It may be the most 'literary' of my books, but it also has the most explicit sex and the most gruesome violence I've ever written. Nobody will be bored by it." [4]
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle and outspoken, blunt public image. Some of his seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works have become classics of American literature, and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Joe William Haldeman is an American science fiction author.
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Jack Dann is an American writer best known for his science fiction, as well as an editor and a writing teacher, who has lived in Australia since 1994. He has published over seventy books, the majority being as editor or co-editor of story anthologies in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. He has published nine novels, numerous shorter works of fiction, essays, and poetry, and his books have been translated into thirteen languages. His work, which includes fiction in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, and historical and alternative history genres, has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick.
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The Garden of Eden is the second posthumously released novel of Ernest Hemingway, published in 1986. Hemingway started the novel in 1946 and worked on the manuscript for the next 15 years, during which time he also wrote The Old Man and the Sea, The Dangerous Summer, A Moveable Feast, and Islands in the Stream.
In Our Time is the title of Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories, published in 1925 by Boni & Liveright, New York, and of a collection of vignettes published in 1924 in France titled in our time. Its title is derived from the English Book of Common Prayer, "Give peace in our time, O Lord".
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Across the River and Into the Trees is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1950, after first being serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine earlier that year. The title is derived from the last words of Confederate States Army General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, who was mortally wounded by friendly fire during the American Civil War: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” In the 19th century, this was understood to refer to the Jordan River and the passage to death and afterlife in Christianity.
Elizabeth Hadley Richardson was the first wife of American author Ernest Hemingway. The two married in 1921 after a courtship of less than a year, and moved to Paris within months of being married. In Paris, Hemingway pursued a writing career, and through him Richardson met other expatriate American and British writers.
The iceberg theory or theory of omission is a writing technique coined by American writer Ernest Hemingway. As a young journalist, Hemingway had to focus his newspaper reports on immediate events, with very little context or interpretation. When he became a writer of short stories, he retained this minimalistic style, focusing on surface elements without explicitly discussing underlying themes. Hemingway believed the deeper meaning of a story should not be evident on the surface, but should shine through implicitly.
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