The Hemingway Hoax
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
The Hemingway Hoax is a Hugo- and Nebula-winning novella that weaves an intricate plot of a fake Hemingway manuscript with time travel, multiple universes, and the potential destruction of the omniverse itself.
Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, lost a bag containing the manuscript of his first novel on a Parisian train. In 1996, John Baird, a renowned Hemingway scholar, decides to use that loss to account for a fake manuscript he creates.
Little does Baird suspect that his attempt to pass off the forgery as a recovered Hemingway manuscript will take him on a journey involving parallel universes and time travel. For Hemingway's reputation is intricately linked to the fate of multiple worlds in the omniverse and any attempt to change that can have disastrous consequences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Devotees of SF and literary mystery will enjoy this fast-paced, well-thought-out adventure that takes a college professor and Hemingway scholar on an eerie journey to coexisting universes. Nebula and Hugo Award-winner Haldeman ( The Forever War ) has written a tale that twists upon itself like a Moebius strip, with characters reenacting their lives in each slightly different, slightly worse universe. In a Key West bar, Baird is conned into writing a story in Hemingway's 1920s style, which could be passed off as one of the contents of the famous valise left on a train by Hemingway's then-wife Hadley. Returning to Key West from the Hemingway collection at the Kennedy Library, Baird suddenly finds Ernest Hemingway sitting opposite him in the train compartment. This is, however, a nonhuman who can take on any form, and who has come to warn Baird not to finish the Hemingway pastiche. In a lively, philosophical conversation, the temporal policeman explains that if Baird continues in his plan he will be killed. As each attempt to murder him fails, Baird finds himself in a slightly altered universe--and in one of these supernatural worlds, Baird evolves into Hemingway himself. Haldeman has injected humor and philosophy into what turns out to be an intriguingly existential drama.
