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Famous Men Who Never Lived (2019)

de K. Chess

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1855146,044 (3.56)1
"Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate United States--and alternate timeline, somewhere across the multiverse--she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram's copy of The Pyronauts--a science fiction masterwork in her world that now only exists as a single flimsy paperback--and becomes determined to create a museum dedicated to preserving the remaining artifacts and memories of her vanished culture. But the refugees are unwelcome and Hel's efforts are met with either indifference or hostility. And when the only copy of The Pyronauts goes missing, Hel must decide how far she is willing to go to recover it and finally face her own anger, guilt, and grief over what she has truly lost."--… (mais)
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Exibindo 5 de 5
A science fiction novel that is much more about atmosphere and emotion than science. An immigrant story, about the longing for a self, a community, and a history that no longer exists. ( )
  bibliovermis | Jun 7, 2021 |
Helen "Hel" Nash is a resident of New York City, only it's not her New York City. Her New York City has been irradiated into uninhabitability, and she is one of the approximately 156,000 people who were lucky enough to escape through an experimental interdimensional portal before the end. Now a "Universally Displaced Person," she lives with another UDP and spends her days dwelling over the world that she left behind. While contemplating the divergent fates of a beloved science fiction author from her world, she decides to convert his home into a museum for UDPs, one memorializing the world they had lost by containing the remaining fragments from it.

In this novel, K Chess offers a different approach to the traditional alternate history novel. Whereas most such works thrive on the concept of difference, as refugees from a doomed world her characters are practically drowning in it. This allows Chess to hammer home the concept of alienation that these people feel, one that she underscores nicely by focusing on the small things in which people invest so much of their emotion and identity. The result transcends many of the other books of its genre to become a touching meditation about the relationship between identity and place, one richer for the considerable effort the author put into realizing the very different world to which her characters belonged. ( )
  MacDad | Mar 27, 2020 |
Helen Nash ("Hel") and Vikram are Universally Displaced Persons (UDPs): They came into this world when a series of terrorist attacks on nuclear sites caused fatal levels of radiation poisoning in their world. Just over 100,000 UDPs came through the Gate into Calvary Cemetery in Queens, NY, where officials quickly debriefed them, checked their belongings, and began a reintegration program. Nearly three years on, Vikram has found a job as a guard at a storage warehouse, but Helen has not returned to work as a doctor; instead, she has the idea to start a museum of UDP history and culture. The museum, Hel thinks, should be in the apartment where science fiction author Ezra Sleight grew up - or, in this world, didn't grow up. In soliciting help to start the museum, Hel lends out Vikram's copy of Sleight's novel The Pyronauts - and it disappears. Frantic to get it back, Hel begins stalking the two women who work at the Museum of Modern Thought; meanwhile, Vikram and another UDP, Wes, help the apartment's current owner clear out his late grandmother's cache of junk.

A brilliant thought experiment full of empathy, Famous Men Who Never Lived examines the lives of two people who find themselves permanently stranded in a different world from the one they knew, and the reaction of this new world to the influx of immigrants. The UDPs are supposed to assimilate, not misbehave, certainly not set up museums to their lost art and literature; their collective trauma isn't really dealt with or acknowledged by a society that finds them a threat at worst, a curiosity at best.

See also: Station Eleven, The Age of Miracles

Quotes

Everything was like that. 1910 was the magic year, as far as anyone could prove. Before that was a known quantity. It was After - after 1910 - that things slowly started to unzip, one set of possibilities uncoupling from another and veering off, gradually at first, but then more and more drastically. (5-6)

Why just literature...? ...(Because he didn't know - none of them had any way of knowing - and because he didn't think he could live in a world without Rumi or Tolstoy or Jules Verne.) (Vikram, 7)

Apparently, it all stood for something bigger....Literature always seemed to have some hidden meaning that a normal person wouldn't guess. (Hel, 9)

"You're a doctor. You're supposed to be a scientist. Just because two things happened doesn't make them related." (Vikram to Hel, 13)

Every UDP agreed that something had gone wrong. Only she had it narrowed down to a day, a minute. A singular event, dividing Before from After. (15)

To her, those born just Before whose lives had ended prematurely were the worst cases, the most frustrating. There was something especially poignant about knowing exactly what these men and women might have accomplished if only history had proceeded the way it ought to have. "All the things they should have done. They need to be memorialized....Only we know about these inventors, these discoverers, these artists. It is our duty to share that knowledge with the whole world. Don't you think? we can make them understand us."
"A museum dedicated to those who never existed." (Hel and Dr. Carlos Oliveira, 38)

The watercraft parted the skin of the water in white-foamed cuts that closed seamlessly behind, scars that could heal perfectly. (Vikram, 90)

"No one seems to want to know more about UDP history....Let me be honest: it's frightening, to think about what happened to you. People prefer to keep it simple. To view you all as a problem."
"People can learn from problems."
"Only if they want to." (Ayanna Donaldson and Hel, 94)

"That fragile hour. When my colleagues on the other side saw me walk through, they witnessed an escape. They must have thought they'd saved the world, and I certainly thought so too. Everything still seemed possible...I still thought they would find me. I didn't know anything about this world - the ways it was different, or the ways it was the same. The ways it would disappoint me." (Lida Cristaudo to Vikram, 138)

"It's like a whole separate twentieth century."
"That is literally what it is." (Wes and Vikram, with Dwayne, 154)

From the right distance, all movement looked like fate. And if major world-shaking events were predetermined, why not minor? (194)

Alien is how anybody sane would feel, in the face of a life that's so unfair. (Interview transcript: Orson Young, age 54, Queens) (239)

He thought he'd lost the capacity to feel this way. (247)

A skill, not remembering, one he'd cultivated. After all, holding on taxes you. You do it for a while, but eventually, you choose to stop working so hard. Drowning - drowning that part of you - begins to seem preferable to fighting. (248)

All the aspects of his world and Hel's that were gone, all the people and places they would never see again. And weighing against these deficiencies, the few things they'd saved. (308) ( )
1 vote JennyArch | Apr 6, 2019 |
Hel is a UDP, or Universally Displaced Person, she is one of the few who escaped her universe - one similar to our own - saving her life, but at the cost of leaving everyone she ever loved, everyone she even knew, behind. Her quest to make a place of remembrance for a vanished universe becomes a quest for a right to existence.

'Famous Men Who Never Lived' is alternate history and parallel universe sf with the perspective of a refugee. Hel is an ordinary person, but surrounded by a world that has little interest in her past she clings to a paperback novel, the sole surviving work of a popular author in her universe. When that symbol is stolen from her, she is driven to extremes.

This was a nicely plotted and totally engrossing story that will share a unique perspective with its audience. I couldn't put it down. ( )
  ManWithAnAgenda | Feb 28, 2019 |
Famous Men Who Never Lived is built upon a tremendous premise: survivors from a doomed alternate timeline, selected through lottery, flee through a portal into our world. They're registered, treated as refugees, and forced to endure stigmas they cannot shake and restrictions that deny them their freedom. Their presence draws parallels to the Book of Revelation (their number was relatively close to 144,000). Their knowledge of the world, their speech, their culture—all of these were left in another reality.

The premise is fabulous, but the implementation was off. There's so much potential here, but it's untapped. We're told that these two worlds had identical histories until the the first decade of the twentieth century. In the last 110 years, however, everything has changed. In this other timeline, South America is a super power, the United States uses the metric system, the swastika is a peaceful symbol of eternity, every posh neighborhood is a slum, every celebrity you've ever heard of never rose to fame. Nearly every piece of history since 1909 has been turned upside down. If it happened in your world in the last hundred years, it apparently didn't happen in theirs. You were never born, neither were your parents or their parents. And I find this not only hard to believe, but anticlimactic. Here's a chance to to tackle issues that could be fun to explore: What if you run into the parallel you? What if your child who died in the parallel timeline is alive in this one? What if some maniacal tyrant from the other timeline lives in peace in this one? None of this is explored. Instead, after such a brilliant setup, we're given a rather run-of-the-mill thriller that plays out like an episode of Scooby-Doo. (Those in the other timeline didn't have Scooby, however, so they may have thought they were being original.)

When Famous Men Who Never Lived focuses on the human side of the story, it's wonderful. Like when the protagonist is considering the son she left behind. Or the dichotomy of world that welcomes these refugees who have nowhere else to go, but binds them in yellow tape. Even the simple nostalgia for a world one can never return to. I would've loved a story like that. At some point, though, the action took over and a villain had to be constructed. I hate stories with villains—it's a constraint of our world that I find so incredibly limiting and boring. Maybe there's another reality out there where literature isn't littered with all these villains, and if so, I do hope some day to visit it.

If you like science-fiction-based mysteries with a plot that is too light for literary readers and too dense for thrill-seeking readers, this is the perfect novel for you! ( )
2 vote chrisblocker | Feb 24, 2019 |
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K. Chessautor principaltodas as ediçõescalculado
Jung, StephanieArtista da capaautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Vala, JakobDesigner da capaautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
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"Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate United States--and alternate timeline, somewhere across the multiverse--she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram's copy of The Pyronauts--a science fiction masterwork in her world that now only exists as a single flimsy paperback--and becomes determined to create a museum dedicated to preserving the remaining artifacts and memories of her vanished culture. But the refugees are unwelcome and Hel's efforts are met with either indifference or hostility. And when the only copy of The Pyronauts goes missing, Hel must decide how far she is willing to go to recover it and finally face her own anger, guilt, and grief over what she has truly lost."--

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