The Hemingway Hoax
A forged manuscript triggers deadly shifts between parallel worlds.
The Hemingway Hoax is a 1990 short novel by American science fiction writer Joe Haldeman that combines a forged Ernest Hemingway manuscript with themes of time travel and parallel worlds. A shorter version won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1991. The novel explores how a literary forgery inadvertently threatens the stability of multiple timelines.
Quick Facts
- Author
- Joe Haldeman
- Publication year
- 1990
- Original publication
- Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (April 1990 issue, shorter version)
- Awards
- Hugo Award for Best Novella (1991), Nebula Award for Best Novella (1991)
- Genre
- Science fiction
- Protagonist
- John Baird
- Antagonist entity
- The Hemingway
Facts from the source article.
Plot summary
In 1921, Hemingway's first wife, Hadley Richardson, lost a bag containing the manuscript and all carbon copies of his first novel, along with most of his short stories, on a Parisian train. This event has since fueled speculation about the novel's nature and whether the manuscript might still exist. 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 that could be passed off as one of the lost copies. Baird initially hesitates but agrees, believing legal trickery might allow him to avoid authorities. Instead, he attracts attention from entities that control destiny across multiple parallel versions of the world. These entities see any change to Hemingway's cultural influence as a threat, because many timelines are destined to end in 2006 with a catastrophic nuclear war triggered by two macho superpower leaders influenced by Hemingway's stories. If even a few timelines fail to reach that point, the reverberations across the Omniverse would be fatal. Baird researches at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and tries to obtain aged paper and the exact model of typewriter Hemingway used. He receives three surprises: Hemingway appears to him on a train back from Boston to Florida and warns him to stop; when Baird refuses, the Hemingway kills him by inducing a massive stroke; and Baird wakes up on the same train, slightly different, with two sets of conflicting memories. The Hemingway entity is surprised that Baird shifted to a parallel timeline instead of staying dead.
Author's description of the book
Around 1991, Haldeman described the book as a 'Short Comic Novel of Existential Terror,' blending horror with ghastly humor. The apparently insane ghost of Ernest Hemingway murders a helpless scholar repeatedly, with the scholar slipping between universes each time he dies, gaining a form of serial immortality. The tongue-in-cheek explanations qualify the book as science fiction. Haldeman noted it may be his most literary work, containing the most explicit sex and gruesome violence he had written.
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