Famous Men Who Never Lived
Ratings10
Average rating2.9
15
Ratings10
Average rating2.9
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--an alternate timeline--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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Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an eARC of this in exchange for my open and honest review.
K Chess's debut novel, “Famous Men Who Never Lived” is a diverse blend of different science fiction, sociological, and psychological ideas. It is a profoundly cerebral collection of ideas of who we are, and how do we go on after facing the loss of an entire timeline. The premise is what if a whole group of UDP (universally displaced persons) fled their failing and dying timeline and came into ours and how survivors of that would fare in our new world. The UDP's each have a different history both large and small, and even though they have gone through an intensive reintegration program to adapt to the new timeline, they still remain a curiosity to some and a focus of outright hostility and prejudice for others.
The narrative follows a few different people as they surf the woes and difficulties adapting to living in a new timeline — specifically those of Hel and Vikram. Vikram's favorite author in the old timeline was a man named Sleight. Vikram managed to bring one of Sleight's books with him, a book that was never written in this timeline due to Sleight dying at a young age. Hel feels like there is something strange about Sleight and how he somehow caused the divergence between the two timelines and Vikram and Hel decide to figure out what that is.
“Famous Men Who Never Lived” is marketed as a science fiction novel; however, I felt it was more a character study based on a science fiction premise. Those looking for a heavy parallel universe novel should look elsewhere as the parallel universe premise is a means of talking about the effects of displacement for people. The writing is well done, the characters are well-formed and interesting, especially for a debut novel but I felt that the story did not know precisely what it wanted to be and that led to it feeling choppy.
The multiverse trick didn't work for me, not enough difference between the ones in this book.
