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The Hemingway Hoax is a short novel by science fiction writer Joe Haldeman. It weaves together a story of an attempt to
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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]
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About Wikipedia 1 Plot summary
Community portal 2 Author's description of the book
Recent changes 3 Citations
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4 External links
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Plot summary [ edit ]
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Upload file In 1921, Hemingway's writing career suffered a setback when his first wife, Hadley, lost a bag containing the manuscript and all
Special pages the carbon copies of his first novel on a Parisian train. Since that time there has been speculation about the nature of the novel
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and whether the manuscript survived and may turn up one day.
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Wikidata item Seventy-five years later in 1996, John Baird, a Hemingway scholar with a completely eidetic memory, is persuaded by
Cite this page 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
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attention of the authorities.
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Printable version 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
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Hemingway is a threat to them. We eventually learn that many of the timelines are supposed to end in 2006 with a catastrophic
Español nuclear war when two macho superpower leaders, both influenced by Hemingway's stories, refuse to back down in a crisis. If
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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]
Author's description of the book [ edit ]
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]
Citations [ edit ]
1. ^ Morrow, James (1992). Nebula Awards 26. Harcourt Barce Jovanovich. p. xii, 222.
2. ^ Kening, Dan (September 2, 1991). "Hugo Awards Honor Science Fiction`s Finest" . Chicago Tribune. p. 10. Retrieved
September 2, 2012.
3. ^ Osborn, Williams. "Book Review: The Hemingway Hoax" . Grand Valley State University. Retrieved 12 March 2014.
4. ^ "The Hemingway Hoax" , review by Nicholas Whyte. Whyte credits James Morrow for a longer quote, but this version was posted
on Haldeman's old website, retrieved in FEB 2003.
External links [ edit ]
The Hemingway Hoax title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
The Hemingway Hoax at the Internet Book List
· · Hugo Award for Best Novella [show]
· · Nebula Award for Best Novella [show]
Categories: Science fiction short stories Hugo Award for Best Novella winning works Novels by Joe Haldeman
Works about Ernest Hemingway Cultural depictions of Ernest Hemingway
Nebula Award for Best Novella-winning works
This page was last edited on 14 January 2020, at 14:37 (UTC).
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