Famous Men Who Never Lived

An interesting take on multiverse where the stakes aren't grand and there's no great evil to fight. Just finding meaning and existence in a universe not entirely your own something that has always been a staple of science fiction but you don't often told in such a way.

Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess

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This is a literary science fiction novel that emphasizes character over plot and setting. This works for the most part because the author, K. Chess, has a nice, engaging writing style. Unfortunately, the main character - “Hel” (short for Helen) - is not a particularly appealing character, the plot is fairly weak, and the real strength is in the setting, which is underplayed.

Hel is the main character of the story. She and 150,000 others have immigrated from a parallel history that diverged from our history in 1910 for unexplained reasons. We are given tantalizing pieces of information about the divergent history of Hel's timeline. The Nazis in Germany weren't “Nazis” but operated under a different name. There was no Holocaust, but some undefined ugly behavior against the Slavs. The real threat to Hel's America was some kind of Communist state based in Caracas that unified Latin America. We never get any explanation about how that history developed the way it did, which is a disappointment to any fan of alt-hist, and which seems highly implausible.

Hel arrives in our history because the Latin America Superpower has unleashed some kind of radiological disaster that threatens Hel's New York (and maybe the world (it isn't clear)), but, fortunately, a scientist has invented a window into a parallel universe, which we assume is our universe.

This is all incredibly interesting, but the focus of Chess's story is on the experience of Hel and her fellow “universally displaced persons” (“UDP”). Once here, the story of Hel and the other UDPs is the typical existence of immigrants - alienated, isolated, and discriminated against. Chess does a good job with the first two elements, but, honestly, the discrimination trope is so tired and cliche at this point. Chess seems to want to win some points for bringing this trope into the story, particularly with the strange requirements that UDPs attend some kind of re-education classes five years after their arrival and are docked for failing to attend, but this element of the story goes nowhere. Apparently, there is a box to check for “xenophobia” in stories of this kind.

This leads to my main problem with the book - I didn't particularly emphasize with Hel. She seemed too much like an upper-class, urban elite - what would have once been called a “Yuppie.” Hel has been lucky enough to survive a world-ending disaster, but she is upset, angry and disappointed with the fact that the world is not her world. This is not an incidental or occasional set of feelings; these feelings seem to define her to the extent that she has made no effort to fit herself into the new reality. For example, she refuses to take the steps necessary to qualify herself as a doctor in current New York for no logical reason. She stupidly risks the last copy of the great science fiction work of her reality and then assaults her only influential friend because he curtly informs her that he can't help her.

In short, Hel is not particularly sympathetic. We are supposed to sympathize with her because of her situation, and I do sympathize to a certain extent, but like most people, including her influential friend, there is a limit to sympathy, and that limit tends to get reached when we don't see the object of our sympathy doing rational things to help themselves.

That said, I did enjoy contemplating with the book what it would be like to be exiled to a universe where everything I knew had “never happened.” (Of course, those things had happened, really, in a different time and place.) Of course, I have those experiences all the time at my age. I can go to a particular place where I had a picnic in the country one spring afternoon, which is now an intersection with stoplights and medical buildings. I can clearly see with my mind's eye what it was and with my actual eye what it is now. I am just as much at a loss to explain to my kids what it was like as I know it in my memory as Hel is to explain why a particular science fiction book that no one knows was known by everyone.

The core of the story is, of course, about Hel's memory. Her boyfriend, Vikram, was a scholar of Ezra Sleight, author of The Pyronauts. In our history, Sleight died as a boy; in Hel's history, Sleight became an influential writer, perhaps he was the Kurt Vonnegut of Hel's world, albeit it seems that Slieight's work was pulpier and he was more influential than Vonnegut. Vikram brought a copy of The Pyronauts with him and so it is the only remaining text of its kind in our world. If it is lost, then Sleight is lost.

Hel discovers the house where Sleight lived as an adult in her history. She decides that it would be a good idea to open a UDP museum - which actually seems like a good idea - and she brings the only copy of the book to a party with a museum official, at which point, she loses the book. She believes that the museum official stole the book and the vast middle section of the book is taken up by her efforts to get the book back.

Meanwhile, Vikram learns some things about the program that led to the arrival of the UDP in our history. This thread seems to go nowhere, but in retrospect, you will realize that it provides the developments necessary for the final wrap-up.

After seeming to wander around for most of the book, the ending arrives like the solution of a mystery when we didn't know we were reading a mystery. I began to be suspicious when Chess started throwing a particular character at us.

This is not a bad book. In fact, it is enjoyable if you don't mind a book that takes its time to develop itself. Likewise, if you are willing to read a book that is more literary than science fiction, you will enjoy this book. On the other hand, this book could easily have been written in a way that developed the alternate history setting and the plot more directly. That book would have been more exciting, but you can't blame a book for being the book that was written rather than the one you wanted to be written. This book is more cerebral and more tantalizing in laying out hints and clues concerning the history Hel grew up in without providing answers.

This book reminded me of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which was also cerebral and brought the reader into the minds of the characters. If you liked that book, you will probably like this. If not, then you won't.

The multiverse trick didn't work for me, not enough difference between the ones in this book.

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.

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 probably 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!