{"id":16060,"date":"2022-08-14T17:40:59","date_gmt":"2022-08-15T00:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=16060"},"modified":"2022-08-14T18:43:42","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T01:43:42","slug":"joe-haldemans-the-hemingway-hoax-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2022\/08\/14\/joe-haldemans-the-hemingway-hoax-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Haldeman’s “The Hemingway Hoax” + 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cThe Hemingway Hoax,\u201d by Joe Haldeman, first published in April 1990, is the third story in the big Gardner Dozois anthology being perused by the Facebook reading group I’m following. (See previous Sundays’ posts.)<\/p>\n

Haldeman is a popular writer who, like William Gibson and no doubt other writers, remains most famous for his very first novel: THE FOREVER WAR (1975), a book that responds to Robert A. Heinlein\u2019s equally-famous STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959) and which reflects Haldeman\u2019s own experience in the Vietnam War. (Even though both Haldeman and Gibson went on to write arguably much better novels.) Haldeman’s war experience shows up in other of his works as well, including two of the stories covered here.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Hemingway Hoax\u201d<\/strong> is unusual among Haldeman\u2019s work for not being obviously science fiction, at least not at first. Initially it\u2019s about, of all things, a famous historical incident concerning the writer Ernest Hemingway, in which early in his career an entire bag of manuscripts went missing on a train trip with his wife. The bag never turned up, and the novels and stories in the bag were never found.<\/p>\n

So our story begins, as Haldeman himself begins the story, with John Baird, a university professor and specialist in Hemingway, as he is approached in a Key West bar by a con man who, hearing the story of the lost manuscripts, wonders if they might be faked and passed off as real, to make lots of money. Baird dismisses the idea at first but then considers it intellectually. How would it be done? You\u2019d have to find exactly the right typewriter, the kind of paper used back in the 1920s, and so on; and you\u2019d have to be familiar enough with Hemingway\u2019s themes and his early life to imagine what he might have written in those years before he became famous. Soon enough Baird goes to Boston for research, the con man begins an affair with Baird\u2019s wife, and as backup the con man arranges to blackmail Baird via a dalliance with escort.<\/p>\n

But something else is going on, in some higher plane of existence; Haldeman tips us to this on the fourth page of the story (as set in Dozois\u2019 anthology). Extradimensional entities overseeing the timelines, or something. Some disturbance on the Hemingway plane, they notice. Keep an eye on things. Don’t let this Baird guy get out of hand.<\/p>\n

For Baird things really start happening when \u2013 following a sip of absinthe \u2013 Ernest Hemingway appears in his train car, urging him to give this project up. There are zillions of universes, along with entities keeping them straight, Hemingway explains, and for interest in him, and his idea of American masculinity, to be revived now would have tragic political consequences. Hemingway produces a cane, touches it to Baird, and gives him a stroke.<\/p>\n

But Baird wakes \u2013 perhaps in an adjacent universe. Meanwhile, we\u2019re given to understand the higher plane entities don\u2019t know what this Hemingway entity is up to, and can\u2019t control him. So there are three sets of forces in conflict.<\/p>\n

Work continues on the hoax, the con man\u2019s schemes move forward, and Baird encounters Hemingway again and again, each time dying ever more grievously.<\/p>\n

Now the *challenge* of this story \u2013 a reader impatient with multi-genre complexities might call it a flaw \u2013 is that it doesn\u2019t go, or end up, where you thought it might. It\u2019s not about hoaxing manuscripts. It\u2019s not an alternate timeline story, exactly. There\u2019s no simple explanation for the missing manuscripts, though an explanation of a sort is provided. Indeed, when I first reviewed this story in Locus Magazine (March 1990 issue), I concluded,<\/p>\n

Unfortunately the resolution whips everything into a flashy transcendental froth that doesn’t satisfactorily resolve various specific mysteries, let alone explain why it’s all happening.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This read I\u2019m a little more forgiving. There\u2019s no conventional cause and effect here; the characters of Baird and Hemingway are somehow inextricably connected, one life bound up in the other. Do authors only live by virtue of critical attention? Or is this about a ghost Hemingway trying to preserve his legacy from a revisionist critic? Or perhaps this is overthinking it. Here\u2019s a comment from Haldeman on Wikipedia<\/a>: \u201cIt’s a horror novel tinged with ghastly humor, as the apparently insane ghost of Ernest Hemingway murders a helpless scholar over and over\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

And it did win both the Hugo and the Nebula.<\/p>\n

(Aside: The book version of THE HEMINGWAY HOAX was published in June 1990, just two months after the cover date of issue of Asimov\u2019s<\/i> where the novella was published. Isfdb assumes the book was expanded from the novella<\/a>, but I haven\u2019t seen Haldeman say this anywhere; perhaps the novella was cut from the novel. Anyway, the novel has several extra short chapters, which I\u2019ll indicate as 5+, 6+, 15+, 19+, 20+, and 21+, to indicate their positions following the numbered sections of the novella. These include details about setting up the typewriter, and later actions Lena (Baird\u2019s wife) and Pansy (the escort) take against Castle (the con man). But the most substantial difference is in chapter 18, in which Pansy tells John much more about her past, before admitting that Castle has put her up to this encounter; and John tells something about his life after he came home from Vietnam. These sections are more graphically sexual than anything in the rest of the book (which might suggest they were cut for magazine publication, rather than added for the book).<\/p>\n

\\\\<\/p>\n

Also this week I read three shorter Haldeman stories, also award winners. In chronological order of publication:<\/p>\n

\u201cTricentennial\u201d (1976)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Written at the request of Ben Bova\u2019s for Analog<\/i>\u2019s July 1976 issue. And to match an existing work of cover art by Rick Sternbach showing a planet, a damaged spaceship, and the North America Nebula in backdrop. It won the Hugo and Locus awards and was a Nebula finalist.<\/p>\n

It consists of lots of short sections dated from 1975 to 1992 to 2040 and 2076, and eventually 2093\/5000.<\/p>\n

In 1975 it\u2019s discovered the sun is part of a double star system, and a few years later, that in fact the companion is a pair of black dwarfs, one matter, one anti-matter.<\/p>\n

In 2075 scientists receive a signal from 61 Cygni, apparently from an intelligent civilization, and want to respond.<\/p>\n

The story follows the scientists, who live in an L-5 space colony, and their frustration with the \u201cGroundhogs\u201d on Earth, where culture is becoming increasingly degenerate following the Breakup and People\u2019s Revolution. This is illustrated, e.g., by newspaper articles that are bulleted sentences rather than prose, and that use terms like \u201cupleft\u201d and \u201cupright\u201d to refer to parts of the page; similarly \u201cbacover\u201d. So the scientists decide to revive Project Daedalus \u2013 the actual proposed idea of using H-bombs to propel a starship \u2013 and simply go<\/i> to 61 Cygni themselves, using the material from those two black dwarfs as fuel for the bulk of the journey. But not to tell Earth until they\u2019re on their way.<\/p>\n

This is a snappy, black-humored story that takes a dim view of public support for science or exploration, or of the general public in general. The crux of the mission involves a technological problem that echoes that of Poul Anderson\u2019s novel TAU ZERO, from 1970, though the outcome here is notably different. And further underscores Haldeman\u2019s projection of the diminution of civilization on Earth.<\/p>\n

\\\\<\/p>\n

\u201cGraves\u201d (1992)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This incorporates Haldeman\u2019s Vietnam War experience as much as any story he ever wrote, I suspect. The narrator writes how 20 years before he was on \u201cGraves\u201d duty to retrieve dead bodies from the jungle, despite the dangers of being shot at by the enemy. We get details of how such bodies look and smell after days; how sometimes they are officers terminated by their own men. The key event concerns the finding of a native corpse, a Montagnard<\/a> with filed teeth, whose soft body parts are already gone. The retrieval crew is ambushed, the major shot, the rest huddling through the night, until morning when they find the major\u2019s body\u2026 with his insides already gone.<\/p>\n

The story wraps swiftly with the narrator\u2019s sleep troubles and a recurring dream that suggests a shocking supernatural explanation for what happened in the jungle. It’s saying quite a bit that, even after the grotesqueries of death in the jungle, the revelation from the dreams is the most shocking thing of all.<\/p>\n

(But without giving anything away, wasn\u2019t there an episode of the \u201870s TV series The Night Gallery<\/i> that did something similar at the end?)<\/p>\n

The story won a Nebula and tied for the World Fantasy Award; placed 3rd in the Locus Poll.<\/p>\n

\\\\<\/p>\n

\u201cNone So Blind\u201d (1994)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This won the Hugo and a Locus, not to mention a HOMer and the SF Chronicles poll, and was a Nebula finalist.<\/p>\n

Even more so than \u201cTricentennial,\u201d this is crisp and efficient as a story with a substantial theme could possibly be.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s about Cletus, a 13-year-old genius who\u2019s black, short, and ugly, and Amy, who\u2019s white, tall, and rich, and a musical prodigy on the violin despite being blind. \u201cWhy aren\u2019t all blind people geniuses?\u201d Cletus wonders as the story opens, and in the years after he and Amy meet and bond, he studies the brain, learning how skills are not located in particular areas, and how sometimes people who lose one skill develop compensating talents. Years later when the technology become available, he suggests removing Amy\u2019s eyes to replace them with electronic implants, giving her limited sight. But he has ulterior motives. The success of the operation triggers (r)evolutionary consequences.<\/p>\n

Even in such a brief story Haldeman paints Cletus and Amy vividly. The background about the brain\u2019s structure, the way skills and knowledge are multitasked throughout the brain, shows an astute understanding of that topic, even in the 1990s. And Haldeman, in the afterword to this story in his collection NONE SO BLIND (1996), confirms the impression that the story was modeled after what he says is his own favorite SF story, Frederik Pohl\u2019s \u201cDay Million.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Hemingway Hoax,\u201d by Joe Haldeman, first published in April 1990, is the third story in the big Gardner Dozois anthology being perused by the Facebook reading group I’m following. (See previous Sundays’ posts.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","category-short-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16060"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16072,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16060\/revisions\/16072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}