The Hemingway Hoax
- 1991 Hugo
- 1991 Nebula
- by Joe Haldeman
- Novella
- Science Fiction, Horror, Comedy
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “The Hemingway Hoax” by Joe Haldeman, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1990.
Literature professor John Baird and conman Sylvester Castlemaine hatch a plan to get rich forging Hemingway’s lost stories, but before long, Baird is confronted by an apparent guardian of the many timelines in the form of Hemingway himself.
—Michael Main
I’m from the future and the past and other temporalities that you can’t comprehend. But all you need to know is that yiou must not write this Hemingway story. If you do, I or someone like me will have to kill you.
Tags
(20)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1900 to 1929: The Parisian train is in 1921.
- Circa AD 1970 to 1999: Baird’s home time is around 1996.
- Timeline Models
- Multiple Naive Timelines: Clearly there are many timelines, but how they are created, changed, and destroyed is not addressed.
- Time Runs in Reverse for Some Beings: during the climactic fight
- Themes
- Alternate Histories: Some of the universes are clearly alternate histories of our own world, such as the one where Hemingway’s stories were never lost.
- Cannot Return to Where You Already Exist
- Caution! Do Not Destroy Spacetime Continuum!: John Baird is told that he’s the nexus of a potential apocalypse that can destroy the omniverse.
- Frozen Time: With considerable effort of will and expenditure of something like energy, he froze time at this moment [. . .]
- Guardians of Time: The thing who appears as Hemingway claims to be from the Spacial-Temporal Adjustment Board.
- Incorporeal Traveler: During his initial travel, Baird is incorporeal.
- Invisible Traveler
- Long Life: The Hemingway thing has lived for centuries at least.
- Time Montages: Near the end of the story, Baird experiences a slow reverse montage of Hemingway’s life.
- Real-World Tags
- Fictional Tags
- Parallel Universes or Dimensions: the omniverse
- Shapeshifters: 4126
- Groupings
Variants
(1)
- “The Hemingway Hoax” by Joe Haldeman, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1990.
Gardner Dozois (abridgment)
Translations
(4)
- German.
“Der Schwindel um Hemingway” by Joe Haldeman, in Heyne Science Fiction Jahresband 1992, edited by Wolfgang Jeschke (Heyne, February 1992). - Italian.
“La burla di Hemingway” by Joe Haldeman, in Supernovæ, edited by Gardner Dozois (Interno Giallo, October 1993). - Serbian.
“Hemingvejska obmana” by Joe Haldeman, in Science Fiction almanah Monolit knjiga 8, edited by Boban Knežević (Flamarion, 1993). - Swedish.
“Hemingwaybluffen” by Joe Haldeman, Nova science fiction #9, early 2006.
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translated by
unknown persons
Previous Works
abridgement of The Hemingway Hoax (1990)