The Hemingway Hoax

The Hemingway Hoax is a 1990 short novel by science fiction writer Joe Haldeman. It weaves together a story of an attempt to 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).

A literary scholar decides to create a forged copy of Hemingway's missing first novel. He unwittingly interferes with a destined nuclear war which was influenced by Hemingway's stories. The scholar consequently experiences multiple deaths as he keeps shifting between parallel timeline.

In 1921, Hemingway's writing career suffered a setback when his first wife, Hadley Richardson, lost a bag containing the manuscript and all the carbon copies of his first novel as well as most of the short stories he had so far written on a Parisian train. Since that time there has been speculation about the nature of the novel and whether the manuscript survived and may turn up one day.

Seventy-five years later in 1996, John Baird, a Hemingway scholar with a completely eidetic memory, is persuaded by 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 attention of the authorities.

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 Hemingway is a threat to them. We eventually learn that many of the timelines are supposed to end in 2006 with a catastrophic nuclear war when two macho superpower leaders, both influenced by Hemingway's stories, refuse to back down in a crisis. If 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.