Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess

 


"For many individuals and families, their reason to leave the only home they have ever known is simply that they have no other option. Currently, there are nearly 80 million men, women and children fleeing war, persecution and political turmoil. These people are refugees and asylum seekers."

The above quote is taken from a leading website on refugees and seekers of asylum. The plight of such peoples is at the heart of the heart of Famous Men Who Never Lived. Indeed, K Chess employs a particular science fiction trope (parallel universes) to address this critical, heart wrenching issue.

The author frames her tale thusly: after 1910 "things slowly started to unzip, one set of possibilities uncoupling from another and veering off, gradually at first, but then more and more drastically." As readers we're invited to explore the consequences of a multiverse when two worlds converge in 2020. Specifically, Famous Men picks up three years after 156,000 refugees from an alternate reality arrived in Calvary Cemetery in Queens via what the refugees referred to as 'the gate'. The refugees (only women and men, no children) were chosen by their government's lottery in the aftermath of total nuclear devastation.

So, how are those refugees (labeled Universally Displaced Persons or UDPs by our world) faring in modern day New York City? Chess's main focus is on two characters: Vikram Bhatnagar, a young literary scholar working as a night watchman and Helen Nash (Hel), a surgeon (ear, nose, throat specialist) who is too traumatized to practice medicine and chooses to remain on public assistance.

Since there's so much happening from first page to last, I'll take an immediate shift to a highlight reel -

DAMN ALIENS
"At first, public curiosity had been intense, the attention not unfriendly. The scientifically inclined and the religious were equally fascinated by the miraculous proof of the existence of a version of creation other than the one they knew." However, soon after this initial wave of wonderment, people viewed the UDPs as aliens, a minority to be feared, even hated (any crimes committed by individual UDPs were sensationalized in the media and quickly projected onto all UDPs). Common pubic sentiment: those creepy foreigners are either taking our jobs or sitting around demanding handouts.

REINTEGRATION EDUCATION
We're given a glimpse of what it means to be among those universally displaced when Vikram attends Reintegration Education, his enforced weekly meeting held on Wednesday evenings. Tonight Vikram joins about a dozen others in a semicircle to watch a DVD about the US Justice System. Justice - what a joke. The UDPs know the justice system wouldn't take the first step in addressing all the many abuses and hate crimes committed against them. Scratch the surface and it becomes clear such meetings serve as a way for the government to keep tabs on the UDPs.

FROM THE GOVERNMENT FILES
One way K Chess provides up close and personal windows into the lives of individual UDPs is by the inclusion of eight 'Interview Transcripts' for women and men who came through the gate at Calvary Cemetery. Among the transcripts, Joslan Micallef, age 22, where Joslan relates how she "got wild and did all those things to that old lady...stabbed her and stabbed her till she died." Joslan's lawyer advises her to tell how the system failed her and the way a drug dealer prayed on her ignorance about the power of street drugs. A second transcript features Gregory "Wes" Westmorland, age 38, who encountered unending hostility since he had a swastika tattoo on his neck. The police ask Wes if he knows about the Nazis. Wes tells them 'no' (in Wes's world there was no Nazi party or WWII). From all eight transcripts it becomes abundantly clear just how shockingly different their world was from our own and all are suffering from various degrees of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

THE PYRONAUTS, ONE
Vikram completed his dissertation on The Pyronauts by Ezra Sleight, a science fiction author from his world comparable to Isaac Asimov or Philip K. Dick. Vicram brought along a copy of The Pyronauts, the one and only copy now in existence. Turns out, Hel, the lovely lady he's living with in his Bronx apartment, has become obsessive with The Pyronaut and not only passionately rereads the novel but has made it her life's work to establish a museum dedicated to Ezra Slight and the collective stories and memories of her fellow Universally Displaced Persons. And the location of the museum? In the very house where Ezra Slight lived and wrote his novels, a cottage in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn that's currently up for sale by Dwayne, a young dude who's been having trouble attracting buyers since his grandma who lived there until her death was a hoarder and the place looks like a garbage dump.

THE PYRONAUTS, TWO
Ezra Slight's most famous novel chronicles a post-apocalyptic Earth where survivors live in scattered underground settlements and only pyronauts wearing special suits venture out beyond the settlements to the Neverlands in order to burn all infected plantlife. The cause of the planet-wide infection came from outer space aliens who traveled to Earth on a mission of peace, to help Earthlings better sustain life through innovations in agriculture and technology. The aliens leave but, alas, they also brought their alien microscopic viruses which proved deadly to all forms of life on our planet. Slight's novel traces the saga of two pyronauts, John Gund and his patrol-partner Asyl, on their odyssey through the Neverlands. Hel closely identifies with John Gund and Asyl and their mission.

THE PYRONAUTS, THREE
As Hel seeks out supporters of her museum project, she must deal with the unexpected: it appears a museum director has stolen The Pyronauts and refuses to return it to her. Hel is now on her own mission to recover her beloved possession, as if the battered paperback represents her lost world's culture.

HELEN NASH
Hel not only suffers from cultural loss but great personal loss: the lottery system forced women and men to leave behind their loved ones and Hel left behind her ten-year-old son with her ex-husband, both now long dead along with everybody else from her world.

Famous Men Who Never Lived is a novel for our time, a moving novel containing a number of mysteries I haven't touched on in my review. To discover what I'm alluding to here, you'll have to read for yourself. Highly, highly recommended.


American author K Chess