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Famous Men Who Never Lived
Famous Men Who Never Lived | K. Chess
Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate United States--an alternate timeline--she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram's copy of The Pyronauts--a science fiction masterwork in her world that now only exists as a single flimsy paperback--and becomes determined to create a museum dedicated to preserving the remaining artifacts and memories of her vanished culture.But the refugees are unwelcome and Hel's efforts are met with either indifference or hostility. And when the only copy of The Pyronauts goes missing, Hel must decide how far she is willing to go to recover it and finally face her own anger, guilt, and grief over what she has truly lost.
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Schlinkles
Pickpick

One of the things I really love about science fiction is the ability to explore issues in a way that almost feels safer than in regular fiction. This book takes the emotional intensity of the refugee situation presented in Moshin Hamid's Exit West and ups the magical realism to full blown alternate realities. This is a book that I'll be thinking about for a long time and will need to sit with for a while to really process.

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The.Intentional.Reader
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It‘s been a while since I posted so I‘ll try to post some of the great books I‘ve read or am reading. I‘ll start with this one. I‘m going to call it hopeful apocalyptic. It‘s about when an alternate New York in another timeline butts up against our own. The main character becomes obsessed with preserving the alternate New York culture. One such piece is a book called “The Pyronauts” (which the publisher cleverly hid behind the book jacket).

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Christopher_Tallon
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This is a really cool book. It‘s science fiction that, I think, would appeal to people who aren‘t big sci-fi fans. It‘s imaginative but also relatable. K Chess uses the sci-fi genre, set in an alternate future, to make important statements about the world we live in, relevant to immigration and refugee issues, as well as general loss.
Love it!

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TheLibrarian
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#bookmail from the other week. I‘m really looking forward to the tagged and The Umbrella Academy.

yeahnonotagain I've been wanting to read the umbrella academy! Did you watch the series? 5y
TheLibrarian @ReadingOverSleeping Yes and I really liked the Netflix series. Have you seen it? 5y
yeahnonotagain @TheLibrarian yes, I really enjoyed them too! Looking forward to the book, let me know what you think 5y
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balletbookworm
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Pickpick

Between🤘🏻and so-so, rounded to🤘🏻because I really like the premise - using the idea of divergent Earths and their histories to explore forced migration and Otherness, “belonging” to a group, grief, and mourning. Where I struggled was when the sections of the fictional book “The Pyronauts” from Hel and Vikram‘s world were included in the narrative - the technique was distracting and didn‘t work as well as it did in a book like Station Eleven.

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aeeklund
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After the post office, I had to stop by the library for my holds. Excited to read both of these! Just got the arc of the sequel to Trail of Lightning in the mail—I have a fun marathon in my future!

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nitalibrarian
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It's my Saturday to work again. I'm currently cataloging the books that come out this Tuesday. 😍

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