New Books In Science Fiction

Famous Men Who Never Lived (Tin House, 2019) is set in two Brooklyns. In one, people ride in trams; in the other, they take subways. In one, the swastika is a symbol of luck; in the other, it signifies hate. In one, science fiction is literature; in the other, it’s considered mere genre. Helen (Hel) Nash, the main character in K Chess’s debut novel, comes from the other Brooklyn—the one with trams and innocuous swastikas. She is a refugee from a nuclear war, one of 156,000 Universally Displaced Persons who escape through an experimental gate from her timeline to ours. Like many refugees, she’s having a hard time adjusting. Not only has she lost friends and family—including her son, who she can never see again—but she faces a new world of unfamiliar laws, customs, and culture. It doesn’t help that most people in our timeline eye UDPs with mistrust. Hel’s and our world diverged around 1910. “It was fun to think about all the things that happened since nineteen hundred,” Chess says in her New Books interview. “F