The newcomers, who’s reality had betrayed them. Here they all were, crash-landed. Resented and resentful. Universally Displaced Persons.
They’re called the One Hundred and Fifty-Six Thousand: refugees who used an experimental machine to escape an alternate version of America on the brink of nuclear war.
Chosen by lottery, leaving behind friends and family and taking only what they could grab and carry at the last minute, the UDP’s stepped across the Gate into a universe that diverged from theirs somewhere around the early 1900’s. Most of the differences between their universe and ours are minor, some are enormous. And in our universe in 1909, Ezra Sleight drowned as a child instead of growing up to be a renowned science-fiction writer, author of The Pyronauts, a novel that now only exists as a single tattered paperback on a UDP’s shelf in New York.
Then one day, The Pyronauts goes missing.
Fans of the current Doctor Who series may remember Rose and the Doctor traveling centuries into the future after Rose decided that London a hundred years from now was just too similar to current day London. Up until now I would have agreed, but that was before I saw how author K Chess could make all the tiny variations between two universes so fascinating.
Cough syrup in the UDP’s home universe is blue. Cars are called “pods”. One character refers to a toaster in this universe as having “those weird vertical slits”, and someone else talks about riding a “velocab” and leaning back to talk with the driver. Slang is different, technology and medical treatments are better, or have a new focus, or didn’t exist at all. The UDP’s home universe even has a version of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck that was created by the same artist, but with an unfamiliar design for each card. All of these tidbits are dropped into the story bit by bit, and I loved the little jolt I would get every time the author introduced a new divergence.
The altered timeline means that some countries have different names and different governments. One new international conflict means a change in migration for another group, entirely changed family histories, and symbols in one universe that will have a completely different meaning in another.
We learn about a lot of the differences from the chapters that are in the form of interview transcripts (one of my favorite storytelling formats, along with the “how did we get here” history recaps that the author does so well). Everything else is told from the point of view of Vikram Bhatnagar and his friend/lover/it’s complicated fellow UDP Helen Nash.
If only there’d been a way for her to understand in advance what it would be like to be shipwrecked in a world populated by seven billion strangers with whom she had nothing in common.
None of the UDP’s knew what world they would be stepping into, so no one knew the best things to take with them. It’s one of those the-house-is-burning-down-what-do-I-save types of mental puzzles that can actually make me a little anxious. In many cases the refugees are mourning the items they lost as well as the people and lives they left behind. After almost three years in our universe, Vikram has found a kind of balance between his love for the few precious books he brought from his old world (the last remnants of how now-useless Ph.D. classes in 20th Century American literature), and his slow assimilation into this one: boring job as a night watchman, tedious mandatory Reintegration meetings, tentative friendships.
Meanwhile Hel has not even begun to adjust to what she’s lost, and her balance has settled between an obsession with the author-who-never-existed-in-this-world Ezra Sleight and a jumbled mass of rage and resentment against the world, this one and her own. It’s a testament to how well K Chess has created this character that you can sympathize with this former surgeon (and former mother), while at the same time being incredibly annoyed at her tendency to sabotage her life and lash out at every damn person she meets and refuses to connect with.
Daniel, pumping her hand, giving his meaningless condolences. A face, a set of fingers to grip, a heart, a penis. An unlikely collection of atoms, assembled in a unique and different way, utterly unspecial to her. A rock among rocks on a beach she wished she’d never visited.
And unfortunately Hel has a lot to be bitter about. In what should come as a surprise to no one, some of the natives of our universe are hostile (those durn aliens coming over here and stealing our jobs! And also they want to just sit around and collect welfare,) some are scared (those refugees are all really just animals, there’s no telling what they’ll do next) and many see the UDP’s as a kind of sideshow exhibit (never mind who you are as an individual, tell me what life was like without smartphones!)
The justice system is hopelessly prejudiced against non-natives, “helpful” people keep making the suggestion that maybe things would be easier if they just acted more like _____ (insert name of majority population here), and even the refugees who become respected citizens have to remember that they can lose it all the very second that they forget to “behave”.
It’s no wonder that Hel is mentally and spiritually stuck, fixated on sharing the works of Sleight and other UDP stories that should exist (you’ll see Hel falling back on that “should” many, many times), and then on trying to recover The Pyronauts when it’s misplaced (or taken). With nothing left for her to fall back on, Hel focuses on anything she can push against, anything that will keep her from spiraling down into regret and useless wishes for all the things that her world could have done to make things turn out differently.
A police detail tipped off, ready to pull the convoy off the highway before the saboteurs arrived at the targets. Teachers to admonish them, to take away the propaganda-laced black market sims they’d played. Mothers to love them more as children. Murderers to kill all their mothers.
It amazes me that this is K Chess’s debut novel, since this book has the feel of someone who’s been writing novels for decades. The chapters weave together Hel and Vikram’s point of view with the interviews with various UDP’s, the themes from the Tarot cards (both this universe’s and the strange designs from the deck in the other world) and snippets from the post apocalyptic tale in The Pyronauts (a story of unwelcome visitors destroying the Earth, written decades before the Earth is destroyed and its citizens become unwelcome visitors themselves).
This is a story about refugees – whether coming from a different country or a different universe – but it’s also about reverence for art, for personal history, and for the tiny details in mundane objects that take you back in time to the person who made them, or the person you were when you first saw them. It’s a rejection of the either/or choice of assimilate completely or get out. And it’s also something of a love letter to New York. I mean, if there’s any place that would be home to tens of thousands of refugees from an alternate timeline, it would have to be New York.