These refugees-known as Universally Displaced Persons, or UDPs-find themselves in a world they both recognize and don’t. As the book begins, the parallel world in which Sleight wrote The Pyronauts actually has been destroyed by nuclear catastrophe, forcing 156,000 of its citizens to flee across the fabric of the universe to seek refuge in ours. Sleight and his apocalyptic masterpiece are at the center of Famous Men Who Never Lived, the debut novel by Providence-based writer K Chess. Ezra Sleight and The Pyronauts are part of an alternate timeline, a parallel universe that split off from ours in the early years of the 20th century. There’s only one small problem if you want to read the book itself, which is that The Pyronauts doesn’t actually exist-at least not in this world. Sleight’s home in New York has been preserved as a museum, and his famous novel has been subject to one intricate analysis after another. The Pyronauts is often heralded as a masterwork, a mournful allegory for the dangers of colonialism or the nuclear age. The earth is left to smolder, charred black beyond recognition. The scattered survivors resort to burning the infected landscape in hopes of killing the virus. One by one, crops, flowers, and trees wither and die.

But the well-intentioned extraterrestrials bring along an unintended stowaway: a toxic parasite that destroys all plant life on earth. Aliens in crystal spaceships arrive on Earth bearing peaceful solutions to humanity’s deepest crises: war, illness, racism, xenophobia. In Ezra Sleight’s classic sci-fi novel The Pyronauts, the world ends in fire.

Famous men who never lived by k chess