Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman is an author, born in Oklahoma but presently residing in Gainesville, Florida. He may not be a household name, but he's very well known to science fiction fans around the world. He's a recipient of the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, a SFWA Grand Master, and a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving as a combat engineer in the Vietnam war. He was wounded in combat, and received the Purple Heart. These experiences inspired his first novel, War Year, in 1972, and also influenced later books such as Old Twentieth and Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds.

In 1975, he received an MFA degree in Creative Writing. Somewhere along the way, he drifted down to Florida, and why he chose Gainesville as his home, I'm not sure. His brother, the late Jack C. Haldeman II, also lived in Gainesville, and both brothers authored Star Trek novels - Jack wrote Perry's Planet and Joe wrote Planet of Judgment and World Without End.

His greatest claim to fame, some say, is his 1974 opus The Forever War, but for my money you can't beat his novella The Hemingway Hoax.

In 1921, Ernest Hemingway's wife lost a bag containing the manuscript of his first novel on a train. Since that time, people have wondered what the book contained, and whether it could still be floating around out there. Haldeman's story tells of a man named Baird who, along with a Key West grifter named Castle, propose to create a fake manuscript of Hemingway's lost novel and pass it off as a historic discovery.

Baird later finds, however, that there are cosmic time-traveling entities who monitor life in our universe and in parallel universes, and for complicated reasons, anything that affects the cultural influence of Hemingway is a matter of grave concern to them. If Baird publishes the fake Hemingway novel, it will alter the future in ways that will lead to nuclear war, Baird is told, and will create reverberations that will be catastrophic all through the omniverse as well.

Hemingway himself time-travels to 1996 to personally confront Baird on a train from Boston to Florida, and warns him to give up on the idea. What happens then? Well, read the book.

Boat to Bimini

When I mentioned yesterday that there are over 4,500 islands in Florida, that didn't include the Bahamas, which contains over 700 islands and 2,400 cays. In other words, that adds over 3,100 islands to our list - I don't really make a distinction between the terms "island" and "cay". An island is an island, saith I, just as a planet is a planet.

The Bahamas weren't included in yesterday's statistic, of course, because they're not part of Florida and not part of the United States; they're a semi-independent commonwealth under the auspices of the British Crown and you need a passport to go there. But they are, tantalizingly, right over there off the coast. Bimini, in fact, is practically spitting distance from Miami if you have a boat. And even if you don't, there's a $49 ferry that'll shuttle your butt there every day. So now what's stoppping you?

Bimini is especially notable to me for two reasons:

Hemingway. Bimini was a favorite hangout of Ernest Hemingway, who wrote To Have And Have Not here and stayed at the Compleat Angler Hotel during 1935-1937. The hotel, which housed a museum of Hemingway memorabilia, tragically burned up in a fire in 2006.

The Bimini Road. Also known as the Bimini Wall, this underwater assemblage of stones is apparently the remains of a lost civilization, which some have said to be the mythical Atlantis. (But of course, that title has been bestowed on many sunken ruins around the world.)