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The Impossible Us

 The Impossible Us
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The Impossible Us
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Impossible (US: The Impossible Us) is a 2022 Fantastic Romance novel by Sarah Lotz.When Rebecca "Bee" Davies finds a misdelivered tirade in her e-mail inbox, she replies in good humour. The sender, Nicolas "Nick" Belcher, responds to apologise, striking up a conversation that brightens each one's day. Bit by bit their relationship progresses beyond anonymous banter, and when Nick's marriage collapses and Bee's most recent Tinder match turns out to be a boring jerk they provide emotional support to each other. But then Nick comes to London to meet Bee in person — and even though she's waiting where and when he arrives, they never bothered to check that they lived in the same reality.Separation by an interdimensional mesh (as the only people Nick finds with insight into the situation call it) is a challenge for any relationship, but it's also an opportunity to check on how the lives of the people they care about could have gone. Even if they can't be with each other, they've got a good lead on who's both possible to reach and personally compatible. And maybe they can make the world — both worlds — a better place.
 The Impossible Us
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2023-06-03T04:59:04Z
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2023-06-03T04:59:04Z
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Two-Person Love Triangle
 The Impossible Us / int_1b77fe36
comment
Two-Person Love Triangle: A variation, as Bee tries romancing Nicolas while still carrying on with Nick.
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Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest
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Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest: "Operation Doppelgänger" is Bee and Nick's deliberate effort to find and court each other's counterpart in their own worlds. Success is mixed.
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Split-Personality Merge
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Split-Personality Merge: Geoffrey manages this with the aid of Nick's contextualisation of his "displaced" memories.
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Embarrassing Nickname
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Embarrassing Nickname: In school, Leila and Rebecca got called Acne Face and Fatty Boom-Boom, respectively.
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Mysterious Past
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Mysterious Past: We know Henrietta is the chair of the Berenstain Society. We also know she has the connections and/or computer skills to expose a journalist as a plagiarist, to get the authorities to arrest one of the world's richest men and investigate him for a potpourri of crimes, and to illegally clone a zone account while appearing only to read its i-mail. We can only guess which intelligence agency, if any, is backing her.
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Most Writers Are Writers
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Most Writers Are Writers: We meet Nick as his career evolves from freelance editor to novelist (invokedone published novel in his past notwithstanding), including a brief scene meeting his agent. Nicolas didn't give up after that first attempt, developing into a prolific, popular author.
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Dead Alternate Counterpart
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Dead Alternate Counterpart: Geoffrey has one, from whom he inherited memories. Other examples include Dylan and, from the other direction, Jonas, but the survivors don't show any effect in those cases.
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Author Avatar
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Author Avatar: In-universe. There are striking similarities between Tweedy and the protagonist he created for A Shot in the Dark, and the former really enjoys reading the latter's triumphs in the sequel.
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One Dialogue, Two Conversations
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One Dialogue, Two Conversations: A very short example, as Bee interprets "Don't wait" as encouragement to pursue love but Magda later reveals that, if she said it at all, it was advice on taking out the recycling.
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Like Reality, Unless Noted
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Like Reality, Unless Noted: Bee's world has the same laws, brands, politicians, and pop culture as our own. Nick's world, in contrast, doesn't.
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In-Series Nickname
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In-Series Nickname: Bernard Eldridge, Esq. is known exclusively as "Tweedy" in Nick and Bee's conversations. Well, he started as "Tweedy Twat", but Nick soon realised the insult was uncalled for.
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Love Transcends Spacetime
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Love Transcends Spacetime: One explanation floated for how Bee and Nick are able to communicate.
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555
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555: Nick's phone number obviously violates the UK's real-life numbering conventions, while even Bee's is outside the allocated range.
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Cluster Bleep-Bomb
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Cluster Bleep-Bomb: In Kelvin's transcription of Iain O'Sullivan's tale, Iain judges his counterpart's relationship with his mother to be "[expletive expletive expletive]".
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It's for a Book
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It's for a Book: Nick uses the justification legitimately to get Petrus to put him in a chokehold, and as an excuse for both moving into Becca's part of the country and trying out Tweedy's shotgun.
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Alternate History
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Alternate History: Nick's world has gone all in on environmental protection: population control, decarbonisation, and criminal standards for ecocide in both the UK and the US.
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I Should Write a Book About This
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I Should Write a Book About This: Nick calls his memoir Impossible to Explain: A Fucked-Up Love Story.
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Alternative-Self Name-Change
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Alternative-Self Name-Change: Conveniently, the two leads both go by nicknames, so their full names (Rebecca and Nicolas) are available to identify their counterparts in each other's world. Once they track the Rebecca in Nick's world, they switch over to calling her by her usual sobriquet, Becca. Other characters (most relevantly Leila) aren't so lucky, with whichever alternate is less familiar to the main characters getting the suffix 2.
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Market-Based Title
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Market-Based Title: In-universe. Nick's world has a book called Crossed Lines, which resembles Strangers on a Train closely enough that he rationalises it as the American title.
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Mandela Effect
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The Berenstain Society is united by its members' invokedrecollection of The Berenstain Bears in place of The Berenstein Bears, in whose timeline they actually live.
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In Spite of a Nail
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In Spite of a Nail: The two worlds have differences as early as 1950 (with the title Strangers on a Train completely unknown to Nick), but on the whole they "seem... to diverge around the mid-eighties and early nineties". Dylan (born 1994 or 1995) has an identifiable counterpart in Bee's world.
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Embarrassing Last Name
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Embarrassing Last Name: Nick considers "Belcher" to have enured him to bullying. Nicolas uses a pen name for most of his work, but Nick and Bee agree it's not much of an improvement.
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Spotting the Thread
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Spotting the Thread: The Berenstain Society is united by its members' invokedrecollection of The Berenstain Bears in place of The Berenstein Bears, in whose timeline they actually live. Nick and Bee notably fail to do this during their initial correspondence. Once Nick finally gets suspicious, he determines he's overlooked fifty-four discrepancies between Bee's i-mails and reality.
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The Impossible Us

The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

 The Impossible Us
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Alternative-Self Name-Change / int_a1936d77
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Cluster Bleep-Bomb / int_a1936d77
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Dead Alternate Counterpart / int_a1936d77
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Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest / int_a1936d77
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Embarrassing Last Name / int_a1936d77
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English Literature / int_a1936d77
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555 / int_a1936d77
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I Should Write a Book About This / int_a1936d77
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It's for a Book / int_a1936d77
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Literature of the 2020s / int_a1936d77
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Love Transcends Spacetime / int_a1936d77
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Most Writers Are Writers / int_a1936d77
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Mysterious Past / int_a1936d77
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One Dialogue, Two Conversations / int_a1936d77
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Split-Personality Merge / int_a1936d77
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Spotting the Thread / int_a1936d77
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Two-Person Love Triangle / int_a1936d77