“This daughter of Mary Shelley delights and excites the border between story and science.” —Samantha Hunt “A novel about what we want and also what we can’t escape.” —Allegra Hyde “A haunting chord of a novel that will hang in the air long after you turn the final page.” —Tiffany Tsao “Reads like a documentary retold as a dream retold as a mystery novel. What a wise, good-hearted debut!” —Kate Bernheimer After nearly drowning, eight-year-old Maeve Wilhelm falls into a strange comatose state. As years pass, it becomes clear that Maeve is not physically aging. A wide cast of characters finds themselves pulled toward Maeve, each believing that her mysterious “sleep” holds the answers to their life’s most pressing questions: Kevin Marks, a museum owner obsessed with preservation; Monique Gray, a refugee and performance artist; Lionel Wilhelm, an entomologist who dreamed of being an astrophysicist; and Evangeline Wilhelm, Maeve’s identical twin. As Maeve remains asleep, the characters grapple with a mysterious new technology and medical advances that promise to ease anxiety and end pain, but instead cause devastating side effects. Weaving together speculative elements and classic fables, and exploring urgent issues from the opioid epidemic to the hazards of biotech to the obsession with self-improvement and remaining forever young, Rebekah Bergman’s The Museum of Human History is a brilliant and fascinating novel about how time shapes us, asking what—if anything—we would be without it.
Rebekah Bergman’s fiction has been published in Joyland, Tin House, The Masters Review anthology, and other journals. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.
Read an Excerpt
Not long after the birth of the cloned woolly mammoth, there was a second local scientific breakthrough when a human head was successfully transplanted. Luke thought this was a grotesque advancement: a healthy head and brain from one dying body grafted onto another person’s spinal cord. Nonetheless, you could have a second life now in a new body. That was, if you were lucky and it wasn’t your brain that was killing you. He thought of Tess’s joke to the surgeon as he read all about the new technology, and Tess added the article to her list of ominous news. A part of him could see the appeal of it though. If you didn’t think too hard about this stuff, and most people did not, there was a would-be-nice idea of immortality floating around. The city was bustling with the new industry of biotech, and Luke’s client list shifted. Every day brought a new initiative to convince the public that death no longer had to have its constant stranglehold over life. Sometimes, when he was working late on a project, it seemed impossible that a tiny mass of cells could destroy someone. After all, We Live in the Future Now, as all the ad copy he was drafting would claim. Other times, he felt the pulse of his and Tess’s outsider status. He could picture himself with his artifact of a camera and Tess with her archaic illness and it seemed obvious that the future had gone on without them; that they belonged, instead, to a more terrifying and primitive time. There were rumors of another medical advancement; a procedure that would stop the body from aging. Luke came to the office one day and this was the only thing his coworkers wanted to talk about. They speculated about how much it would cost and when they would know if Genesix, the company developing it, would sign on with them. Luke was quiet, listening.
