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 humor. The sender, Nicolas "Nick" Belcher, responds to apologize, 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 contains examples of:
- 555: Nick's phone number obviously violates the UK's real-life numbering conventions, while even Bee's is outside the allocated range.
- Alternate History: Nick's world has gone all in on environmental protection: population control, decarbonization, and criminal standards for ecocide in both the UK and the US.
- 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 down, 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.
- 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.
- 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]".
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Embarrassing Nickname: In school, Leila and Rebecca got called Acne Face and Fatty Boom-Boom, respectively.
- 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 realized the insult was uncalled for.
- 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.
- I Should Write a Book About This: Nick calls his memoir Impossible to Explain: A Fucked-Up Love Story.
- 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.
- 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.
- Love Transcends Spacetime: One explanation floated for how Bee and Nick are able to communicate.
- Market-Based Title: In-universe. Nick's world has a book called Crossed Lines, which resembles Strangers on a Train closely enough that he rationalizes it as the American title.
- Most Writers Are Writers: We meet Nick as his career evolves from freelance editor to novelist (one 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Split-Personality Merge: Geoffrey manages this with the aid of Nick's contextualization of his "displaced" memories.
- Spotting the Thread:
- The Berenstain Society is united by its members' recollection 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.
- Two-Person Love Triangle: A variation, as Bee tries romancing Nicolas while still carrying on with Nick.
