Customer Reviews

Alternate Kennedys

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Alternate Kennedys is not your traditional alternate history, and is a collection best saved for Kennedy enthusiasts and hard-core alternate history fans. While a few of the stories are plausible, most here are intentionally comic and fantastic -- an all-Kennedy rock band playing for President Elvis Presley, or a neutered JFK forced to spend a chaste eternity in hell with Marilyn Monroe. Resnick's Alternates series is my personal favorite collection of alternate history stories, as editor Resnick has commissioned a wide variety of fiction writers in each to imagine alternate timelines and individuals. This one is well written, and good for laughs.

"The Kennedys. What is it about them?" Mike Resnick asks in his introduction to this book. Through several generations and across decades, this family has fascinated the American public through its ups and downs in the worlds of politics, money, love and beyond. Yet what if things had been different for this famous family? What if, say, history had seen them enter the realm of Hollywood instead of politics? Or what if the eldest son, Joseph "Joe" Kennedy Junior, had survived World War II? Those are amongst the twenty- five different possibilities explored in the 1992 alternate history anthology Alternate Kennedys.

The "what if's?" covered in the book are wide ranging: some plausible, some fantastic, all intriguing. The realistic possibilites are explored in stories such as "In The Stone House" by Barry N. Malzberg and "Freedom" by Barbara Delaplace, both of which deal with Joe Junior and how different his life might have been. "In The Stone House" in particular is one of the best stories in the entire book though it does go on for a bit too long. Another tale that seems oddly plausible is "The Kennedy Enterprise" in which the Kennedy brothers went to Hollywood and become involved in perhaps the most famous science fiction television series of all time. This story is made all the more plausible by who wrote it: David Gerrold, the man who wrote the famous episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" for that very series. This though is just the tip of the iceberg.

The stories don't always stick to being plausible. On the more fantasy driven side are stories that see a rather unexpected meeting and heartbreaking choice in "Siren Song" Susan Shwartz and a visit by JFK to the real life Camelot ("A Massachusetts Yankee In King Arthur's Court" by Henry Turtledove). Taking plausibility to the breaking point is the highly entertaining "Them Old Hyannis Blues" by Judith Tarr which sees the Kennedy brothers as a pop group performing at the inaguration of President Elvis Presley (yes...you read that right!). There are humorous stories as well such as "The Missing 35th President" by Brian M. Thomsen and "'Til Death Do Us Part" by Charles Von Rospach. There are some downright odd stories as well such as "The End Of Summer, By The Great Sea" by Ginjer Buchanan with its decidedly odd take on the cause of the family's tragedies and the beyond summarizing "The Disorder And Early Sorrow Of Edward Moore Kennedy, Homunculus" by Robert Sheckley.

There are stories that don't work of course. "The Inga-Binga Affair" by Michael P. Kube-McDowell, "Bobbygate" by Rick Katze and "Prince Pat" by George Alec Effinger are very different stories, each presenting highly intriguing possibilities in their own rights. Yet, they suffer from the same problem: weak character's and wooden dialogue. Those two things undermine three otherwise good stories and make them the weakest in the volume by far.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, but not fitting into any of the aforementioned categories really, are two stories that open and close the book. The first is "A Fleeting Wisp Of Glory" by Laura Resnick which rather movingly combines the King Arthur legend (and the Camelot musical in particular) with the Kennedy presidency . The second is "The Winterberry" by Nicholas A. DiChario which is perhaps the single best story in the book with its incredibly moving tale that is easily spoiled if you haven't read it. For the two stories alone I recommend the book.

From possible presidents to possible scandals and from the intriguingly plausible to the blatantly absurd, the twenty-five stories in Alternate Kennedys charts the possibilities of America's most famous political family. Much like the family, some accomplish more then others and some are as just as forgettable as others are memorable. Overall though, as an exploration of the Kennedy family and their possible alternate histories, this collection is definitely worth a read.