Corrupting Dr Nice [Import] [Paperback]

John Kessel (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Orion mass market paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0575602791
• ISBN-13: 978-0575602793
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Storytelling at its best, June 11, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Corrupting Dr. Nice (Hardcover)

John Kessel knows how to tell a story. Countless
science fiction books make it into the bookstores
only because of some cool idea, or because they tie in to a popular TV series or movie, or because the author's name guarantees sales, or because some big dinosaur is ripping across the cover.

Not so with _Corrupting Doctor Nice_. The best
fiction--and this novel is surely some of the best
fiction--tells a _story_, one which engages the reader's interest; delights with plot complications, humor, and tension; and satisfies with a resolution that fulfills all the promises made by the developing plot.

Kessel's book does just that, and does it with dinosaurs and time travel, too. The "coolness factor" which makes good science fiction good science fiction is intimately blended with the brilliant storytelling which makes good fiction good fiction.

Buy the book, read it, and remember why you came to love fiction in the first place.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dino's for Dinner, May 15, 2000

By 

Nicholas Noyes (New York, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Corrupting Dr. Nice (Paperback)

If travel through different ages and parallel dimensions were a possibility would we hesitate to exploit them? John Kessel's imaginative and plain old funny "Corrupting Dr. Nice" depicts a world (well, several) in which cars are driven with gas pumped from other dimensions, messiahs are plucked from 1st century Jerusalem to appear on talk shows, tourists from the 21st Century swarm around ancient Rome, and dinosaurs are cloned to provide the ultimate steak dinner. With Doctor Nice, the earnest but naive palentologist, his security software which keeps making him preform acts of heroism, and any number of rouges and con-artists, this book is engaging and thought-provoking. In a Sci-Fi tradition which includes Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a good time-travel story, September 3, 2000

By 

C. Piersol "buzzbo" (California USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Corrupting Dr. Nice (Paperback)

The story surrounds the scientific realization of time travel in the 21st century. Humans can travel to the past in any number of "unburned" parallel universes during historical periods where the "historicals" have not yet been exposed to the "futurians." Alternatively, travelers can go back to a well-established moment universe where the historicals have gotten used to the futurians coming and going. A revolt occurs during a well-established universe, 40 C.E. A good story follows and mostly takes place back in the future.

The main plot is a common thread with a new twist. A grifter and her father travel to various times and scam clueless tourists from the futre. Soon, she falls for one of the men she intends to scam, a naive, almost perfect paleontologist who has taken a young dinosaur from the past for study. This part of the story is somewhat obvious. It reminds me of a movie. I can see this going to the big screen easily. The bigger story in the background surrounds the ethics of time-travel.

There is a parallel between the unethical behavior of the scam-artists, the paleontologist's removing the dinosaur from the past, and the corporation who owns the time-travel machines.

I kept wondering how this story would end. Any book that makes me guess what's going to happen in the last few pages gets 4 stars from me.