Customer Reviews

Corrupting Dr. Nice

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

As you can see from some of the less fun-loving previous reviewers, this wild time travel yarn from John Kessel does have many logical inconsistencies. Sure there are problems inherent in this book's characters meeting alternate versions of themselves from different time periods, and altering past events for their own purposes. But time travel itself, in any science fiction story, is illogical to start with, so quit bellyaching and enjoy a story that is both fun and dwells on many surprisingly deep themes. Kessel throws off a quickie (and admittedly under-elaborated) explanation of quantized time streams and something called "moment universes" to allow a thought-provoking premise on how the supposed miracle of time travel can be exploited by corporations for profit. Here, time travel is turned into slavish entertainment as historical people are used as theatre for rich time-hopping tourists, alternate time streams are exploited for natural resources and infinite profit-making opportunities, and the downtrodden are enslaved by public opinion and elitism. The basic plot of the story revolves around some crafty time bandits trying to game the new system, and a pretty implausible love story. Very well, but I also detect some deeper messages about corporate domination, colonialism, human identity, and religion in the face of time travel. And the book is pretty funny too. [~doomsdayer520~]

The premise: Multinational, multitemporal Saltimbanque Corp. has commercialized time travel, and they've worked around the pesky lots-of-people-showing-up-at-the-same-time problem and the interference-with-the-future problem.

Or have they?

Some of the "historicals" (the natives of the eras which the time-hopping thrill-seekers have set up bases) are getting restless. In particular, Simon the Zealot, an apostle of Jesus left without a cause when promoters kidnap Jesus at age 23 from his particular time line, is tired of his 30 C.E. Jerusalem being held in thrall to these tourists from the future. He and a few others of the Zealot cause are using automatic weaponry to try to eject the time travelers and the Romans (the now-puppet rulers, bought off with antibiotics, air-conditioning, and Air Jordans, it seems) in one fell swoop.

Oh yes, a rich-boy paleontologist trying to carry a rare dinosaur back to 2062, and a father-daughter team of grifters are accidently caught in the middle of this (while the father of the pair attempts to abscond with Wilma, the dinosaur). Oh, and the rich boy has a bodyguard implanted in his brain which can make his body kung fu fight, when need be.

Had enough yet? The whole thing is ridiculous, but it's ridiculously fun. Though there seems to be some weighty pondering on exploitation of natives, more or less, it's never taken too totally seriously. Those who are annoyed by sci-fi authors who use time travel as an excuse to write about their favorite historical figures - will be only minorly annoyed, perhaps. Those who are tickled by a little Christian blasphemy will be amused, and those not overly adoring of Abraham Lincoln will snort at a particular moment in the novel. There are no =big ideas= in here, as one might get from Heinlein, there are no =new ideas= for that matter, but there's plenty of good humor in here. Nobody and nothing can be taken totally seriously in this book, except for Simon the Zealot. He's the only seemingly real person, with real worries, regrets, and passions, and I found his part of the story more interesting than anything else (from a serious point of view).

For those who complain that there are logical holes in Kessel's particular time travel premise: get over it. You simply cannot have time travel to the past and not have logical contradictions. You can travel to the future and not have problems (sure, you'll never get to go back where you came from, but just think -- personal jet packs! castles in the air! free computers for all!), you can even posit something that will let you =see= what happened in the past, but you can't travel to the past and not have absurdities popping up every place. Kessel himself knows this, and so has funny things like a 20-something pre-Christian St. Augustine running into a middle-aged, very devout St. Augustine at a 20th century academic conference, ending with them duking it out. Time travel is such a silly idea in sci-fi plots, and absurdity is Kessel's forte.

In any case, I think it's a great book for the beach (I read it while doing the laundry) - very light, no depressing thoughts, and smirks on every page.

I consider Kessel's first solo novel, Good News from Outer Space, to be one of the best (and oddly neglected) SF novels of the past decade, and stories such as "Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!", "Another Orphan", "The Big Dream", "The Pure Product", "Buddha Nostril Bird" and last year's "The Miracle of Ivar Avenue", among others, are part of a fine, memorable, corpus of short fiction. So I was eagerly anticipating Corrupting Dr. Nice.

Kessel's most familiar mode, it seems to me, is satire, often quite savage, as in "The Pure Product" or the well-known Good News outtake "Mrs. Shummel Exits a Winner", but he can also wax lyrical, and passionate (see "Invaders" or "Buffalo", for instance). And lately he has shown a distinct flair for out-and-out comedy, as in his explicit Preston Sturges hommage from 1996, "The Miracle of Ivar Avenue". Corrupting Dr. Nice is in this latter mode, a screwball comedy, also dedicated to Sturges (as well as a host of other screwball directors). It is quite successful on those terms, as well as being successful as SF, with a well-expressed core message (over-simplified, that people in the past are still real people) which is resolved in a satisfactory manner.

The story opens by introducing August and Genevieve Faison, a father-daughter team of time traveling con artists. They have just completed a successful scan in revolutionary Paris, and are escaping into the past, when the canonical "meet-cute" occurs, as the very rich Paleontologist Owen Vannice (nicknamed "Dr. Nice") literally stumbles out of a time-machine in Jerusalem, 41 C.E., and into the arms of Genevieve. Owen is transporting a baby apatosaurus (echoes of BRINGING UP BABY strictly intentional, I trust) back to his present (2062), but time travel equipment problems strand everyone for a while in 41.

An appropriately wacky plot ensues, involving August's plan to steal the apatosaurus, Owen and Genevieve falling in love, and a plot involving Simon the Zealot and a band of Hebrew revolutionaries trying to expel the time travellers. All these threads collide nicely, various disasters occur, and the main action winds up with a courtroom scene featuring two historical heavy-hitters (to say the least).

The novel is very entertaining, a fast and funny read, yet with a core of serious thought about the exploitation of the people in the past by those of the future. The characters are well-realized, particularly Owen and his AI security implant Bill, Genevieve, and Simon the zealot (and his son). The resolution to the plot threads are satisfactory, and honest, though the courtroom scene may have gone a bit over the top. The weaknesses of the novel are to some extent endemic to the screwball comedy form: the characters are well-enough realized that their motivations for the acts that propel the plot sometimes seem thin (and Owen and Genevieve don't quite convince me as a likely pair: this in particular seems common in screwball comedies), also, things move so fast that not everything quite makes sense. I could quibble, for instance, about some holes in the time-travel setup: though as I said, Kessel talks a good enough game to let us ignore these while reading. I must say, though, that these quibbles and weaknesses are basically excused by the constraints of the form Kessel is working in (that is, screwball comedy). Things aren't necessarily supposed to make sense.

In summary, highly recommended. A first-rate comedy, and a fine SF novel to boot.

John Kessel has done it again. He has raised science fiction to literary prominence -- in a humorous, satiric comedy that effortlessly flows back and forth through time. This novel is politically intriguing, highly serious and wildly comical -- but it also is very warm-hearted and filled with well rounded charcters that keep the story moving and interesting. Highly recommended.

I didn't read the dedication before starting the story, so I took a little longer than I should have to realize that this was Preston Sturges's "The Lady Eve". If you like one, you'll probably like the other.

This book has an awesome premise! In the book's setting, people can travel through time easily and with very few problems. More than that, they can travel to MUs - Moment Universes, which are like instances of our universe at a given point in time. That means they can travel through a certain point in time and behave in some way, and afterwards go to the *same* moment, only on a different universe, and act differently. (Imagine, killing Brutus when he tries to murder Ceasar on one universe, and helping Brutus on another).
The book's protagonist is Dr. Owen Vannice, a paleontologist who gets entangled with 2 con artists who trick people in different time periods.
This too sounds good, no?
So what is bad?
Well, The story is utterly *filled* with logic inconsistencies. The author contradicts himself left and right.. and the most annoying thing, is that the author simply avoids certain "problems" with his theories.. he doesn't even bother finding silly solutions for them... simply ignores them altogher. You must agree that a book about time travel which doesn't raise the issue of travelling to the future is kind of silly. And what about meeting with yourself? Or maybe even having time travellers from the future coming to visit YOU? All these are ignored.
In addition, the story doesn't focus on these ideas.. it concentrates on a silly love affair of the main characters... That, and the fact that I couldn't stand any of the characters made it a BAD book.

Another wasted idea in the book: the kidnapping of historical figures and bringing them to the present. This can lead to to interesting ideas - but what does the author do with it? Mozart becomes a pop star, Jesus starts a talk show, Abraham Lincoln becomes a PR representative.. It's as if these historical figures just *wanted* to drop everything, leave their families, and come to the future to do silly tasks. Utterly ridiculous.
If you really like the premise, read Joshua Dann's Timeshare trilogy... wasn't a masterpiece, but certainly much better than this. Otherwise, avoid this book.

Very well written and edited. The whole family might enjoy this little sci-fi book, imaginative but at the end lacks a little something to give it a higher rating.