Corrupting Dr. Nice
John Kessel
Tor, 316 pages
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Anyone who read John Kessel's previous novel, Good News From Outer Space, and enjoyed its unique blend
of humor and satire, won't be disappointed by Kessel's latest, Corrupting Dr. Nice.
Imagine a world in which time travel is not only possible, but has been extensively commercially exploited. It's
a world in which tourists can vacation in luxurious resorts located at various points along the timestream, and
take trips to crucial historical moments to eavesdrop on important events. It's a world in which natural resources
are mined in the past and sold in the present by profiteering industrial giants. It's a world populated by famous
figures from history, snatched from their own historical period by time entrepreneurs.
All of this is possible because time is quantized: each instant of time is connected to an entirely separate universe,
from which stems an entirely different time continuum. So if, say, Mozart is kidnapped from one time instant and
brought into the present, he will still exist in all the millions of other instants in which he was not kidnapped,
and the cumulative timestream leading to the present day won't be altered.
The story of Corrupting Dr. Nice revolves around the collision--literally--between the innocent and somewhat
nerdy Dr. Owen Vannice (the Dr. Nice of the title), a wealthy paleontologist, and Genevieve Faison, a time traveling
con artist. Girl cons boy, girl and boy fall in love, boy finds out about girl and subsequently ditches her, girl
returns for revenge, girl and boy fall in love all over again--if this sounds like the plot of a 1930's screwball
comedy, it's not accidental. The novel is dedicated to a number of famous Hollywood directors of that era, and
many of the chapter headings are also famous movie titles.
The manic pace of the book's action recalls screwball films like Bringing Up Baby, as do some of its story
elements. Kessel doesn't neglect the sf-nal references either, the cleverest of which involves Ray Bradbury's classic
time-travel story "A Sound of Thunder." As in screwball comedies, the plot is less important than the
set dressing, which in this case include a baby aptasaur, a dysfunctional AI, a revolt in first-century Palestine,
a celebrity trial in twenty-first century New York, and a host of displaced historical figures, including St. Augustine,
Gandhi, Freud, Marx, John Coltrane, James Dean, Abraham Lincoln, and several versions of Jesus. There is, naturally,
a happy ending.
Kessler deftly blends comedy with social satire. He lampoons our own media-crazed culture, and doesn't lose the
chance to comment on the negative aspects of time travel. The book's most sympathetic character is Simon, a Palestinian
revolutionary, through whose eyes we see the callousness of the twenty-first century time profiteers and the havoc
they have wreaked upon the past and its people. Mostly, however, Corrupting Dr. Nice doesn't dip that deep.
Kessler's clever vision of the social transformations worked by time travel are meant to amuse rather than to educate--he's
satirizing, but not darkly. It's a confection of a book, and one of the most enjoyable reads I've had in some time
Copyright © 1998 Victoria Strauss
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