Corrupting Dr Nice eBook John Kessel
Download As PDF : Corrupting Dr Nice eBook John Kessel 
August Faison and his gorgeous young daughter Genevieve are rogues of the first water—seasoned swindlers who rove across time in search of new victims to fleece. Now the most precious pigeon of the all has fallen into their laps, in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus.
Dr. Owen Vannice is far too unworldly and far too rich for his own good. A fabulously wealthy paleontologist who has just spent the last year, not to mention billions of the family fortune, doing research in the Cretaceous period, he now finds himself stranded in the Holy City with a rapidly growing baby dinosaur in tow.
Simon is a disillusioned disciple whose master has been kidnapped uptime by colonists from the future. Now he works for the exploitative crosstime corporation which has turned his timeline into a tourist trap, complete with luxury hotels and junkets to countless versions of the Crucifixion.
When a desperate act of sabotage brings them all together, their lives are drastically transformed, for Genevieve is falling in love with "Dr. Nice" against her better judgment, and is even willing to double-cross her father to protect him. But even that isn't enough, for Dr. Nice is losing his innocence, while Simon and his revolutionary zealots seek to drive out the invaders from the future.
Skillfully interweaving screwball comedy with the paradoxes of time travel and satirical social commentary, Corrupting Dr. Nice is, in the tradition of its Hollywood forbears, a love story, one that is at the same time serious and funny, sweet-natured and cynical—sophisticated speculative fiction by an award-winning modern master.
"Lucid, humane, and mercilessly funny, Corrupting Dr. Nice is a peach. If there could be great date books like there are great date movies, this would be one. Dr. Kessel's self-deceiving lovers strive against a painstakingly realized social backdrop—in this case, one that also happens to be the ultimate metaphor for post-modernism. Brilliant." —Jonathan Lethem
"Brilliantly intelligent, light-handed, and warm-hearted—a dazzler." —Ursula K. Le Guin
"Time travel yarns have been a science fiction staple since the early days of the genre, but have worn a bit thin in recent years. Now John Kessel breathes new life into the sub-genre with his latest novel. Corrupting Dr. Nice follows a pair of hapless lovers from ancient Jerusalem to the twenty-first century in a deft homage to the 1941 Preston Sturges romantic comedy, The Lady Eve. Like Sturges, Kessel uses his deluded characters' antics as a vehicle for wicked observations on media saturation, consumer culture, and postmodern looniness . . . Corrupting Dr. Nice is suffused with gentle good humor. Kessel treats his characters with warmth and compassion even while he's putting them through the wringer." —The San Francisco Chronicle
Corrupting Dr Nice eBook John Kessel
I think by this point its safe to say that I am a sucker for any book featuring a dinosaur, no matter how prominently, on the cover. I'm pretty sure I first spotted this in a bookstore about ten years ago and the whole package is intriguing, to say the least. An interesting title, with a plot synopsis that promises time traveling misadventures and several bits of praise from noted SF writers (Ursula Le Guin, for one, and an extremely long quote from Connie Willis), while the book itself makes it seem like Kessel is one the most frequently honored authors in SF ever (which was especially intriguing, since I'd never heard of him). That's half true, as it turns out, since he's been nominated for various awards quite a few times, generally for short stories, but his novel work is very scant. This was his second solo novel (one of his three was a collaboration) and he's written nothing else of novel length since this was published in 1997.Still, with all that completely necessary background, does the book live up to the fact that there's a great big dinosaur looking all "Lost World"esque on the cover? Actually . . . it comes pretty close. Kessel's bright idea was to apparently combine the wacky SF madness that's inherent in time travel with the screwball comedy genre (specifically "The Lady Eve", which I've never seen . . . which is probably a good thing since reading over a summary of the plot it pretty much steals the entire thing, including the last line, so if you're not into spoilers and you've already seen that movie you may want to let a few more years go by to let the memory get cloudy before diving in) and proposes a future where time travel has been made pretty routine, to the point where communities have been set up in various eras with tours and resource mining becoming more prominent. Also, no one is concerned much about paradoxes since whenever someone is taken from their time or things are altered, it creates another Moment Universe and events proceed along the new line, leaving the future intact. This also allows them to steal the same people over and over again at different stages of their lives, or visit events like Caesar's assassination repeatedly without all the tourists bumping into each other.
Into this mix comes a father and daughter con artist team, Genevieve and August, who are having fun making a living out of getting the best out of people. When their next con involves the hapless but extremely rich Dr Owen Vannice, who is bringing a dinosaur he was studying forward from the Cretaceous, it seems like a piece of cake until Genevieve winds up falling for his innocent niceness and starts to rethink the con game, until circumstances conspire to cause a falling out that leads her to rethink how to render the best revenge. In the meantime, the zealot Simon, making do in a past Jerusalem that has been made near unrecognizable from the cultural exchange with the future, tries to make his life better by figuring out how to overthrow the whole system despite the fact that Jesus has gone ahead to the present and appears to be doing rather well for himself (there are also several versions of Jesus from various stages of his life wandering about).
The idea of turning history into a playground for everyone isn't something entirely novel, with recent examples being Michael Swanwick's "Bones of the Earth" (which played this much more seriously but also included dinosaurs and was thus awesome) and an Eighth Doctor novel "The Last Resort" which took a cool concept and drowned it in incoherence. Kessel manages to maintain a fairly light tone that doesn't skimp on the seriousness of some of the underlying issues but also keeps things moving enough that you probably won't actively question the lapses in story logic that occur here and there (the biggest one to me was how no one from the characters' futures ever showed up to steal their famous people or just to sightsee . . . though you could claim they were doing it and were just better at hiding). But the basic concept is fascinating enough that being shown the mechanisms of this future world, how they interact with the past and strip-mine it for stuff, how they tend to alter it through contact and the moral obligations involved in screwing up the past, even if it doesn't really have any consequences because you just creating more parallel timestreams.
Considering how dense the scenario can be, he doesn't entirely let it overwhelm the plot and the whole affair feels charming for the most part, with not much at stake beyond screwing over a rich guy, while the con artists aren't totally bad people since they're not out to hurt anybody, they just like ensnaring people in scams. Being able to let the fairly simple screwball plot play out against the backdrop gives him room to explore some side issues, mostly dealing with the aforementioned alterations of cultures of the past and whether we have the right to go snagging things from prehistory to study. Sometimes it feels he has too much to stuff in there and at points you get the sense he really wants to examine the effects of the media on societies of the future (especially how public sentiment can be manipulated for ratings) or the protest organizations that are against all the time-snagging (though they seem to have their own agendas). The one section that actually feels serious are the scenes dealing with Simon, which are heart-breaking in a sense because he's a broken down man who's lost the one man he respected and is in the process of losing his family while he has to grit his teeth and do menial work for the people of the future who he feels are ruining everything. If the book had made his struggle the center of its emotional core it would have for one thing been a completely different book but the seriousness might have helped anchor it slightly better.
As it stands the book rises and falls based on how fast he keeps the plot moving and, more importantly, how much you buy the romance between Genevieve and Owen and then their changes of heart and subsequent actions once they have those changes of heart. For me, the book doesn't succeed as wildly here, and while it remains charming he doesn't seem to be able to justify the characterizations as much, with people doing things more because the plot demands it (or, in this case, because the plot of a 1941 comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda demands it) . . . and while the addition of the stuff with Simon helps (although the grimmer tone isn't always a good contrast), it isn't enough at times to distract from the fact that the romance sort of sputters into something not quite as compelling and he's not able to totally fuse the elements of comedy and satire and science-fiction into one delicious pot, instead giving us something with a weird crust and a semi-tasty filling that has a bit of an odd aftertaste.
But it's a quick read and a nice homage to a decent movie and a classic Hollywood era with a creative SF twist and even if he can't completely stick the landing (the ending definitely seems to make more sense in the movie, but maybe it didn't work there either) the journey itself is nice with quite a few entertaining sights (a showdown between Jesus and Lincoln isn't as epic as you'd hope but it comes close), and frankly even this slightly flawed effort is still better than most attempts at this type of time travel story I've seen (avoiding a really gritty tone and not taking itself too seriously probably goes a long way here). There are definitely worse ways to spend three hours or so, and maybe it will give you an excuse to check out the film it's homaging as well.
Product details
|
Tags : Corrupting Dr. Nice - Kindle edition by John Kessel. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Corrupting Dr. Nice.,ebook,John Kessel,Corrupting Dr. Nice,FICTION Science Fiction General,FICTION Romance Time Travel
People also read other books :
- Unleavened bread [a novel] Robert Grant 9781176355729 Books
- Forever Ours A Young Adult Coming of Age Romance Shattered Hearts Series YA Trisha Leigh Cassia Leo 9781521149874 Books
- Marriages' Missing Links edition by Donald Shipley Health Fitness Dieting eBooks
- Undercover Daddy Katherine Deane 9781544245324 Books
- Lumber Jacked Bad Boy Billionaires Book 3 edition by Jessa James Contemporary Romance eBooks
Corrupting Dr Nice eBook John Kessel Reviews
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~]
I am confused by the number of 4 and 5 star reviews of this book. The time travel premise is unique but not much is done with it. The characters are never developed, what little plot there is doesn’t move very fast and the prose just lays there. I only got to the end of the book because I kept waiting for it to live up to the reviews I read (and because “The Lady Eve” is the best romantic comedy ever made and one of
my personal favorites). Do yourself a favor - skip the book and watch the movie.
This is an under appreciated masterpiece by one of the smartest science fiction writers working today. A brilliant mashup of the screwball comedy and time travel sub-genres, there are surprises and laughs on every page. This is my favorite Kessel novel. Do your sense of wonder (and humor) a favor and hit the "buy now" button NOW. You'll be glad you did.
A must for fans of The Lady Eve screwball comedy. Doesn't come off as well as the film but definitely well done and worth the read.
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.
I think by this point its safe to say that I am a sucker for any book featuring a dinosaur, no matter how prominently, on the cover. I'm pretty sure I first spotted this in a bookstore about ten years ago and the whole package is intriguing, to say the least. An interesting title, with a plot synopsis that promises time traveling misadventures and several bits of praise from noted SF writers (Ursula Le Guin, for one, and an extremely long quote from Connie Willis), while the book itself makes it seem like Kessel is one the most frequently honored authors in SF ever (which was especially intriguing, since I'd never heard of him). That's half true, as it turns out, since he's been nominated for various awards quite a few times, generally for short stories, but his novel work is very scant. This was his second solo novel (one of his three was a collaboration) and he's written nothing else of novel length since this was published in 1997.
Still, with all that completely necessary background, does the book live up to the fact that there's a great big dinosaur looking all "Lost World"esque on the cover? Actually . . . it comes pretty close. Kessel's bright idea was to apparently combine the wacky SF madness that's inherent in time travel with the screwball comedy genre (specifically "The Lady Eve", which I've never seen . . . which is probably a good thing since reading over a summary of the plot it pretty much steals the entire thing, including the last line, so if you're not into spoilers and you've already seen that movie you may want to let a few more years go by to let the memory get cloudy before diving in) and proposes a future where time travel has been made pretty routine, to the point where communities have been set up in various eras with tours and resource mining becoming more prominent. Also, no one is concerned much about paradoxes since whenever someone is taken from their time or things are altered, it creates another Moment Universe and events proceed along the new line, leaving the future intact. This also allows them to steal the same people over and over again at different stages of their lives, or visit events like Caesar's assassination repeatedly without all the tourists bumping into each other.
Into this mix comes a father and daughter con artist team, Genevieve and August, who are having fun making a living out of getting the best out of people. When their next con involves the hapless but extremely rich Dr Owen Vannice, who is bringing a dinosaur he was studying forward from the Cretaceous, it seems like a piece of cake until Genevieve winds up falling for his innocent niceness and starts to rethink the con game, until circumstances conspire to cause a falling out that leads her to rethink how to render the best revenge. In the meantime, the zealot Simon, making do in a past Jerusalem that has been made near unrecognizable from the cultural exchange with the future, tries to make his life better by figuring out how to overthrow the whole system despite the fact that Jesus has gone ahead to the present and appears to be doing rather well for himself (there are also several versions of Jesus from various stages of his life wandering about).
The idea of turning history into a playground for everyone isn't something entirely novel, with recent examples being Michael Swanwick's "Bones of the Earth" (which played this much more seriously but also included dinosaurs and was thus awesome) and an Eighth Doctor novel "The Last Resort" which took a cool concept and drowned it in incoherence. Kessel manages to maintain a fairly light tone that doesn't skimp on the seriousness of some of the underlying issues but also keeps things moving enough that you probably won't actively question the lapses in story logic that occur here and there (the biggest one to me was how no one from the characters' futures ever showed up to steal their famous people or just to sightsee . . . though you could claim they were doing it and were just better at hiding). But the basic concept is fascinating enough that being shown the mechanisms of this future world, how they interact with the past and strip-mine it for stuff, how they tend to alter it through contact and the moral obligations involved in screwing up the past, even if it doesn't really have any consequences because you just creating more parallel timestreams.
Considering how dense the scenario can be, he doesn't entirely let it overwhelm the plot and the whole affair feels charming for the most part, with not much at stake beyond screwing over a rich guy, while the con artists aren't totally bad people since they're not out to hurt anybody, they just like ensnaring people in scams. Being able to let the fairly simple screwball plot play out against the backdrop gives him room to explore some side issues, mostly dealing with the aforementioned alterations of cultures of the past and whether we have the right to go snagging things from prehistory to study. Sometimes it feels he has too much to stuff in there and at points you get the sense he really wants to examine the effects of the media on societies of the future (especially how public sentiment can be manipulated for ratings) or the protest organizations that are against all the time-snagging (though they seem to have their own agendas). The one section that actually feels serious are the scenes dealing with Simon, which are heart-breaking in a sense because he's a broken down man who's lost the one man he respected and is in the process of losing his family while he has to grit his teeth and do menial work for the people of the future who he feels are ruining everything. If the book had made his struggle the center of its emotional core it would have for one thing been a completely different book but the seriousness might have helped anchor it slightly better.
As it stands the book rises and falls based on how fast he keeps the plot moving and, more importantly, how much you buy the romance between Genevieve and Owen and then their changes of heart and subsequent actions once they have those changes of heart. For me, the book doesn't succeed as wildly here, and while it remains charming he doesn't seem to be able to justify the characterizations as much, with people doing things more because the plot demands it (or, in this case, because the plot of a 1941 comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda demands it) . . . and while the addition of the stuff with Simon helps (although the grimmer tone isn't always a good contrast), it isn't enough at times to distract from the fact that the romance sort of sputters into something not quite as compelling and he's not able to totally fuse the elements of comedy and satire and science-fiction into one delicious pot, instead giving us something with a weird crust and a semi-tasty filling that has a bit of an odd aftertaste.
But it's a quick read and a nice homage to a decent movie and a classic Hollywood era with a creative SF twist and even if he can't completely stick the landing (the ending definitely seems to make more sense in the movie, but maybe it didn't work there either) the journey itself is nice with quite a few entertaining sights (a showdown between Jesus and Lincoln isn't as epic as you'd hope but it comes close), and frankly even this slightly flawed effort is still better than most attempts at this type of time travel story I've seen (avoiding a really gritty tone and not taking itself too seriously probably goes a long way here). There are definitely worse ways to spend three hours or so, and maybe it will give you an excuse to check out the film it's homaging as well.
0 Response to "[JT0]⇒ PDF Corrupting Dr Nice eBook John Kessel"
Post a Comment