Corrupting Dr. Nice by John Kessel

I'm still not sure if I ever read this book before. Corrupting Dr. Nice was published in 1997, and the trade paperback I have came out a year later. I think I've had that trade paperback nearly that long -- or, rather, that I had a trade paperback that long ago, since I lost a lot of books (10k, by my estimate) in my 2011 flood.

So, looking at the shelf, I kept hesitating over Dr. Nice. Didn't I read that once already? I thought. Did I like it? I can't remember it.

I poked through my reading notebook for the eight months or so around that 1997 publication date -- the times I might have been reading it for the SFBC -- and I definitely didn't read it then. Whether I got to it between 1998 and 2011 is a question that would take a lot more running down a long list of handwritten book titles, and I don't actually care that much.

I'm still not sure, but at least I can say I read in it October of 2020, and until this blog is nuked by a random worm, there will be proof of that fact the next time I can't remember.

John Kessel is not a prolific writer: his first story was published in 1978 but he's only published five novels (one of them a collaboration). Corrupting Dr. Nice, at the moment, is the middle one -- he had two books in the '80s, then this a decade later, then another novel-sized silence for twenty years until two recent books I haven't seen. Luckily, he doesn't go in for series.

Dr. Nice is a screwball time-travel comedy, explicitly a homage to a slew of '30s and '40s movies, man of which turn up as chapter titles. It's set in a near-future that's probably deeply horrible to most of the people who have to endure it -- and that number is exponentially higher than you might think, since the variety of time-travel used here exploits "moment-universes," meaning the people of Kessel's 2063 have already colonized several dozen past Earths of various eras, with the promise of strip-mining hundreds or thousands of them down the line.

But our main characters are mostly insulated from any such unpleasantness, as they must be in a romantic comedy. (Well, a major secondary character is a "historical" from 40 CE, whose perspective Kessel does not skimp on. Don't get the idea that Kessel is unaware how horrible the world he's constructed is.) Genevieve is a time-hopping con artists, working in the company of her father August. And the eponymous Owen Van Nice is the heir to a multi-billion-dollar fortune, back up the line, though vastly more interested in his studies of dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous.

They meet cute on a time-travel platform in Jerusalem, stumbling into each other in a minor transport mishap that eventually turns out to be the first step in a terrorist plot hatched by a group including the historical I alluded to in the previous paragraph. But first they run into each other, and Gen sizes up Owen as a massive mark: rich, distracted, somewhat unworldly, and in possession of a potentially fabulously valuable baby Apatosaurus megacephalos he calls Wilma.

Gen and August start to reel Owen in, during an enforced short shutdown of the time-stage while the authorities investigate that mishap that introduced them. Owen does start to fall in love with Gen.

And, maybe, she with him, which is unexpected.

But then the terrorist plot hits, right at the moment the con is supposed to also conclude. Gen and Owen are both hostages of those terrorists, whose plots also rapidly go sideways. Owen's expensive on-board bodyguard AI, Bill -- installed as an anti-kidnapping measure, among other protections -- saves the day, more or less, and Owen comes out looking like the hero of the event...and still in the possession of Wilma.

Screwball love cannot run straight and true, of course, so there must be a surprising reveal. And, not quite half-way into the novel, the action jumps a year forward, and up to 2063. Owen is under pressure from his separately horrible parents to marry, and Gen is looking for revenge. Plus, the trial of the 40 CE terrorists is about to begin, in a media landscape where public sentiment counts for a carefully-measured 20% of a judicial AI's decision.

Various hijinks then ensue. Well, there have been hijinks throughout, as has probably been clear. On the evidence here, Kessel is quite good at hijinks. (As I recall, his 1989 novel, Good News from Outer Space, has somewhat more subdued hijinks, but he was still good at them then.) This is a screwball comedy, so you can probably guess the general outlines of the ending: Kessel knows his form.

Dr. Nice also has a strong strain of nasty satire, which is clearly from the '90s -- our media and political landscape has mutated a lot since then, and the horrible things about 2020 are different from the horrible things about 1997 -- but it's sadly all very relevant, from the "sexual de-liberation" movement to the judicial AI I mentioned above. We could very easily still be on the path to the world of this novel, absent some specific time-travel breakthroughs (which I think, actually, only start hitting in the mid-20s anyway).

This novel does not feel twenty years old. Some parts of it were deliberately retro, for the screwball ambiance, and some parts of it have barely dated at all. It's still funny and cutting and full of interesting characters doing particular things for well-defined reasons. It also has a really interesting quick curtain-down closing that I won't describe further, but that I really liked. It's a random minor SF novel, sure, but it's a damn good random minor SF novel.