Corrupting Dr. Nice

by John Kessel

When they meet at the transtemporal stage at the Jerusalem 42 C.E. Hilton, con artist Genevieve attempts to take advantage of the rich Dr. Vannice but instead finds herself falling in love with the famed "Dr. Nice."

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Time Travel, Humor, Dinosaurs, Alternate History, Novels

316 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

John (Joseph Vincent) Kessel co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Tiptree Awards, his books include Good News From Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories. His story collection Meeting in Infinity was a New York Times Notable Book. Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly he has edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange, Rewired, The Secret History of Science Fiction and Kafkaesque. Born in Buffalo, NY, Kessel has a PhD in American Literature, has been an NEA Fellow, and for twenty years has been one of the organizers of the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop.

Reviews

[Tomislav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Corrupting Dr. Nice is science fictional screwball comedy. It is set in a world where time travel has been used to exploit "moment universes" selected from throughout human history. Since there is no limit on fresh instances, there are no ethical constraints on burning off moment universes - changing history for commercial entertainment, kidnapping of interesting people, mining of untapped reserves of oil, or operating anachronistic high-rise vacation resorts.

Genevieve Faison and her father are grifters moving through the multiverse, currently working a scam in Jerusalem, 40 AD, a holy land that has been colonized and thoroughly trashed by modern profiteers. Dr. Owen Vannice (“Dr. Nice”) is the clumsy and naïve son of fabulously rich media-mogul parents, who is smuggling a baby apatosaurus back to modern times, as an “experiment.” Accidently stuck in Jerusalem 40 AD, due to sabotage of an intermediate time stage, Owen meets Genevieve and falls in love. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl seeks revenge. It is a very clever premise, with plenty of opportunities for discomforting situations and preposterous historical mash-ups.

I enjoyed the comedy, the romance, and the screwball plot, but at the end of the day this is light reading. Perhaps a roast of colonialism. I know John Kessel mostly as an anthologist, but he is also a critic and writing teacher, who has written and won awards for shorter works. This is one of his few novels.

[Xabi1990 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conste que es un 3,5/5 y que es entretenida, amable, fácil de leer y deja buen cuerpo.

Viajes en el tiempo, universos paralelos y varias incongruencias nos harán sonreir al leerla. Hay romance, hay paradojas temporales, hay bussiness, hay líneas del tiempo e incluso se filma a Jesús.

Oye, que estoy sonriendo según escribo y lo voy recordando. La subo a 4.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this definitely falls under Romance. SF rom-com. But don't dismiss it so casually! It has a LOT of great worldbuiding features.

Time travel hijinx is only the start of it.

First, throw out paradoxes. New timelines pop up everywhere. But this also means that you can go back to the same past time and pick up the same person or mineral resource and bring it (or them) back to the future. Mozart writing a rock ballad? Yep.

Commercial exploitation of the past. Movie crews hanging out during the time of Jesus. Bringing Jesus forward. Several of him. Pop him out before he actually DOES anything. Enjoy the ramifications. Mix, stir, repeat.

Let's keep the reveals about the dinosaurs to the novel, shall we?

But the rom-com is actually the best part! Put a con artist next to a rich scientist and watch the sparks fly.

I had a really fun time. :)

[Gary Lynch · Rating 3 out of 5]

In John Kessel's 2063 Earth, time travel is a booming tourist business, and because in this version of time travel physics you can change the past without affecting your own present, the past can be commercially exploited with little thought to the consequences.

The titular Dr. Nice is a young, naive, wealthy amateur paleontologist who is bringing a baby apatosaurus from the Cretaceous period to the 21st century. During a layover in 40 AD Jerusalem he runs into a father-daughter con artist team who immediately begin plans to steal his dinosaur. Things don't go according to plan because natives of Jerusalem are fed up with being exploited by wealthy visitors from the future and revolt against them instead of their Roman oppressors.

The plot is interlaced with thinly-veiled criticisms of America's unrestrained looting of the third world and aims even sharper barbs at the unplanned consequences of celebrity worship (the O.J. Simpson murder trial ended a little before this book came out). It is both painful and funny in places, especially the sarcasm of some of the players (He reminds me of John Scalzi, but he is older than Scalzi). Chief among the characters is an AI agent implanted in Dr. Nice's brain by his parents, who can force him to conform to their notion of gentlemanly behavior. Bill has a smart-aleck comeback for every situation.

Meanwhile you can throw a cocktail party and hire Mozart or Strauss to provide the music, spend the night in a 4-star hotel before watching Caesar's assassination, and Voltaire runs his own TV talk show.

Witty, caustic, exciting in places, save Corrupting Dr. Nice for a weekend getaway where you want to put your brain in neutral and escape from this world for a while.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an entertaining romp! Definitely the best time travel comedy I’ve read, of several. It centres on Genevieve Faison, con artiste extraordinaire, and her rich mark, Owen Vannice. While their byplay was great fun, my favourite element was the deceptively offhand world-building. By 2061, time travel has enabled the globalisation of American culture to go intertemporal. Quite a lot of the novel is set in Jerusalem around 40 AD, full of gawking tourists and neon signs. Kessel’s satire may be light-hearted in tone, but it’s also brutally perceptive. As a result, the whole thing has aged very well in the 21 years since it was first published. ‘Corrupting Dr. Nice’ really nails the US Christian Right hypocrisy about family values and consumerism. The media populism and crass historical tourism seem unsettlingly convincing; even the technological details still work nicely:

Gen settled down on the divan. A crumpled TV lay on the side table; she picked it up, shook it out, laid it across her lap. She flicked idly across the stations, then switched to information services. She called up SEARCH, typed in the name VANNICE and it set it to scan news reports over the last week.

The novel is full of such neat little conceits, farcical incidents (often involving a dinosaur called Wilma), and succinct social critique. Here’s an example of the latter, which contains spoilers:

”So? We’re not social workers, we’re con artists. A mark may learn a lesson from running into us, but that’s not why we con them.”
“He doesn’t need to be conned. He cons himself.” She August about Owen’s plan to testify at the Zealot trial. “It’s a perfect example of what’s twisted about him. He talks to the defense, then testifies for the prosecution. He’s not above being tricky, but he tells himself he’s working within the system - when with all his money and connections he could simply buy Simon’s freedom! To be an honest man he’d have to learn how dishonest he is. Break a law on purpose, and make no excuses. If he doesn’t watch out, he’ll become like his father, a pillar of society who makes money selling pornography as historical material.”

A lot of the jokes are at the expense of annoying men, which I very much enjoyed. The dialogue is delightfully witty throughout:

In a minute the procession [of Jesus going to his crucifixion] had passed. Beside Owen a matron with hennaed hair stood openmouthed. She played with her wristward, disguised as a gold bracelet, turning it over and over. “He’s so short,” she said to her husband.
“So?”
“Can’t we do anything?”
“This is just history, Margaret,” her husband said, “Get ahold of yourself.”

Although I wasn’t particularly interested in the romance elements, the plot and world-building were more than compelling enough on their own. The depiction of time travel as colonialism was brilliantly done, while the shenanigans involved involving housing and feeding a dinosaur were just plain hilarious. An excellent combination.

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Dr. T Loves Books · Rating 2 out of 5]

What it’s about: Genevieve and her father are very good at conning people throughout the timeline. When they accidentally run into one of the richest young men on the planet, it makes sense that they'd target him for their next scam. But sometimes emotions get between a good con and a handsome mark. Will love be able to transcend an ages-old hustle? Only time will tell.

What I thought: Meh. I picked this up because I had somehow managed to get an anthology of Kessel's stories; they were were decent, and ended with an afterword that mentioned a time travel story. I'm a sucker for a good time travel story, so I paid a couple bucks to check this one out.

It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. The foreword lays out Kessel's thought process in creating this story. He says he was going for a 1950's romantic comedy vibe, drawing direct inspiration from some very popular movies. I can get behind a good '50's Billy Wilder flick, so I figured it was a good sign. But overall, this story just felt rather one-note to me. It had an interesting idea for time travel, but one that is very little examined or even really used except as a (sometimes heavy-handed) plot device.

The time travel, as established, could be the basis for a very interesting look at the structure or nature of time, or human identity, or resource use and management, or capitalism. Although it glances briefly off these topics, it doesn't really spend any time on any of them, and it's a shame, because there's a lot to be mined from any one of those issues. Instead, this story follows a pretty narrow formula without much to make it more original, engaging, or interesting.

Why I rated it like I did: The writing was not bad, but this book is very much about plot, and very little about character. The problem is, Kessel doesn't seem to see that, so there's a whole lot of dwelling in characters' heads while they repeat the same train of thought over and over; and the plot is left to sort of move along in the background. It's a shame, because with some different focusing, this could be a really engaging piece of writing. It could be an interesting sci fi story, or an interesting romance, or an interesting examination of the social mores of our time. Instead, it's a character study of some bland characters.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of the book, set in 40 CE Jerusalem, I really enjoyed. The theories of this type of time travel were really fascinating, well-thought out and presented in a very engaging way. I liked the characters (I do have a soft-spot for fictional con men or women, I'll admit) and the plot. But then when they went back to their present/the future, I thought it fell apart a bit. Genevieve's plan for revenge just seemed so weak. I think it's a bit telling that her father, the fellow con, couldn't understand it either. And since so much of the second half of the plot depended on that, it really dragged down the book in my opinion, which is too bad because as I said, I really liked the first part.

[Stuart Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most likely real life result of the discovery of time travel: the past becomes Euro-Disney. Tourists flock to see the Crucifixion, and the assassination of Caesar. Modern hotels are built next to Incan Temples in the 15th century, malls sell iPads to French soldiers of La Grande Armée as they march to Waterloo. Historical figures are snatched from the past to entertain peoples of the present. Mozart plays Rock and Roll in Vegas, Shakespeare is the Bard of Paramount, Muhammed Ali fights Jack Dempsey. And Dr. Nice just wants to raise a pet dinosaur.

Dr. Vannice is often mistakenly called Dr. Van Nice, and his demeanor does little to shake this misnomer. He is the only son of the fifth richest couple in the world and all he cares about is paleontology. A couple of time traveling grifters come across him as he is trying to bring an Apatosaurus home to Boston and make him their mark. Everything gets mixed up with a revolt in the Holy Land with Simon the Zealot, Apostle of Jesus, and a pair of star-crossed lovers who hate each other very much.

This is a farcical love story based in a ridiculous future. Fifty year old versions of James Dean and John Keats work as office workers because it amuses some rich man, people can change their appearance and personality at will if they have enough money, and those without money strive to make enough to travel into the past where they can set themselves up as kings. Dr. Nice is hopelessly naïve and somewhat romantic, and his love interest/con artist makes the cardinal mistake of falling for her mark. All the while a dinosaur runs loose eating everything in sight. It's "Bringing Up Baby" with a real dinosaur. And if the similarities weren't obvious enough Kessel specifically mentions the movie in the text. It's still relatively funny in a goofball sort of way and the plot with Simon is rather compelling.

[Daniel Severin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sweet time travel comedy with lots of romance. It's such an homage to the screwball comedy era that the chapter titles are named for popular '30s and '40s films, though the most clear inspiration is the Preston Sturges film The Lady Eve, starring Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck. The book is blurbed by Connie Willis, whose work is very similar to the territory that Kessel is mining here.

In the 2060s time travel has been commodified and perfected for tourism. Those who can afford it may travel back in time to witness Caesar's assassination and other events, receiving the necessary language and wardrobe support as part of the travel package. It is when one goes off the approved path or script, or runs into time traveling criminals, that hijinks ensue. And boy do they, in a delightfully post-modern fashion. The absolute highlight of the story is a criminal trial for violations of time travel rules, which comes complete with testimony from celebrities who have been transported across the multiverse by both sides in the case.

What puts this book above Willis's works is that the tangents and cross-talk actually lead somewhere. Fans of her Oxford series will find a lot to like in Corrupting Dr. Nice.

[Mark Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

In his acknowledgment, Kessel attributes the story's central conceit to Bruce Stirling and Lewis Shiner's 1985 short story, "Mozart in Mirrorshades." The idea is that 21st-century capitalists can travel back to any point in time and exploit the hell out of it, knowing that time will simply branch at that point and have zero effects on their own future. Rip off resources, steal artworks, steal historical figures to the future for fun and profit. That original story was 16 pages long, sharp as a razor, bursting with the manic energy of the heyday of the new cyberpunk movement.

Kessel's 1997 novel endlessly re-iterates the satirical possibilities, criticizes our postmodern spectacle culture, and decries rabid imperialist oppression. He even throws in a terrorist attack by pissed off Jerusalem "historicals" in a subjugated 41 C.E. But then Kessel decided to wed all that to a screwball romance plot that is a mishmash of The Lady Eve, Bringing Up Baby, and The Front Page. It's all just off. Go read "Mozart in Mirrorshades" and skip this.

[Nicole Geub · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was sold just on the fact there was time traveling and dinosaurs involved. even better was the time traveling wasn't too complicated and it was exactly like I wish it could be like where you can pick and time and go back and not really alter the present. also helped that Wilma the apatosauraus was a fun a d engaging character also able to withstand the modern era. this was just so zany and fresh I had to laugh. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this and I'm glad! also lots of political satire, that scene with the trial was almost as good as the Facebook guy's trial recently (aka hilarious).
give it a shot but don't have too high expectations because I think it's a hoot, but give me a dinosaur and I'll love it no matter what.

[Juan Raffo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Viajes por el tiempo, paquetes de un día para ver la crucifixión o el asesinato de Cesar, estafadores, tráfico de dinosaurios, paleontólogos nerds, Simón/Pedro terrorista, su hijo músico de blues, Abraham Lincoln y Jesús enfrentados en un tribunal, Mozart en una banda pop con Feymann en la batería y un Jerusalén del siglo I gobernada por un Herodes que viste poliester y usa gafas de sol.

Parece un sinsentido pero la solución es genial, el viaje al pasado es posible pero hay infinitos mundos e historias posibles a donde viajar y podemos escoger alguna de esas realidades y establecer una base y colonizar ese pasado.

La primera parte genial, la segunda decae bastante, Kessel quiere construir una novela romántica de situaciones como homenaje a las comedias de los años 50, pero la verdad es que se desinfla bastante en la segunda mitad, quizás hacen falta esos dialogos chispeantes que tenían las comedias de Grant, Hepburn y Doris Day.

Quizás sea un problema con la traducción, ya lo que hicieron con el título, el original sería algo así como Corrompiendo al Dr. Agradable (Corrupting Dr. Nice) un juego de palabras intraducible, pero el escogido es patético.

Se puede leer, especialmente por lo interesante de su premisa.

[Jota Houses · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un homenaje a las screwball comedies del Hollywood clásico en forma de novela de ciencia ficción con viajes en el tiempo. Las nada veladas referencias a "La fiera de mi niña", "Un ladrón en la alcoba" o "las tres noches de Eva" se suceden en uno de los más consistentes panoramas de viajes en el tiempo que he tenido ocasión de encontrar. Una ambientación en el que los viajes en el tiempo generan infinitos universos paralelos con cambios permanentes y que permite una especie de neocolonialismo temporal en el pasado. Es difícil no visualizar a alguno de los actores de los años cuarenta en esta comedia alocada que se disfruta desde el primer momento.

[Steve Craven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating story. Did not need the anti-religion bias to tell the tale. I thought that the author tried too hard at times to make a point (his attempt at writing a parable was virtually unintelligible). And he displays a typical lack of doctrinal understanding in the attempts to denigrate the pious.

[Casey · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a waste of a bonkers bananas premise! If you set out to write a screwball comedy please at least TRY to make it funny. At one point Abraham Lincoln and Jesus both testified in court. And it still didn’t even make me laugh at its ridiculousness.

[Shaynuh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this at the library and read it because Ursula LeGuin called it "a delight". I agree.

[MD · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cute little romance + dinosaur.

[Shaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three and a half stars

This is a weird little book, but it's a quick fun read. It's .... a time travel romantic comedy? It's clever and there's a lot going on.

[Elchamaco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es un 3,4 3,5 raspadito. Aunque si quieres leer algo desengrasante esta es una buena opción. Novela entretenida de viajesen el tiempo. Por cierto el título en español que supongo que lo han tomado de la versión francesa horrible y no tiene mucho que ver con la novela. Si bien es cierto que uno de los protagonistas viene de estar estuadiando dinosaurios y se trae uno, poco más tiene esta novela que ver con los dinosaurios, bueno que aparece en varios puntos de la novela, pero quizás el amor en tiempos de Jesucristo tiene más que ver.
Si es bastante graciosa la idea de viajes en el tiempo a momentos cuanticos distintos (vamos universos paralelos) lo que permite no modificar el pasado. Esto permite que se hayan cargado alguno de estos universos montando hoteles, trayendo personajes históricos al futuro, etc.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

HAd a nice time reading this one. I think one of the things I enjoyed the most was the complete abandoning of the "don't change history by your actions" that occurs in the story. The theory here is that each moment in time is a portal to a discrete universe. So, there can be a pure and unsullied Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, as well as one complete with modern ammenities. Historical figures can transfer to present day, too- multiple times from multiple moments. It was a refreshing view of time travel, and helps give credence to the idea that we are not as bad as we think- we're probably worse!

Clever writing, though, and interesting characters.

Plans for the book? Will offer to son (who recognized the title and had read John Kessel before) and to husband (who didn't, and hadn't).

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book doesn't always have to be surprising to be enjoyable. Just because you can predict the ending doesn't mean you can't enjoy the road that leads there.

Corrupting Dr. Nice is a screwball comedy, with time-traveling. And also dinosaurs. (Modern dinosaurs; intelligent, warm-blooded, with feathers! The dinosaur is also adorable.)

It's fairly predictable, and I don't care. It's also very readable and engaging, and a whole heck of a lot of fun. Sometimes that's all I ask from a novel.

It's another one from Jo Walton's What Makes This Book So Great, and the very first book I've found on Kindle Unlimited that I wanted to read and hadn't read.

[Denise · Rating 2 out of 5]

This started out really well. I liked the premise of moment universes - each instant of time creates its own universe, you can travel back in time, make all the changes you want, only foul up the alternate universe and come home to your own without having made any changes in it. I was enjoying the con artists and the baby dinosaur, too. But after a while the mega-evil capitalists and the revenge plot, and especially the terrorism trial pitting attorney Abraham Lincoln against an-advocate-from-the-past-who-won't-surprise-anybody, just got to be too preachy and unbelievable to enjoy. Oh, well.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's see - Take Connie Willis's "To Say Nothing of the Dog", mix with" The Lady Eve" & "Bringing up Baby", then throw in a dollop of" The DaVinci Code", and you might get some idea of this screwball time-travel story. Kessel has a flair for pastiche, and fills the book with off the wall allusions and in-jokes that kept me laughing throughout. Best moments: a baseball game in first century Jerusalem with Pontius Pilate in attendance, and a trial where Abraham Lincoln and Jesus square off against each other. There is also a baby brontosaurus wandering around for no apparent reason. Some of the other reviewers may not have been amused, but I for one found this book charmingly funny.

[Cason · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Kessel is one of the most imaginative writers that I have ever read. His books are filled with wonderful juxtapositions of the very old with the future, such as the introduction of a modern, luxury hotel in ancient Jerusalem. He also does an excellent job of creating characters with whom it is easy to empathize, including ones that may not be known from history as being particularly empathetic. Who would have ever guessed that Simon the Zealot would have such a tender heart and have all the troubles of a parent with a rebellious teenage son?

[Adobe · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pair of time-traveling con-artists tangle with a paleontologist smuggling an infant dinosaur into the 22nd century. Hijinks ensue.

Corrupting Dr. Nice is a postmodern mash-up of 1930s screwball comedies and science fiction: Preston Sturges meets H. G. Wells. Some of the time paradoxes do not bear close examination, and the novel's frenetic speed does not always allow logic to impede its constant lunge forward, but this, too, is an homage to the source material. (The Lady Eve and Bringing Up Baby will never win any awards for their internal coherence, but nobody cares.)

[Anita · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reminded me a lot of Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog -- it's a similar blend of time travel, romance, and screwball comedy. This book is darker, though, and a little more serious. Although I liked it, I have to say I enjoyed the light-as-air, pure zaniness of To Say Nothing of the Dog more.

My favorite line from this book: "...[he] was a man that only Thomas Hobbes could love: nasty, brutish, and short."

[Fred · Rating 2 out of 5]

meh...

It's a silly, time travel read. The author is going for social criticsm using exploitation of "historicals" (people from the past) as metaphor. Unfortunately, none of the characters in the book are endearing or interesting enough to make the point.

Skip it...

[Zee · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a load of fun. :) I agree that it sort of falls apart near the end, but still a good read.
Thank you for being the book to break me out of the tired and tiring academic essays of my discipline.

[Priyansh Trivedi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This books accomplishes what it set out to perfectly however a story with Time Travel can be played out better.

Overall, the elements of Humour, Satire, Romance, mild action/adventure make it an enjoyable experience.