The Presidential Papers by John Kessel: Review by Gary K. Wolfe
The Presidential Papers, John Kessel (PM Press 979-8-88744-058-3 , $16.00, 160pp, tp), October 2024.
PM Press’s series of “Outspoken Author” collections, reaching its 30th volume with John Kessel’s The Presidential Papers, has long provided useful short overviews of the fiction and nonfiction of some of our field’s most distinguished writers (always accompanied by insouciant but revealing interviews by the late series editor Terry Bisson). While some authors have treated their collections simply as introductory overviews for the general reader, others have taken that “outspoken” rubric pretty seriously, angling unapologetically toward political and social commentary. Kessel is clearly in the latter group. As his title suggests, all four stories (and a one-act play) in The Presidential Papers feature past or future US presidents, ranging from an alternate history in which George W. Bush became a mediocre professional baseball player to a cheerfully pulp-flavored space war satire involving a verbally challenged future president whose familiar cadences are – well, let’s just say that the short play, “A Brief History of the War With Venus” (which was performed delightfully at a recent ICFA conference) is the collection’s trump card.
The lead story, “A Clean Escape”, might as well be a stage play itself, with its two-character one-room setting and slowly building tension. Beginning as an apparent therapy session between a doctor and a patient suffering from a severe sort of short-term memory loss called Korsakoff Syndrome, it evolves into a bleak postapocalyptic nightmare as the true identity of the patient becomes clearer. The Hugo and Nebula-nominated “The Franchise”, one of Kessel’s best-known stories, imagines an alternate 1959 World Series in which a third-string player named George W. Bush faces off against the star pitcher of the title – Fidel Castro. Like many baseball stories, its fascination with play-by-play detail may test the patience of non-fans (it’s by far the longest piece in the book), but the insights into Bush’s need to please his imposing father and a somewhat surprising and darker ending give it unexpected depth. “The Last American”, cast in the form of a review of a biography of Andrew Steele, a terrifying figure who not only spent decades as president, but became an improbably successful author and media celebrity, reads like a capitalist-dystopia tall tale, while celebrity and media culture is also the focus of “The President’s Channel”. The collection is rounded out by a 2001 lecture on SF futures which may seem a bit old-school with its focus on Wells, Stapledon, Vinge, and Sterling, but which makes provocative points about what Kessel calls posthuman ethics, and the usual Bisson interview, which ranges from Kessel’s days at Kansas with James Gunn to writing workshops, his fiction, and his well-known friendship with James Patrick Kelly. As always, Kessel comes across as deeply humane, often scholarly, and quite congenial, but The President’s Papers as a whole reminds us that this very nice man also has some pretty acerbic ideas about capitalism, media culture, and often contradictory American values.
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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.
This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus.
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