- Hamilton, Eric M.
An Inconvenient Presidency.
Seattle: CreateSpace, 2016.
ISBN 978-1-5368-7363-4.
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This novella (89 pages in the Kindle edition) is a delightful
romp into alternative history and the multiverse. Al Gore was
elected president in 2000 and immediately informed of a capability
so secret he had never been told of it, even as Vice President.
He was handed a gadget, the METTA, which allowed a limited kind of
time travel. Should he, or the country, find itself in a
catastrophic and seemingly unrecoverable situation, he could press
its red button and be mentally transported back in time to a
reset point, set just after his election, to give it another try.
But, after the reset, he would retain all of his knowledge
of the events which preceded it.
Haven't you imagined going back in time and explaining to your
younger self all of the things you've learned by trial and error
and attendant bruises throughout your life? The shadowy Government
Apperception Liberation Authority—GALA—has endowed presidents
with this capability. This seems so bizarre the new president
Gore pays little attention to it. But when an unanticipated and
almost unimaginable event occurs, he presses the button.
~KRRZKT~
Well, we won't let that happen! And it doesn't, but something
else does: reset. This job isn't as easy as it appeared: reset,
reset, reset.
We've often joked about the
“Gore
Effect”: the correlation between unseasonably cold weather
and Al Gore's appearance to promote his nostrums of “anthropogenic
global warming”. Here, Al Gore begins to think there is a
greater Gore Effect: that regardless of what he does and what he
learns from previous experience and a myriad of disasters, something
always goes wrong with catastrophic consequences.
Can he escape this loop? Who are the mysterious people behind
GALA? He is determined to find out, and he has plenty of
opportunities to try: ~KRRZKT~.
You will be amazed at how the author brings this tale to
a conclusion. Throughout, everything was not as it seemed, but
in the last few pages, well golly! Unusually for a self-published
work, there are no typographical or grammatical errors which
my compulsive copy-editor hindbrain detected. The author does
not only spin a fine yarn, but respects his audience enough to
perfect his work before presenting it to them: this is rare,
and I respect and applaud that. Despite Al Gore and other U.S.
political figures appearing in the story, there is no particular
political tilt to the narrative: the goal is fun, and it is
superbly achieved.
The Kindle edition is free for Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
January 2018 