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Friday, January 12, 2018

Reading List: An Inconvenient Presidency

Hamilton, Eric M. An Inconvenient Presidency. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2016. ISBN 978-1-5368-7363-4.
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.

Posted at January 12, 2018 01:48