Good News from Outer Space by John Kessel

I have limited patience for picking up random SF by random authors to see if I might enjoy it.  Life seems too short, despite how much time I waste in other ways.

So I was excited to discover a short book entitled something like "100 great science fiction novels" at McNalley Robinson about 10 years ago.  One of the books it recommended was Good News from Outer Space.  I picked up a copy.  However the book looked dystopian, so it languished unread.

In the meantime, I read Corrupting Dr. Nice based on a rave by Jo Walton in What Makes this Book So Great.

Corrupting Dr. Nice is a satire on modern society disguised as an entertaining time travel romp.  It features a hapless researcher (Dr. Nice) who is deceived by a inveterate female con artist who becomes his love interest.  There's also a troublesome pet dinosaur, because, after all, why wouldn't you add a pet dinosaur if your characters have free access to the Mesozoic Era? 

It was great, and it put John Kessel on my radar.  I bought a copy of The Moon and the Other almost as soon as it was released.

The Moon is a very different book from Dr. Nice.  One reviewer describes it as "a complex, but relevant story about politics, gender identity, and social conflict through a series of characters living on Earth’s inhabited Moon. A wonderful, complicated, and beautiful novel, it asks what responsibilities people have to the societies they inhabit." -- Andrew Liptak, The Verge.

Cool.  John Kessel doesn't write the same book twice.  This rare in the SF world, where art wars with the demands of making a living.

I was hooked.  So it was a little bit like Christmas when I suddenly realized that he had also written Good News from Outer Space, still sitting innocently unread on my shelf.

I dove in, and was, perhaps unsurprisingly, surprised. 

Good News from Outer Space might tell one of these two stories:

1. In a near future, near-dystopic version of the United States, a tabloid journalist undergoes an illegal revival procedure after his death.  He lives -- but he cuts himself off from his wife and his best friend and becomes obsessed with an improbable conspiracy.  Invisible, intangible aliens are taking over the world!  He stalks his obsession across a disintegrating United States while the lives of those around him dissolve into chaos.
2. Aliens want to take over our world, or at least the United States of America.  They have superior technology of course, but limited numbers.  How do they go about it?  Easy -- they impersonate select individuals to influence and disrupt human society.  For example, why not convince a prominent tele-evangelist that the Second Coming is imminent?  And that Jesus will arrive in a spaceship near Raleigh North Carolina at midnight of on New Year's Eve 2000?

Or maybe it doesn't. The tone and structure are reminiscent of somewhat hallucinatory books like Phillip K. Dick's Ubik or A Scanner Darkly. Maybe a bit too strongly reminiscent: Good News feels a lot like 1977.

I'm glad I didn't read this novel before I encountered Kessel's other work: despite this book's strikingly original ideas and skillful execution, Good News wouldn't have made me a fan.