‘The Presidential Papers’
By John Kessel
PM Press, 160 pages

Counterfactual science fiction that contains nonfiction and commentaries on biography as well as on its author adds up to a dazzling performance in the genre-busting chapters of “The Presidential Papers.”

The most intriguing and riveting part of the book is the 1959 World Series duel between a fastball pitcher, Fidel Castro, and a minor leaguer, George H.W. Bush. Castro and Bush really did play baseball, and in this imagined alternative life Castro is as wily and unpredictable on the mound as he was as a guerrilla leader and head of state. Bush rather than going into politics spends 10 years in the minor leagues, and then is brought up for what turns out to be his starring moment in the game between the Washington Senators and the New York Giants. 

Hectored by his senator-father, Prescott Bush, about going into politics, George H.W. packs everything into his big moment at bat — about which I will say no more except that the play-by-play in this book is wonderful, as epic and moving as that in Bernard Malamud’s classic baseball novel, “The Natural.”

John Kessel’s book arcs between 1959 and 2100, when the last American president, Dwight Andrew Steele, has died. Here is how his biographer, post-2100, is reviewed: “Drawing on every resource of the posthuman biographer, from heuristic modeling to reconstructing DNA sampling to forensic dreaming, Ms. 13 has produced this labor of, if not love, then obsession and I for one am grateful for it.”

Lots has changed in biography by 2100, but not the obsession with the subject. At the same time, biographers can look forward to lots of new tools in the future. One especially enviable example is “extrapolative genetic mapping,” which allows the biographer to actually relive the subject’s experience — in this case, a scene from Steele’s childhood, when he commits … well, I dare not say.

A reviewer of biography — and perhaps you, too, as a reader of biography — will be amused: “Comparatively little of this biography is subjectively rendered. Instead, harking back to a bygone era, Fiona breaks up the narrative with long passages of text—strings of printed code that must be read with the eyes. Of course this adds the burden of learning the code to anyone seeking to experience her recreation, but an accelerated prefrontal intervention is packaged with the biography. Fiona maintains that text, because it forces an artificial linearity on experience, stimulates portions of the left brain that seldom function in conventional experiential biographies. The result is that the person undergoing the life of Andrew Steele both lives through significant moments in Steele’s subjectivity, and is drawn out of the stream of sensory and emotional reaction to contemplate the significance of that experience from the point of view of a wise commentary.”

This future review of a nonexistent work about a fictional president is a splendid parody of reviewing conventions: “I trust I do not have to explain the charms of this form to those of you reading this review, but I recommend the experience to all cognizant entities who still main elements of curiosity in their affect repertoire.” The last two words are the result — and I hope I am not giving away too much — of the aftermath of a nuclear war in which about two-thirds of the world population perishes.

Because the novel deals with the future, you may have to read certain passages more than once. After all, why should you be able to understand easily what comes after you? Not to worry, though: I think you will have fun sorting out what happens in this playful, sly work of fiction, which is also buttressed by an interview with the author — as if Mr. Kessel is speaking to what readers often want to know after reading a book: Who, for heaven’s sake, wrote this stuff?

If much has gone quite awry a century from now, somehow those in the future have come to terms with it, including the presidential term of  Dwight Andrew Steele, which lasts 33 years, but that is not so surprising coming from an author who has crossed Jane Austen and Mary Shelley in a novel titled “Pride and Prometheus.”

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”