I was totally psyched to come home last night and find out that I’d gotten an email from science fiction writer Gregory Benford, whose novel Timescape turned me into a lifelong subatomic physics fan back in junior high, telling me how much he’d liked my account of the sci-fi publishers’ summit at last Saturday’s Nebula festivities. That said, he took exception to my semi-sympathetic words for Philip Roth and The Plot Against America. “The President flies alone, vanishes, and we go back to the history we know? Not remotely plausible,” Benford objects. “Roth pretended he’s invented a whole new form, but he hadn’t even mastered it.” You know what? He’s got a point, and while I don’t hate Plot by any means, because it does have certain strengths, I wouldn’t go to the wall for it the way I would, say, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which really is a brilliant alternate history novel by a mainstream literary writer.
Benford’s email also reminded me of something annoying in the essay Joe Queenan wrote for last week’s NYTBR about the joys of bad literature. “At no point do I ever lose sight of the fact that bad books are truly bad,” Queenan writes. “But it is their very badness that reminds us of the good books of which they are pallid copies… Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen‘s 1945, a reimagining of the 20th century if the Nazis had won the war in Europe, is a Bizarro World precursor of Philip Roth’s [The] Plot Against America.” Actually, Joe, it’s a gung-ho twist on the theme of what many readers consider the greatest alternate history ever written, Philip K. Dick‘s The Man in the High Castle. You know, the 1962 novel that was recently elevated to the literary canon by the Library of America. (As for Gingrich and Forstchen, they’re still at it, looping back to the start of World War II for a new “what-if” called Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8th that’s just turning up in stores now.)