(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D., Cape Town, South Africa)

In recent years, various mainstream authors – Simon Louvish, Steve Erickson, and Christoph Ransmayr among them - have produced alternate history novels. Now Gore Vidal, the perennial political gadfly of American literature, has tried his hand at the game. The result, The Smithsonian Institution (1998), while serious in implication, is brash, daft, self-indulgent, and often very funny, a notable work of satirical SF.

One of Vidal’s governing concerns in his five decades as a novelist has been the imperial direction taken by the United States since 1939. As a member of a major American political family, which also includes the current US Vice-President, Al Gore, Vidal has been well situated to comment upon the opportunistic skullduggeries and complex personalities characteristic of Washington D.C.. In his view, expressed in a succession of major historical novels, the USA has moved from limited government and a concern only with its own affairs to bureaucratic over-government and unjustified interference abroad. The Rooseveltian New Deal, and America’s assumption of global superpower status in consequence of the Second World War and the Cold War, have turned the country into an empire, a National Security State. This is a perspective informing much American genre SF, and Vidal, as in previous novels like Live From Golgotha (1992), uses genre SF notions to carry his Libertarian crusade forward.

The Smithsonian Institution begins at Easter 1939, at the point when America’s imperial course was being set in motion. T., a teenaged scientific genius, is recruited into the Smithsonian Institution, the American capital’s complex of museums and laboratories. Here he finds that the dummy historical personages on display come alive when the doors close at night; he interacts amusingly with them, while co-operating with the Manhattan Project to ensure that the first A-Bombs do not destroy the world through an uncontrolled chain reaction. He is meeting the past and determining the future, and the two are closely linked.

By conversing with dead Presidents and the fatalities of earlier wars, T. comes to comprehend just how dangerous the road to Empire is for himself and his country. Inventing a highly unlikely form of time travel, he interferes with history, preventing the rise of Nazi Germany (typically for Vidal the scandalmonger, this involves blackmailing Woodrow Wilson through threatened exposure of his marital infidelity). And so America must face only Japan in World War Two; further preposterous pseudo-science, amounting to SF parody, rescues T.’s alter-ego from death on Iwo Jima and forces Japan’s surrender, the atomic bomb being used more humanely than it historically was at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In further parody of genre SF power fantasies, T. is the new genetic superman; with ‘zeolite’ as an unlimited energy source, a third lobe to his brain, and premature knowledge of superstring theory, he promises a new direction for humanity at the novel’s end. But in the midst of this zaniness, Vidal has articulated his serious theme: history, although it can never turn out perfectly (T.’s America still builds an Asian empire for itself), is subject to our control, and we must not yield to pessimistic fatalism. If we know the past, we, inhabiting a flexible universe of quantum uncertainty, can select more promising future paths. Remembering that Vidal served in World War Two and that he lost good friends in battle (one on Iwo Jima), we can read The Smithsonian Institution as a heartfelt wishing away of historical folly.

LITTLE, BROWN (UK). 1998. HARDCOVER.