The Pure Product
- by John Kessel
- Novelette
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “The Pure Product” by John Kessel, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 1986.
A cynical sociopath from the future goes on a crime spree (sometimes with random blood, sometimes with trite tripping on his future drugs) across 20th-century North America.
—Michael Main
“I said, have you got something going,” she repeated, still with the accent—the accent of my own time.
Tags
(10)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1970 to 1999: “reading a late-twentieth-century newspaper”
- Unspecified Future Year: the narrator and Ruth come from the future
- Time Travel Methods
- Real-World Tags
- Francis Bacon: briefly
- JFK: Briefly: “‘I was there for the Kennedy assassination,’ I said, ‘but I had nothing to do with it.’”
- Watergate: Briefly: “The last time I had anything to do, even peripherally, with anyone famous was when I changed the direction of the tape over the lock in the Watergate so Frank Wills would see it.”
- Groupings
Variants
(4)
- “The Pure Product” by John Kessel, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 1986.
- “Das reine Produkt” [The pure product] by John Kessel, in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazin 27 May 1987.
- “Il prodotto puro” [The pure product] by John Kessel, Urania #1541, December 2008.
- “O produto puro” [The pure product] by John Kessel, in As melhores histórias de viagem no tempo: Os contos dos autores mais consagrados da ficção científica, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Harry Turtledove (Editora Jangada, April 2017).
Indexer Notes
(1)
- Series—Uchronia[/url lists “The Pure Product” as one of Kessel’s Moment Universe Stories, but we don’t see any connection.