Khrushchev's Second Chance

In this fantasy, "e;the gods"e; allow the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to go back in time to fulfill a wish that had been denied him when visiting the U.S. The original plot was the brainchild of a history buff who said to me on the phone one night that it had always bothered him that when Khrushchev visited the United States, it was determined that having him go to a place a complex as Disneyland was too great a security risk. He wished someone would write a book 'righting this wrong.' And so I decided to write that book. This book creates a mythology that makes not only that fantasy come true, but many other things not included in the original idea. The book is full of theological comedy, where the Atheist Khrushchev is confronted with a series of Buddhist and Hindu entities and finally Jesus Christ Himself, along with the Virgin Mary. The book presumes that each "e;all-powerful"e; creature is not as all-powerful as we might have believed, and that the cosmos itself is run more like an unruly bureaucracy in which all players are subject to rules over which no one person or thing seems to have final control. The outcomes are rather the "e;bargains"e; or "e;compromises"e; reached as each character seeks to get his "e;job"e; done. Like all of my works, the fiction or poetry is not "e;pure art"e; in and of itself, but always has the ulterior motive of clouding the philosophical waters and moving everything into a state of uncertainty, divine uncertainty, where not-knowing again makes all things plausible, at least theoretically, if not practically.