A Revolutionary Nightmare: Notes on “Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America”

What happens when a novel abounding with 18th century anachronisms feels like one of the most urgent works of fiction of the 21st? Welcome to Damien Lincoln Ober’s Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America. It’s subtitled “A Novel of the Digital Revolution,” and that last word functions in a couple of different ways. Ober’s novel is set in an alternate timeline, in which a version of the internet was present during the American Revolution and thus evolved with the new nation. Its structure is also distinctive: each chapter tells the story of the last day in the life of one of the Declaration of Independence’s signers.

It’s also one of the most bizarre novels I’ve ever read, and one of the most original. The closest point of comparison I can make might be to Michael Swanwick’s Jack Faust or Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World — but said novels are light-years apart in other ways. Ober’s novel ultimately occupies its own space, a hallucinatory counterfactual that frequently turns utterly nightmarish.

Getting one’s head around this book is a strange process. And the presence of an internet hundreds of years ago isn’t the only divergence from history: there’s a harrowing plague known simply as The Death, which devastates the nascent United States and takes the narrative into body-horror…