With Hugo and Nebula awards to his name, Nottingham, New Hampshire, writer James Patrick Kelly is well known within science fiction and fantasy. A faculty member of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine, he’s less familiar to mainstream readers, but his work has sufficient crossover appeal to make the leap to a wider audience.

Back in 2016, Centipede Press published a massive collection of Kelly’s best short work, but now Prime Books has prepared its own selection of memorable stories by the author. Diverse, daring and inventive, the stories reflect Kelly’s deep knowledge of science fiction and his facility in employing – and sometimes up-ending – its conventions.

In his afterword, Kelly writes, “I try to write as many different kinds of stories as I can. But if there is a theme running through this new collection, it is that I am interrogating assumptions. Often as not this means I am arguing with my younger self… ”

Kelly’s younger self clearly revered the Grand Masters of the genre. The title story harks back to an Arthur C. Clarke story from 1968. In this case, however, the narrative takes the form of a heartbreaking conversation between a science fiction writer and her husband, a Mars pilot attempting to re-assemble his memory and personality from thousands of hours of recordings. It’s a strong piece with which to open the collection, and only the most hardened readers will fail to be moved by its ending.

Kelly tips his hat to another veteran author with “The Chimp of the Popes,” a play on Robert Silverberg’s acclaimed story, “The Pope of the Chimps.” Kelly’s story features a troupe of mentally enhanced primates dealing with the depleted human population of Earth, many of whom harbor serious religious delusions.

In addition to his sci-fi idols, Kelly also displays an affinity for the hardboiled ethos of Raymond Chandler. He finishes the volume with a substantial novella, “The Last Judgment,” reminiscent of Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye.” Set in a future when alien “devils” have somehow caused the entire male population to disappear, the story follows private detective Fay Hardaway as she endeavors to track down a missing painting by Hieronymus Bosch. That case seems to have a simple solution, but the harder Hardaway presses for the truth, the more tangled the revelations become. The story is a strong piece of noir with a cyberpunk edge, addressing issues of sex, gender and identity.

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Not all of the stories come with a heap of contextual baggage. In “Crazy Me,” a mild-mannered eye surgeon contends with the erratic behavior of his freewheeling doppelgänger. The story will have readers seeing raccoons in a different, more sinister light.

Kelly turns a deft hand to the modern-day ghost story with “Miss Nobody Never Was,” a tale of a bartender and the alcoholic ex-girlfriend who nearly kills him when she hits bottom. “Happy Ending 2.0” offers a couple a glimpse of a lost past and a renewed future. Even though he professes not to be a fan of superhero fiction, Kelly finds a fresh approach for “The Biggest,” a bittersweet tale of a would-be do-gooder who can’t find sufficient appreciation for his talents.

Some of the stories here are set in Kelly’s far-flung, far-future Thousand Worlds universe. “One Sister, Two Sisters, Three,” for example, concerns a set of siblings who must reconcile their feelings about their fatally ill mother, who wants to upload her consciousness against their religious beliefs.

The stories are almost all reprints, but the volume includes one new work, “Yukui!” It asks what happens when a “Directed Intelligence” – a virtual reality sidekick, of sorts – is abandoned by its object of affection.

Taken as a whole, “The Promise of Space and Other Stories” delivers an eclectic mix of stories, allowing its author the opportunity to display his literary skills to best effect, satisfying for long-time fans and welcoming to newcomers. In his afterword, Kelly says that he would like to experiment more in the next decade of his career, and that’s good news for anyone who enjoys solidly constructed, often visionary science fiction and fantasy.

Berkeley writer Michael Berry is a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, native who has contributed to Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books and many other publications. He can be contacted at:

mikeberry@mindspring.com

Twitter: mlberry


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