Asimov's SF June 2009 Read online

  But I want to say a few words here in favor of niceness. Maybe I feel defensive because a writer whose story I was critiquing once told me he thought the worst response anyone could have to his work was to say it was nice. Maybe I HAD just said it was nice. I don't remember. But in my brain and my mouth, there is nothing simple or simple-minded about niceness. It's a lot harder than it looks. Sure, anyone can manage brief public displays of it. But the genuine article? The nicest guy in science fiction? If it were easy, everyone would be that.

  Over the years I've seen Jim be nice in public and in private, in good times and in bad, before coffee and after wine. I have seen Jim be nice on little sleep and less food. Jim's sort of niceness takes effort, attentiveness, wit, and imagination. It is an interesting, a provocative, sparky sort of niceness, nothing reflexive or dull about it. It is magnetic. When Jim is on one side of a party and I am on the other, then I know I am not in the place I want to be.

  I wouldn't characterize Jim's work as nice. Some of it is, but some of it is rough or edgy or sly. He is a quintessentially protean writer; no single adjective suffices for the whole. I have read a ton of Jim Kelly and I continue to be regularly surprised at where he goes and what he's doing with his fiction. With the name removed, I'm not convinced I would recognize all of his stories as his. That, like niceness, is another hard thing to pull off.

  Much of our relationship has taken place in the context of the Sycamore Hill writing workshop. On the day my story is on the block, Jim's response is one I await with a particular nervous anxiety. Jim is a brilliant critic, and strong, as I am not, on plot. But that's not why I'm nervous. I'm nervous because I know Jim will have given me a generous reading. An ungenerous reading can sink a brilliant story. But a story that doesn't survive a generous reading is a story with problems. Even when that critique is delivered in the nicest possible way.

  * * * *

  Karen Joy Fowler's latest novels are “Wit's End” and “The Jane Austen Book Club". Her most recent Nebula award was for the short story, “Always,” that appeared in our April/May 2006 issue.

  Bruce Sterling

  James Patrick Kelly has a solid New England yeoman reticence. Kelly lacks the showboating weirdness of many science fiction writers, guys who tend to have spikey, odd, finny names, like Lem or Pohl or Poul or Sturgeon. In person Kelly comes across as a bluff-looking Irish guy bouncing a basketball.

  But I've spent a lot of time in close quarters with James Patrick Kelly. He never behaves as a gaseous interstellar intellectual, yet he is nevertheless keenly and even somewhat scarily intelligent. Thinking back over the Kelly oeuvre, I'm struck not by its solid craft but by its visionary qualities.

  Most writers crafting a story whose protagonist is a thieving street rat would be playing mythical and metaphorical tricks; a Kafka-style fantasy riff of a man turned into a rat, a Philip Dick ontological charade of melting realities. In the Kelly story “Rat,” the rat is very simply and lucidly a rat. He's a big urban rat in soiled clothes who lives in a nest of tattered dollar bills.

  Not much is made of this; there's no fancy sleight-of-hand about it. Not only do we not ask how this happened, we're somehow maneuvered into a situation where we can't even ask.

  Much the same goes for the Kelly character whose mother is the Statue of Liberty. This conceit sounds a lot more fey than it is in practice; by the time we're dragged through the bizarre yet quotidian world of that story, Mom's statuesque proportions are the least of our difficulties.

  James Patrick Kelly knows what he's doing, ladies and gentlemen. I've seen him do it, not just with his own work but other people's. How often I've quietly marveled as he takes damaged works of fiction in hand, skillfully breaks them down to their functional components, and deftly reassembles them so they run lighter, faster, and cleaner. Nobody applauds him for it. They just stare at him, with the vaguely discomforted look of creatives who should have thought about it that way all along.

  There are few to match him.

  Multiple Hugo-Award-winning author, Bruce Sterling is considered a co-founder of the Cyberpunk Literary movement. The author's most recent novel is The Caryatids.

  * * * *

  Jonathan Lethem

  You never get a second chance to make a first impression, sure, but James Patrick Kelly—Jim to me, now—actually got to make three first impressions on me. Three at least. As a ravenous teenager, awed by the field I was trying to enter, he stood (in my mind) as the dangerously cool older brother whose omnipresent preeminence (omnipreminence?) I'd have to both emulate and, well, partly overthrow, in order to hang my own star in the sky. With Fowler, Kessel, Robinson, Shepherd—among others, but for me, those above all—he represented the flavor of line-by-line literary chops, ambidextrous talent, and cocksure ambition that it seemed to me was just then taking over the genre's short story tradition. In other words, in my mind's eye, he looked a bit like James Dean looks to Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause. Then, when quite suddenly I found myself competing against him for a Nebula Award for best novella, before we'd ever met, Jim defied the rivalrous situation, dropped a postcard's jotting of gracious, comradely praise into my mailbox, out of nowhere, still just about the most angelic collegial gesture I've ever experienced from another writer. There was no reason he had to do it, but he did—and with a single stroke, made me feel welcomed into a community I still could barely imagine the reality of. Last, I actually got to know him. And he turned out, yes, to be that brilliant writer who'd written those stories that had made that impression, and that improbably kind soul who'd sent me the comradely postcard, but he was also one of the least pretentious, most charming, raffish, and simply likeable persons-who-call-themselves-writer, I'd ever met or ever hope to.

  The funny thing about the dumb opening joke I started out with here, is that it seems to me that the brilliance of the storyteller James Patrick Kelly, that master of freshness and surprise, is accidentally captured there: he goes on making first impressions, against all law or likelihood, reinventing himself each time out, always questioning the basic premise of what a science fiction short story can be, or a James Patrick Kelly story, or a story in the first place. May he for many Junes to come.

  Two Student Perspectives:

  Jonathan Lethem won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel “Motherless Brooklyn". His next book, “Chronic City", will be out in the fall.

  * * * *

  Cory Doctorow

  Jim gave me the single best piece of writing advice I've ever received—on my first day of Clarion, no less! The night before, he'd called for volunteers willing to have their “audition” stories critiqued the next day, as none of us had written anything new for the workshop. Being a cocky twenty-year-old, I immediately put my hand up and submitted “The Adventures of Ma ‘n’ Pa Frigidaire” (of which I was inordinately proud). That evening, my fellow students came around one after another to tell me how great the story was, and the next day in the critiquing circle, my roommate started his critique with “I share my toilet with a genius.”

  Then it came to Jim and he said, “Cory Doctorow, you are an asshole.” (He was smiling when he said this). “You've managed to convince sixteen intelligent, talented writers that this story has something to it, despite the fact that it's all pyrotechnics and no heart. You need to learn to sit down at the keyboard and open a vein.”

  That one piece of advice turned out to be the single most important thing anyone's said to me about making art in all my career. I suppose I could have gone home after day one and worked on it for the next five years (and that's how long it took me to figure it out!). But then I would have missed all the camaraderie and tutelage that followed.

  Cory Doctorow, who won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 2000, is a co-editer of the weblog Boing Boing. His most recent novel, “Little Brother", was published last year.

  * * * *

  Sandra McDonald

  Jim Kelly leans forward when he gives you a critique o
f your work. Eyes intent, face animated. Or he leans backward, fingers laced on chest, gaze turning skyward. When he's on his feet in front of a classroom he's a man in motion, waving his arms as he conjures magic. Though often he stands still—relaxed but focused. When I first met him at the Viable Paradise workshop in 2001, I thought, “Clearly this man has some energy in him.” Not only energy, but wit and charm, and a very smart sense of what stories do and how to make them work. If I believed in chakras, I'd say there's a spinning vortex of storytelling and compassion nestled right beside his heart. When Jim joined the staff of my MFA program, I held my breath and stomped up and down until they assigned him to me as my mentor. For a solid year I got to pester him with my writing and watch him slice through my paragraphs with a rapier. Best year's education I ever got. Now other students get their turn at the table, and I'm honored to be sharing these same pages of Asimov's. Thanks, Jim, for all you've taught me—and continue to teach me—about the craft and joy of writing.

  P.S. Last summer some of his former students and I put together a tribute book—forty or so essays from Jim's students. You can download a free copy at lulu.com/content/2648885.

  Sandra McDonald is the author of three novels. You'll find her first story for “Asimov's” on page 72.

  * * * *

  The Modest One

  John Kessel

  The first thing we like in science fiction is the future. The gadget that is used in ordinary everyday life, the sideways perspective on things we think we know, the sudden startling change accepted without astonishment. Jim Kelly gives me lots of these moments. In “Undone,” I love it when the heroine folds up her spaceship and puts it into her pocket. In “Unique Visitors” I laugh at the notion of the Beverly Hillbillies as time travelers. I'm startled and amused that Mr. Boy's mother has had herself transformed into a three-quarter-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty (and the only reason she isn't full-scale is the zoning laws).

  But what sticks in my mind most are the human moments. At the end of Burn the hero Spur stops by the body of his wife, feels the fabric of her shroud between his thumb and finger, and remembers how as children they would play dead. The end of “The First Law of Thermodynamics” when Space the college student in 1970 steps through a doorway and becomes Jack Casten, a fortyish high school teacher in front of his bored science class. The powerful ironies at the end of “Think Like a Dinosaur,” made real in the touch of Kamala's long nails on Michael Burr's cheek. The loneliness of the boy in “1016 to 1” alleviated but not cured by the appearance of a time traveler who doesn't realize the simple reality that a twelve-year-old in 1962 can't just walk into a store and spend a hundred dollar bill.

  What I guess I'm saying is I like the way Jim Kelly writes real science fiction, and makes it art. Jim entertains me, and makes me think, and makes me feel. All without showing off. I know he wants recognition as much as anyone, I know somewhere inside him he wants to shout about his accomplishments. He longs to live forever through his writing as much as any person ever has. But he lets the work speak for itself.

  I admire and try to emulate his generosity as a writer and a person. He gives it all. He has a sense of proportion, a sense of humor, a sense of tragedy, a sense of balance. He has helped me be a better man.

  Nebula-Award-winning author John Kessel's most recent books include two collaborations with James Patrick Kelly: “Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology” and “Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology."

  Copyright © 2009 Connie Willis

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novellete: GOING DEEP

  by James Patrick Kelly

  On the twenty-fifth anniversary of his remarkable feat, James Patrick Kelly tells us that he's still amazed at his good fortune in placing a June story every year for so many years with three different editors of Asimov's. “I am grateful to Shawna, Gardner, and Sheila for their guidance and to you the readers for your support.” In his latest tale, Jim draws a masterful portrait of a preteen about to embark on that treacherous journey to adulthood. Inspiration for the ending to this story came to him while teaching at the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program. Jim's latest book, The Secret History of Science Fiction, an anthology he is co-edited with longtime co-conspirator John Kessel, will be published by Tachyon Publications in the fall.

  Mariska shivered when she realized that her room had been tapping at the dreamfeed for several minutes. “The earth is up,” it murmured in its gentle singing accent. “Daddy Al is up and I am always up. Now Mariska gets up.”

  Mariska groaned, determined not to allow her room in. Recently she had been dreaming her own dreams of Jak and his long fingers and the fuzz on his chin and the way her throat tightened when she brushed up against him. But this was one of her room's feeds, one of the best ones, one she had been having as long as she could remember. In it, she was in space, but she wasn't on the Moon and she wasn't wearing her hardsuit. There were stars every way she turned. Of course, she'd seen stars through the visor of her helmet but these were always different. Not a scatter of light but a swarm. And they were all were singing their names, calling to her to come to them. She could just make out the closest ones: Alpha Centauri. Barnard's. Wolf. Lalande. Luyten. Sirius.

  “The earth is up, Daddy Al is up and I am always up.” Her room insisted. “Now Mariska gets up.” If she didn't wake soon, it would have to sound the gong.

  “Slag it.” She rolled over, awake and grumpy. Her room had been getting on her last nerve recently. When she had been a little girl, she had roused at its whisper, but in the last few weeks it had begun nagging her to wake up. She knew it loved her and was only worried about her going deep, but she was breathing regularly and her heartbeat was probably in the high sixties. It monitored her, so it had to know she was just sleeping.

  She thought this was all about Al. He was getting nervous; so her room was nervous.

  "Dobroye utro," said Feodor Bear. “Good morn-ing Mar-i-ska.” The ancient toy robot stood up on its shelf, wobbled and then sat down abruptly. It was over a century old and, in Mariska's opinion, needed to be put out of its misery.

  “Good morning, dear Mariska,” said her room. “Today is Friday, June 15, 2159. You are expected today in Hydroponics and at the Muoi swimming pool. This Sunday is Father's Day.”

  “I know, I know.” She stuck her foot out from underneath the covers and wiggled her toes in the cool air. Her room began to bring the temperature up from sleeping to waking levels.

  “I could help you find something for Daddy Al, if you'd like.” Her room painted Buycenter icons on the wall. “We haven't shopped together in a while.”

  “Maybe later.” Sometimes she felt guilty that she wasn't spending enough time with her room, but its persona kept treating her like a baby. Still calling him DaddyAl, for example; it was embarrassing. And she would get to all her expectations eventually. What choice did she have?

  The door slid aside a hand's width and Al peered through the opening.

  “Rise and shine, Mariska.” His smile was a crack on a worried face. “Pancakes for breakfast,” he said. “But only if you get up now.” He blew a kiss that she ducked away from.

  “I'm shining already,” she grumbled. “Your own little star.”

  * * * *

  As she stepped through the cleanser, she wondered what to do about him. She knew exactly what was going on. The Gorshkov had just returned from exploring the DeltaPavonis system, which meant they'd probably be hearing soon from Natalya Volochkova. And Mariska had just turned thirteen; in another year she'd be able to vote, sign contracts, get married. This was the way the world worked: now that she was almost an adult, it was time for Al to go crazy. All her friends’ parents had. The symptoms were hard to ignore: embarrassing questions like where was she going and who was she going with and who else would be there? He said he trusted her but she knew he'd slap a trace on her if he thought he could get away with it. But what was the point? This was
the Moon. There were security cams over every safety hatch. How much trouble could she get into? Walk out an airlock without a suit? She wasn't suicidal—or dumb. Have sex and get pregnant? She was patched—when she finally jumped a boy, pregnancy wouldn't be an issue. Crash from some toxic feed? She was young—she'd get over it.

  The fact that she loved Al's strawberry pancakes did nothing to improve her mood at breakfast. He was unusually quiet, which meant he was working his courage up for some stupid fathering talk. Something in the news? She brought her gossip feed up on the tabletop to see what was going on. The scrape of his knife on the plate as she scanned headlines made her want to shriek. Why did he have to use her favorite food as a bribe so that he could pester her?

  “You heard about that boy from Penrose High?” he said at last. “The one in that band you used to like ... No Exit? Final Exit?”

  “You're talking about Last Exit to Nowhere?” That gossip was so old it had curled around the edges and blown away. “Deltron Cleen?”

  “That's him.” He stabbed one last pancake scrap and pushed it into a pool of syrup. “They say he was at a party a couple of weeks ago and opened his head to everyone there, I forget how many mindfeeds he accepted.”

  “So?” She couldn't believe he was pushing Deltron Cleen at her.

  “You knew him?”

  “I've met him, sure.”

  “You weren't there, were you?” He actually squirmed, like he had ants crawling up his leg. “When it happened?”

  “Oh sure. And when he keeled over, I was the one who gave him CPR.” Mariska pinched her nose closed and puffed air at him. “Saved his life—the board of supers is giving me a medal next Thursday.”