The Wreck of the Godspeed: And Other Stories - Hardcover

James Patrick Kelly writes for Asimov's Science Fiction and is the author of Burn, Heroines, Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories, Strange but Not a Stranger, and Wildlife, as well as the coeditor of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, and Rewired: The Post Cyber-Punk Anthology. He lives in Nottingham, New Hampshire.

Kelly’s stories depend on future technologies based on physics, information theory, genetics, and other au courant disciplines, but they’re about love, friendship, and loyalty. The exploratory colonizing craft Godspeed, which is an artificial and quite independent intelligence, nearly ends its thousand-plus-year career in disaster, with the loss of all crew; it’s the latter’s desperate unit cohesion that saves the day, also a burgeoning romance. A professional carrier of undeclared (hence, illegal) personality transplants decides to become gay to relieve the boredom of a long interstellar flight and winds up settling down with his previously unattainable female love interest, though he’s still gay. A hard-boiled PI in a future earth cleansed of men by alien invaders solves the murder of a newlywed (to another woman) and goes home to her own spouse. Those and most of the other 10 selections are fast paced and witty enough to offset their frequent mind-boggling nature, but exhilaration and amusement aren’t all Kelly provides. Check out “Luck,” “Bernardo’s House,” and the short novel Burn for quieter, more profound effects. --Ray Olson