James Patrick Kelly Books In Order

Messenger Books In Order

Look into the Sun (1989)

Novels

Freedom Beach (1985)
Wildlife (1994)
Solstice (1999)
Ninety Percent of Everything (2001)
Burn (2005)

Collections

Think Like a Dinosaur (1990)
Strange But Not a Stranger (2002)
Wreck of the Godspeed (2008)
The Promise of Space and Other Stories (2018)
The First Law of Thermodynamics (2021)

Novellas

Bernardo’s House (2014)
Faith (2016)
Men Are Trouble (2016)
Surprise Party (2016)
Grace’s Family (2018)
King of the Dogs, Queen of the Cats (2020)

Anthologies edited

Feeling Very Strange (2006)
Rewired (2007)
The Secret History of Science Fiction (2009)
Digital Rapture (2012)

Messenger Book Covers

Look into the Sun
(1989)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

James Patrick Kelly Books Overview

Solstice

It was while he was developing Focus that the famous drug artist, Cage, decided he needed someone to help him spend his money. He felt no particular urge to contract a marriage. None of the women he was sleeping with at the time mattered to him. He knew that they had been drawn by that irresistible pheromone: the smell of success. He wanted to share his life with someone who would be bound to him by ties no lawyer could break. Someone who would be uniquely his. Forever. Or so he imagined. Wynne was carried in an artificial womb. All it took was a tissue culture from a few of Cage’s intestinal epithelial cells and some gene sculpturing to change the ‘Y’ chromosome to an ‘X.’ This and one point two million new dollars. She was not his daughter. Nor was she exactly his clone. This story is a cyberpunk classic on two audio CDs.

Burn

Colonization is the theme of this exciting, complex page turner that provides a provocative and entertaining look at Thoreau’s classic eco text Walden. Eccentric billionaire Jack Winter has bought the planet Beekman’s Pea, renamed it Walden, and created a utopia in which members renounce the technologies of human civilization. Marginalized by these newcomers, the planet’s original inhabitants are resisting the colony’s dominance by setting fires to Walden’s artificial ecology. A member of Walden, Prosper Gregory Leung is a veteran firefighter who believes in protecting Winter’s utopian vision, but when he is wounded, he begins to learn of the terrible price that the people of Walden are paying for their paradise. Interwoven with themes of environmental responsibility, political struggle, and courage, this adventure novel nimbly combines political and social relevance with a flawless and gripping narrative from a veteran science fiction author.

Think Like a Dinosaur

This first major retrospective collects Kelly’s finest short fiction from a 20 year career and includes a dazzling array of work, from hard science fiction and Twilight Zone inspired fantasies to stark futuristic horror. The grim fable ‘Pogrom’ presents a near futuristic scenario in which internecine warfare has broken out between the ageing boomer generation and a youthful dispossessed proletariat who must support them. The landmark novella ‘Mr Boy’ is the wildly inventive tale of a genetically stunted 12 year old who literally lives inside his mother, who has turned herself into a three quarter scale model of the Statue of Liberty. ‘The First Law of Thermodynamics’ is a remarkable evocation of the psychedelic sixties the time of Vietnam, Kent State, and acid rock in which, like that era itself, nothing is what it appears to be. The now famous title story, ‘Think Like a Dinosaur‘, is a tale of a transporter beam maintained by aliens, through which humanity can visit the stars.

Strange But Not a Stranger

The 16 stories in this collection run the gamut from cyber adventure and a ghostly haunting to chemically modified romance and a time travel mission to save the world. The Hugo Award winner, ’10to the 16th to 1,’ tells the story of a boy in the 1960s who gets caught up in a spirited adventure that becomes a desperate attempt to prevent a nuclear holocaust. In ‘The Cruelest Month,’ a grieving mother is haunted both by the past and a ghost. ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ presents a radioactive Lake Geneva overrun with cyberpunks seeking fame and fortune through software piracy. By turns humorous and harrowing, this collection highlights the short fiction of a lauded author at his best.

Wreck of the Godspeed

Providing new insights into the human psyche, this remarkable collection gathers 13 cutting edge tales of science fiction that reveal both the dark and light side of progress. In the Nebula award winner, ‘Burn,’ an idyllic planet wrestles with ecological responsibility and terrorism, while the problems and temptations of a happy virtual reality are examined in ‘The Dark Side of Town.’ Colorful pilgrims travel to new worlds until their ship’s artificial intelligence begins to act strangely in the namesake, ‘The Wreck of the Godspeed,’ and the extent that future television programs will go to get ratings is explored in ‘The Leila Torn Show,’ Combining hard technology with complex, character based dilemmas, each inventive narrative shares the message that science is not a panacea and often leads to personal decisions that are neither clear nor easy.

Feeling Very Strange

Intending to establish a canon for the controversial slipstream science fiction subgenre, the editors of this anthology have brought together a group of convention defying tales set in vivid and disorienting dreamscapes that offer no distinction between reality and hallucination. A cross between the literary surrealism of Franz Kafka and escapist popular fiction, this ambitious new species sometimes also called interstitial fiction is exemplified here in stories by Carol Emshwiller, Karen Joy Fowler, Jonathan Lethem, and George Saunders.

Rewired

Following the rapid evolution of cyberpunk from Bruce Sterling and William Gibson into the current millennium, this vivid anthology welcomes a new generation of exciting writers to take the genre in new and unexpected directions. Cyberpunk freewheels with punk rock energy, careening between the internet, bioengineering, and international politics, its influence saturating entertainment and the mass media. Drawing on the traditions of the pioneering cyberpunk manifesto, Mirrorshades, each story delves into the gritty world of technological change. Legendary Mirrorshades editor and contributor Bruce Sterling is back, alongside such cutting edge writers as Cory Doctorow, Jonathan Lethem, Gwyneth Jones, Hal Duncan, Charles Stross, and Pat Cadigan. With a daring introduction from James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors of the controversial Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, this collection is an exhilarating snapshot of a vibrant literary movement.

The Secret History of Science Fiction

This ingeniously conceived anthology raises the intriguing question, If Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity s Rainbow had won the Nebula award in 1973, would the future distinction between literary fiction and science fiction have been erased? Exploring the possibility of an alternate history of speculative fiction, this literary collection reveals that the lines between genres have already been obscured. Don DeLillo s Human Moments in World War III follows the strange detachment of two astronauts who are orbiting in a skylab while a third world war rages on earth. The Ziggurat by Gene Wolfe traverses a dissolving marriage, a custody dispute, and the visit of time travelers from the future. T. C. Boyle s Descent of Man is the subversively funny tale of a man who suspects that his primatologist lover is having an affair with one of her charges. In Schwarzschild Radius, Connie Willis draws an allegorical parallel between the horrors of trench warfare and the speculative physics of black holes. Artfully crafted and offering a wealth of esteemed authors from writers within the genre to those normally associated with mainstream fiction, as well as those with a crossover reputation this volume aptly demonstrates that great science fiction appears in many guises.