James Patrick Kelly (1) (1951–)

Kelly, James Patrick. Grace’s Family. Tor, 2018.
The folks at Tor called Grace’s Family a short story, but they published it separately. At 45 pages, it would probably have been the lead novelette in Analog or Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. This awkward, between-the-stools length may account for the lackluster ratings it has received on Goodreads.
Grace is the AI on a starship that is part of a fleet exploring all the planets in the observable universe. Grace is not a self-directing AI. She requires a human crew to choose the next target, though a random walk is as good as any other plan. Their ultimate goal, in the words of Carl Sagan, is to help “the cosmos know itself,” to convert data into information and information into knowledge.
I will leave it there to avoid plot spoilers, but the intriguing premise alone gets James Patrick Kelly four stars from me.… (mere)

This anthology isn't really a cohesive whole, and that's a good thing. The stories contained within are supposedly from a newish genre called slipstream. According to Bruce Sterling, slipstream's unifying force is cognitive dissonance. What this anthology demonstrated is that Slipstream isn't a genre at all, and that's there nothing new about it. It is, in fact, anti-genre, and a demonstration of how some our great young writers don't give a damn about genre boundaries. Much of the fiction here felt influenced by Borges and Kafka, with a hint of Calvino.

I was familiar with many of the stories here, but it was nice to see such a broad variety of stories in one Anthology. There are other names for the type of fiction contained in this book: interstitial arts seems to be the latest term. Don't be fooled: these stories are fiction without genre, and it works best when the authors aren't trying too hard. Highly recommended.… (mere)

A Creative Commons short story freely available from the authour's website, it starts out as an old fashioned Mike Hammer murder mystery.

Murder mysteries aren't my usual fare, and in this case, I didn't care about the case or the detective. Only the sci-fi near future background is actually engaging.

There's lots going on in here, but most of it ends up as hanging threads, not plotlines. I've read a lot of novels that would have been better cut down to short stories - this is the reverse. If it had been fleshed out more, I likely would have liked it better.… (mere)