John Kessel has written the novels Pride and Prometheus, The Moon and the Other, Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and Freedom Beach (with James Patrick Kelly), and the collections Meeting in Infinity, The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence. The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel, was published by Subterranean Press in 2022. His work has received the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon, the Locus, the James Tiptree Jr./Otherwise, the Ignotus, and the Shirley Jackson awards. With Jim Kelly, he has edited five anthologies of stories re-visioning contemporary science fiction, most recently Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology. His undergraduate degree was in physics and English, and he holds a PhD in English from the University of Kansas, where he studied with SFWA Grandmaster James Gunn. He co-founded the Sycamore Hill Writers Conference. At North Carolina State University Kessel helped found the MFA program in creative writing, serving twice as its director. He lives with his wife, the novelist Therese Anne Fowler, in Raleigh.
John Kessel has written the novels Pride and Prometheus, The Moon and the Other, Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and Freedom Beach (with James Patrick Kelly), and the collections Meeting in Infinity, The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence. The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel, was published by Subterranean Press in 2022. His work has received the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon, the Locus, the James Tiptree Jr./Otherwise, the Ignotus, and the Shirley Jackson awards. With Jim Kelly, he has edited five anthologies of stories re-visioning c...
(18708 words, 94 minutes) Awards: Nebula Award Winner, Best Novella
Ahab had sailed them into the heart of a typhoon. The sails were in tatters, and the men ran across the deck shouting against the wind and trying to lash the boats down tighter before they were washed away or smashed. Stubb had gotten his left hand caught between one of the boats and the rail; he now held it with his right and grimaced. The mastheads were touched with St. Elmo’s fire. Ahab stood with the lightning rod in his right hand and his right foot planted on the neck of Fedallah, declaiming at the lightning. Fallon held tightly to a shroud to keep from being thrown off his feet. The scene was ludicrous; it was horrible.
A scraping noise came from behind us. I turned to find that the giant male figure in the center of the fountain had moved. As I watched, its hand jerked another few centimeters. Its foot pulled free of its setting, and it stepped down from the pedestal into the empty basin. We fell back from the fountain. The statue’s eyes glowed a dull orange. Its lips moved, and it spoke in a voice like the scraping together of two files: “Do not flee, little ones.”
David Baker was born in the back seat of his parents’ Chevy in the great mechanized lot at mile 1.375 x 1025. “George, we need to stop,” his mother Polly said. “I’m having pains.” She was a week early.
During the thirty-three years Andrew Steele occupied the Oval Office of what was then called the White House, in what was then called the United States of America (not to be confused with the current United State of Americans), on the corner of his desk he kept an antiquated device of the early twenty-first century called a taser.
By early December the river, which curled around the campus like a question mark, was frozen. In the mornings, strung out, crossing the bridge over the railroad tracks on his way to thermodynamics, Ben would squint into a howling arctic wind that froze the tears in his eyelashes.
The problem with an engine powered by the rotation of the Earth is that you cannot turn it off. If you built enough of them, they would gradually steal all of the Earth’s angular momentum and the day would lengthen until the sun stood still in the sky, and then eventually start going backward.
(5286 words, 27 minutes) Awards: Featured in "Year's Best Fantasy & Horror", Eleventh Edition, ed. Datlow et al....
Lemuel carefully balanced the box he carried on his knees. He peeked inside, to assure himself for the hundreth time that the tiny cattle and sheep it held were all right. We were on our way to the country estate of the Earl of Kent, who had summoned Lemuel when the rumors of the miniature creatures he’d brought back from Lilliput spread throughout the county.
I might be on the outs, but the story of the wild goose chase for Orson Welles was all around town. Four times talent scouts had been sent back to recruit versions of Welles, and four times they had failed.
It was shortly after this period, in February 1938, that Astounding Science Fiction published the first installment of Melville’s immense five-part serial, Starry Deeps, or the Wail. This cosmos-encompassing novel, which I have shown in my book Plumbers of the Future to be the first real science fiction epic, met with mixed reactions at the time.
Along the path she found a lunchbox tree. The boxes nearest the trunk were small and green, but the ones farthest out and high up, on the big limbs, were square, white, and ripe. Mira leaped up a couple of meters or more and managed to snatch one.
She came over and shined the flashlight into the closet. I ran my hand over the seam of the door. It was about three feet high, flush with the wall, the same off-white color but cool to the touch, made of metal. No visible hinges and no lock, just a flip-up handle like on a tackle box.
“I begin to wonder if we can ever change them,” I said. Lydia’s voice was fierce as she replied, “If men were capable of change, then reason would have done it years ago. For most, the only answer is death.”
My pulse roared in my ears, there joining the drowned choir of the fields and the roar of the engine. Body slimy with sweat, fingers clenched through the cigar, fists clamped on the wheel, smoke stinging my eyes.
The next day Enzo’s battered junker wasn’t in the slot outside his apartment. Instead of a car key on his key ring he had a key to a bike lock that released a shining new street bike with cargo carrier on back.
You wish these people would show a little more imagination. And why the garter belt if she’s not wearing hose? You can see her as she really is, sitting in her kitchen wearing a ragged sweatsuit, eating cookie dough out of a plastic container.
(6591 words, 33 minutes) Awards: World Fantasy Award Nomination for Best Short Story 1999...
Like the cat. Pleasure lived that way all the time. The cat didn’t know about Jesus’ sacrifice, about angels and devils. That cat looked at him and saw what was there.
“Mary gasped, and pulled Kitty toward her. A great peal of thunder rolled across the sky. She saw, beneath the trees not ten feet from them, the giant figure of a man.”
“Nevertheless. I’m a talent scout. I work for the future equivalent of a film studio, a big company that makes entertainment. In the future, Hollywood is still the heart of the industry.”
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