♪♪ -In partnership with the friends of the UNH library, this is the New Hampshire Authors series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ -James Patrick Kelly writes well, you name it, he writes it.

Novels, stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows.

His work has been translated into 16 languages.

He's won two Hugo Awards from the World Science Fiction Society and been nominated for many more awards.

He writes a column for Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine online, and every week he podcasts a couple of things free reads and James Patrick Kelly's story pod.

He's busy, but not too busy, to volunteer on the State Council on the Arts and to chair that council for three years to serve as well on the board of the New England Foundation for the Arts and the New Hampshire Writers Project.

Please welcome the author of Think Like a Dinosaur, The Wreck of the Godspeed, and, among many other titles, Strange But Not a Stranger.

My friend Jim Kelly.

[applause] -Thanks!

- That's good?

Is that right?

- That was good!

-I got most of it in.

[Rebecca chuckles] This I know about James Patrick Kelly, he is out there on the edge.

I mean, on the edge of technology.

-Thank you.

[James chuckles] -Always ahead of the rest of us, so I watch and I learn.

Well, I've got a little quote from you-for you, and it's from the introduction to The Wreck of the Godspeed, which is one of your more recent books.

-Right.

-And it's from the cover artist, Bob Eggleton.

He has a lot of nice stuff to say about you, like, you're a good guy and not pretentious.

He also says that your stories have a sense of place, of normalcy in an otherwise strange situation.

He says that's the mark of the best of fantastic writing or art.

Take the prosaic and put it into the strange and make it all seem matter of fact.

That's true, isn't it?

-I think that's one of the things that, some writers I certainly do try to accomplish, to invite readers into these fantastic worlds, science, fictional worlds, fantasy worlds.

Yeah you have to make a huge leap of the imagination to imagine what it's like to live on a space station or, or in a world where wizards actually hold sway.

But one of the ways I can...

I hope I can help you wrap your mind around these larger concepts is to portray the world as it, as it, as it presents itself to the protagonist, the characters, in the same way that you see it.

So, I mean, I think that if you, you know, if you could find some telling detail in a room, then the entire room blossoms into, into being in the reader's imagination so, you know, I might notice an ashtray, I might notice a doorknob, I might notice a crack in a window, and I might make a point of saying that there's a crack in this window, which is a stained glass window.

All of a sudden you're saying to yourself, well, wait a minute.

It's a stained... room with a stained glass window has a crack in it?

What can that mean?

And once you start looking at these little details and sort of mulling them over, it seems to me that you, the reader, will intuit the rest of the room, the rest of the world from that.

-Or you take something familiar and put it with the unfamiliar and I can't remember which story this is from, but I think you have.

Is it a Coke bubble?

-Yes, right a Coke bubble, sure -Instead of drinking out of a bottle, - Right.

- You drink out of a Coke bubble.

-Right, yup, right.

Or a beer box.

I mean, I’ve used that too.

[James chuckles] - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you've got a story called Men Are Trouble.

And I know you're going to do a little reading from Men are trouble.

- Yup.

[audience laughs] Men are Trouble.

-And this is a world, I’ll just give a little intro.

-Thank you.

-No men.

Does that give away too much?

-That's obvious in the first page so... -So would you read from Men are Trouble?

-Sure.

Becky said I was the first person ever to read from a device here up on the stage, so.

-But apparently you're the second.

-I know!

[audience laughs] -I would, I was robbed of my privacy.

I was all set to claim this one.

[laughter continues] So I will say that Men are Trouble is a world where there's no men.

And what's happened is that the aliens have come, taken a look at the situation day after tomorrow and decided that, well, this specie has- species has promise, but it has a big flaw.

So they decided to disappear all the men to improve the species and so, this story takes place some 40 years later, and it's a detective story.

And so, our, our heroine, you have to imagine, despite my, gravelly, cold induced voice, I'm doing my Nick Nolte imitation today, that this is a woman.

And so she's, just basically broken up with her girlfriend partner, and she says, so my life was a wreck?

Not exactly main menu news.

I told myself all that I needed was coffee.

Although what I really wanted was a rich aunt, a vacation in Fiji, and a new girlfriend.

I locked the door behind me, slogged down the hall, and was about to press the down button.

When the elevator chimed.

The doors slid open to reveal George, the bot in charge of our building, and the devil.

No doubt the same one that had just flown by.

I told myself this had nothing to do with me.

The devil was probably seeing Crazy Martha down the hall for a tax rebate, or taking piano lessons from Abby upstairs.

Sure.

And drunks go to bars for the peanuts.

Hello Fay, said George, this one has two hopes of finding you in the office.

I goggled slack jaw and stupefied at the devil.

Of course, I'd seen them on vids and in the sky, and once I watched one waddle into City Hall, but I'd never been close enough to slap one before.

I hated the devils.

The elevator door shivered and began to close.

George stuck an arm out to stop them.

May this one borrow some of your time?

George, said.

The devil was just over a meter tall.

Its face was the color of an old blood stain, and its maw seemed to kiss the air as it breathed with a wet, sucking sound.

The wings were wrapped tight around it.

The membranes held a rusty translucence that only hinted at the sleek bullet of a body beneath.

I could see my reflection in its flat, compound eyes.

I looked like I had just been hit in the head with a lighthouse.

Something is remarked-regrettable Fay?

This was my cue for a wisecrack to show them that no invincible, mass murdering alien was going to intimidate Fay Hardaway.

No, I said, this way.

-You can clap.

[applause] We’re allowed, we’re allowed.

[applause continues] And it just gets better.

-It gets better -It gets better.

You drop us right into the middle of this world, right into the middle without explanation.

Here we are, a world without men.

We don't know where they went?

- Yeah, you don’t.

- And we go along for the ride.

-But you know that detail to me, this story has some of my favorite sentences in it and this, the sentence where the elevator door is shivering.

I mean, there it is.

All of a sudden, you're in a world where you've seen that elevator door shiver.

So if you believe that, you believe that they're going to walk down an office with a mass murdering alien and a robot and talk about stuff, yeah, okay.

-Yeah, yeah.

And for me in, your stories are full of character.

I mean, Fay is a character.

-She is.

She's funny, she's tough, she's vulnerable.

She gets beat up a lot.

Oh, did I give that away?

- No.

I was talking to Jim earlier, and I said, what I'm, what I'm channeling is Raymond Chandler.

-Yeah -I mean she's a hard boiled detective.

- Right.

- In a science fiction story.

- Right.

-So we've got those two genres together, and it's it's an amazing.

And you're going to do more with this character, is that right?

-Right so that story came out in 2005.

It's a novella, which is a longest- and long-ish story.

And, I liked it so much that I just finished a new Fay Hardaway a new Fay Hardaway adventure.

And that will be coming out shortly in Asimov Science Fiction Magazine.

That also is a novella.

So those two stories together and they sort of continue on what, what from one to the next is about 40,000 words and another 30,000 words.

And that's what we call a novel, folks.

70,000 words, 80,000 words.

So I'm hoping that in the next year or so, I have a whole Fay Hardaway novel.

-Wow.

One of my favorites of your stories, and I know a lot of people really love this story is 10 to the 16th to 1.

10 to the 16th to 1.

I love it for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, like a lot of really great stories, it's like a whole lifetime in just a few pages, you get the whole lifetime.

It's set on Earth, which I like.

I enjoy a story on Earth, I enjoy that it's historical and the main character is strange and appealing and real.

And I'm going to read a little bit to you from your own story, Jim.

And then I have a question, it goes like this.

So I didn't have any real friends.

Instead I had science fiction.

Mom used to complain I was obsessed.

I watched Superman reruns every day after school on Friday nights.

Dad used to let me stay up for The Twilight Zone, but that fall, CBS had temporarily canceled it.

It came back in January after everything happened, but it was never quite the same.

On Saturdays, I watched old sci fi movies on Adventure Theater.

My favorites were Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

I think it was because of the robots.

I decided when I grew up and it was the future, I was going to buy one so I wouldn't have to be alone anymore.

Were you like your hero, Ray Beaumont, as a child?

Were you obsessed with science fiction?

Did you ever think of another kind of writing like romances or cookbooks?

[laughter] Romances not so much, cookbooks, -Maybe?

- Not really.

- But to me it's like we all had those shows as children.

-But to me it's like we all had those shows as children.

But somehow you I mean you just really became absorbed in that world, I guess I don't know were you like Ray?

-I was like, Ray, I mean, so this is a difficult subject because, okay, so this story takes place during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it takes place in a suburb of New York City, which is a very thinly disguised suburb where I grew up.

And, Ray's parents, dad is a window salesman.

He's on the road a lot.

His mom drinks a lot, and he's an only child.

So my my mom and dad, lovely people.

Not, window salesmen, not on the road as much.

And my mom doesn't drink.

And I had two other, three other brothers.

So although I had three brothers, I felt sort of like a lonely kid.

And so one of the ways I stopped being lonely was to enter this imaginative world of Superman and The Twilight Zone and monster movies and space.

Although [James clears throat] I, Ray actually is his dad is a science fiction fan, so so Ray has, a little, advantage on me because his dad has in his house an entire collection of these magazines, which I did not have.

I discovered it on my own.

I would bicycle my bike over to the library once or twice a week and take out the absolute number, you know, the top number of books, 4 or 5.

And most of them would be science fiction books so, in this story, this is a time travel story.

So a guy comes from the future and, he has a very important message, and he delivers it to Ray, who's 12 years old.

And all of a sudden, this kid has the future of civilization on his shoulders and doesn't know what to do with it.

And so it's, it's a story that is, it's very dear to my heart because of all that stuff.

It is my childhood and, and and it is I mean, I think for, for people of a certain age, if you can recall back to 1961, when your parents are watching the news continually and you go to bed that night and you're not really sure whether you're going to wake up the next morning and that was, a very traumatic moment for me, because I have an active so- So I was thinking, okay, if the bombs come and I survive, I guess I'll be fighting mutants, you know, where's my bomb shelter?

How am I going to survive?

And so, you know, but I mean, the actual fact of the matter is we were very close to blowing ourselves up, and.

And there was no hiding it from the kids.

There was no hiding it from the kids.

The kids knew I knew all all the kids knew, I knew.

Yeah, yeah.

- Very scary time.

- It was.

-Very scary time.

A short story for me.

When I, when I'm writing a story.

And I notice this when I'm reading a story, it's sort of when two elements come together.

-Yeah.

-Grace Paley said, I know I have a story when I have two stories and I see that in a lot of your pieces.

And I wanted to talk about Burn, which is a wonder- is, is a novella.

-It's a, it's a yeah, a novella, -A novella and Burn, well Burn in-evokes, Walden.

- Right.

- Henry David Thoreau.

- Right.

-There are a lot of references to that and sort of set up that way.

But there are other streams that sort of feed into that.

So I want- and it also won a Nebula Award.

-It did!

-Pretty darn good.

It did?

-Yeah!

-Yeah?

[applause] And the difference between a Nebula and a Hugo is?

The Nebula is voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America and the Hugo, which actually, 10 and 16th to 1 won a Hugo, is voted by the World Science Fiction Society but they're basically the two major awards in science fiction.

-Science fiction is challenging for me to read.

It's chall- in every book that you read I think it takes a few pages to get into the world that the writer has created.

You have to figure out the rules of the book and science fiction, there's a lot going on in those first few pages.

You have to get used to that world.

As a writer of science fiction- and the other thing as a for me, I write realistic fiction and I'm limited, you know?

Well, I remember once I was teaching here, I was teaching here, and a student had written a story.

It was a fight between roommates.

And in the last paragraph, she had a fairy godmother fly in and solve the problem.

And I said, no, that's not really working, because you have to have the fairy godmother from the -in the first- beginning, she can’t just, -but the fairy god- she was trying end the story but, but the limits of the real world help me.

Right.

They free my imagination.

- Sure, right.

So you know the poet who writes haiku, the limits of the haiku form, free, but to me, science fiction is so limitless.

-Right.

- So full of possibilities.

- Right.

Why aren't you insane?

[laughter] I mean, -No.

-What limits do you give yourself?

-Well, one of the things you have to do when you write science fiction, the story in the first couple pages has to teach the reader what kind of story he’s in.

-Yes that's right.

-And so in a for instance, if you if you're if your student had put a fairy godmother on the mantelpiece, if there was, you know, if she in the first page and then not mention her until you came back at the end, the reader would hold in her imagination the idea, oh my gosh, this is the UNH that has fairy godmothers okay, I know that fairy godmother is going to show up again.

And so when when science fiction writers, when fantasy writers, write worlds, we, we have this process we call it worldbuilding, which is, okay, you want to set the parameters of what can happen in this world, and you want the reader to understand as soon as possible what can happen, and what can’t happen in a science fiction story, no fairy godmothers, in a fairy story, no robots.

Unless you put a robot on the mantelpiece in the first book.

And so, so there's that whole process of worldbuilding, which is in some ways what people come to science fiction for or fantasy and they said they want to be taken away from this mundane world and see things that they've never seen before.

But on the other hand, it's the burden that we have because we're realistic write- people who write realistic fiction, literary fiction, and I write it as well.

We don't have to explain how the world works.

You guys know how the world works.

So every minute of story time we have to spend explaining how the world works is a minute we don't have to explain how characters work and setting work and so like that, you need to explain.

But the more explanation you have, the less story you have.

-And, I wondered if you'd read from Plus or Minus, and we can listen, I think, to how Jim builds that world.

-So plus or minus is in some ways a Y A, story -Young adult.

-Young adult, correct then so the the narrator is a teenager, probably 14.

She's grown up on the moon, and now she's working in sort of a tramp steamer version of, of a mining spaceship.

So they're coming back from the asteroid belt with a bunch of mining stuff, and she's sort of gotten herself involved in something she didn't really, she she made a mistake when she she volunteered to do this work and so this is basically the start of the story.

[James clears his throat] Everything changed once Beep found out that Mariska's mother was the famous Natalya Volochkova.

Mariska's life aboard, aboard the Shining Legend went immediately from bad to awful.

Even before he singled her out, she had decided that there was no way she'd be spending the rest of her teen years crewing on an asteroid bucket.

Once Beep started persecuting her, she began counting down the remaining days of the run as if she were a prisoner.

She tried explaining that she had no use for Natalya Volochkova who had never been much of a mother to her.

But Beep wouldn't hear it.

He didn't care that Mariska had only signed on to the Shining Legend to get back at her mother for ruining her life.

Somehow that hadn't worked out quite the way she planned.

For example, there was crud duty.

With a twisting push, Mariska sailed into the corran- command module, caught herself on a handrail, and launched toward the starboard wall.

The racks of instrument screens chirped and beeped and buzzed; command was one of the loudest mods on the ship.

She stuck her landing in front of the navigation rack and her slippers caught on the deck burrs, anchoring her in the ship's .0006 gravity.

Sure enough, she could see new smears of mold growing from the crack where the nav screen fit into the wall.

This was Beep’s fault, although he would never admit it, he kept the humidity jacked up in the command module, said that the dry air gave him nosebleeds.

Richard FiveFord claimed those nosebleeds came from all the drugs that Beep sniffed, but Mariska didn't want to believe that.

Also Beep liked to sip his coffee from a cup instead of sucking it out of a bag, even though he slept all the time.

Fun got- fungi loved sugary splatters.

She sniffed one particularly vile looking smear of mold.

It smelled faintly like the worms she used to grow back home on the moon.

She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her jersey and reached to the holster on her belt for her sponge.

As she scrubbed, the vinegar tang of disinfectant gel filled the mod.

Not for the first time, she told herself that this job stunk.

[laughter] -That's a wonderful story.

And I just, you know, she's sticking the landing in the burrs, and so much that's familiar and so much that's unfamiliar.

-One of the things about I didn't realize this when I was doing research, so this takes place on a on a ship, asteroid bucket, spaceship that's been out now for probably eight, ten months.

Is that, on the space station the, which we have is-an image of as a beautiful, pristine, you know, environment.

They have a real problem with mold and fungi.

It grows everywhere.

It's one of the things that the astronauts spend a lot of time doing.

And if they don't, it starts creeping down the walls.

And so I thought, okay, I right away I want to establish a lot of things.

This is the not the Earth standard TV spaceship.

But I also wanted to sort of make the point that this is space in space travel, although we still sort of think of it as a sort of glamorous thing, will never be glamorous.

It will be dangerous, dirty, hard work.

And, and they may actually ask people to do it who are more expendable than, than the general run of the population.

-Well, we're right back to where we started with, you know with, what Bob Eggleton said which is, which is, you know, you take the prosaic, put it into the strange, make it seem matter of fact.

- Yup.

-There she is, cleaning the mold with her sponge and thinking it was much better growing worms on the moon.

-Yeah, right, yeah.

[laughter] - And we get it all figured out.

- Yeah!

-We get it.

While we have you here, who better to ask about the future of reading and publishing?

-It is exactly right.

It's exciting and disturbing at the same time.

We're used to these beautiful objects, molecules.

- Molecules.

-And, and I'm here to tell you that molecules will be like LPs.

I mean, books will be like LPs someday.

So you can still buy an LP, yes?

And you should probably go to a store and buy them used, some people are still issuing them, but do you?

All right, I'm a friend of the Nottingham Library, and so I was in the Nottingham Library- [applause] Friends.

- They’re all here.

- They’re all here.

- All the friends are here.

-I was in the Nottingham Library the other day and I asked Rhoda, our librarian, how many books does the Nottingham Library have in its collection?

And of course, she looked it up on a computer.

And, and she, she, she went into the master list and she said, I believe it was 17,364 5 Maybe she bought some since I saw her the other day.

And I'm thinking, that's a lot of books.

So this thing is a, a tablet.

This book, this device can hold 60,000 books.

The Nottingham Library has 17,365.

So you might say oh you're going to have to buy all these books right?

That's a lot of books to buy, 60,000 books.

Well, there's a website, a wonderful, wonderful website called Project Gutenberg.

Do you know about this project?

Gutenberg is a website where they've been digitizing works that are in public domain.

So there's your Dickens, there's your Plato, there's your Nietzsche, there's your Twain.

65,000 books on Project Gutenberg.

So again and again and again, writers are being able to reach out directly to, to, to the, to their readers and either offer them stuff for free or offer them things, for, for a price that that makes me money, but wouldn't make random house or, or someone else, even our wonderful publishers here wouldn't they wouldn't be able to do the things that I can do.

So what's happened is that the means of production as Marx might say, have been taken away from the capitalist and put in the hands of the people.

Any one of you could publish a book on Kindle if you wanted.

Now who would read it?

That's a good question, but you could do it.

And so when that happens, everything changes.

So that's the good that's the upside.

But the downside.

I want to read you, a piece talking about a book, which I'm assuming is in this library, should be in most libraries by Nicholas Carr called The Shallows.

Now, he wrote a very controversial article oh, five years ago was in Esquire saying, Is Google making us stupid?

And, and, and his thesis is that the more time you spend on the internet, the more the internet changes who you are.

It changes your brain, literally.

This is a little known fact.

Socrates, Socrates the Greek was an illiterate, and Plato, when he writes about Socrates in one of his dialogues has Socrates say, complain about this new invention, the book, because the book is going to make people stupid because they won't be memorizing the myths and the stories themselves.

We'll have to look them up, the-off load that brain capacity.

And in fact, we know that in pre literate societies they are better storytellers, they remember more things to say, orally their retention is better than ours.

We have books.

But we are losing that book thing and changing it for the internet.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Were books a good thing or a bad thing?

You be the judge.

[laughter] -Well, thank you all for all your questions and Jame-Jim Kelly, James, Patrick Kelly, thank you very, very much.

[applause] ♪♪