I'm in love. Theodore Sturgeon, John Varley, maybe even R. A. Heinlein when his sexism wasn't showing -- these are the writers that James Patrick Kelly's stories bring to mind. In "10¹⁶ to 1" a young boy receives a visitor from the future. As in many such stories, the world needs saving. It's not really a new idea, but one of Kelly's strengths is character. The viewpoint character would be the stereotypical nerdy SF fan of the early '60s, except he is fleshed out with personal touches. We know his nicknames, what happened when he said "albeit" in class, where he lives, and what he thinks about his alcoholic mother and competent but distant dad. (Kelly's characters have depth, and they evoke empathy even when they are not entirely likable. For instance, Phillip Wing, the protagonist of "Glass Cloud" is a self-centered prick. He's not someone I would want to be, but he is a real person.) By the way, I also like the ending of "10¹⁶ to 1," but I can't tell you why. Read the book.

Most of the stories in Strange But Not a Stranger are mainline SF. Time travel is a traditional SF trope, of course, and so is the window into alien cultures. Most of us really write about H. sapiens when we write about aliens, or we allow words to fail us, lapsing into gibberish, or we simply declare that the aliens are, well, alien, and leave it at that. Kelly does none of these things. The race that is the focus of "Lovestory" is quite different from us both physically and mentally, and yet they are people. They are not like us, but like us they are human. Kelly makes it easy to feel their love, pain, and anxiety; they are as real as people we know well. I am reminded of Neal Barrett's Stress Pattern, a novel in which a man is set down on an alien world with the job of making sense of it. In that story, the natives at first seem more human than they really are, and then in the end it turns out that they are not so different after all. In a way, "Lovestory" is like that too. Kelly plays with other SF tropes in this collection as well. For instance, "Glass Cloud" is the story of an inventor who does something no one else has done before, but finds his creation not as satisfying as he thought it would be. The "cool invention" story was a popular trope in the '50s and '60s, but Kelly's story goes deeper than the old gadget-driven tales some of us remember from the mid-20th century; he cares more about humanity and writing realistic humans than John W. Campbell did.

There are a couple of fantasy stories in the book, though no horror, despite what Kelly says in his afterword. Kelly doesn't even write horror the way I write horror, and I am no horror writer. The difference is that SF has its tropes, its code words, its short-hand references to the great old stories, and horror has a whole different set. Kelly's dark stories are SF or fantasy stories in which horrible things happen; they're not horror with its dead teenagers, all-powerful anti-gods, undying killers who are evil just because they wanna be, and so on. Be that as it may, I loved "The Pyramid of Amirah." In this story, a state religion requires a gruesome sacrifice from a young woman. She goes willingly, and skeptic that I am, I was shouting "don't do it!" But here's what I mean about Kelly not being a horror writer. I think I know about what would have happened to Amirah if this had been a horror story, and it would have been abominable, but this is a fantasy story. I don't often weep for characters in literature, but the young protagonist of this story really got to me. I want to know more about her world! Moreover, this brief tale is not merely evocative, it shines a light on religion that reveals something I've never seen before.

Kelly handles religion less successfully in "Proof of the Existence of God," in which a psychologist witnesses a frightening miracle that he regards as incontrovertible proof of the existence of God. Of course it is nothing of the sort. A test subject dies and is brought back to life under inexplicable circumstances. Proof that God exists? Pfaugh! Almost any advanced technology indistinguishable from magic could reproduce the effects the researcher sees and records, yet he immediately seizes on the obvious interpretation as the only one possible. He's acting more like a faith healer than a scientist. More fundamentally, although the death and resurrection described in this story might readily convince the witnesses, like all miracles this event will produce three classes of people: the witnesses, the credulous, and the skeptical. It doesn't matter if God himself tattoos his own visage on the President's forehead, on live television, in pure palladium. Some people will not believe and they will be right not to. THEY didn't witness the miracle, and for all they know it didn't happen. This is a problem for a God trying to influence human behavior through miracles, but that's not the hard part from the human point of view. This clever and amusing story falls short of dealing with the human problem with any miracle: the aftermath. I am reminded of "Things which are Caesar's," a novella by Gordon Dickson. It's a story of a miracle, and of what happened to the witnesses, and what didn't happen to them. I think Kelly could handle the issue with insight, and I'm sorry he chose not to in this story. Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed every story in this book, maugre my niggling criticism. I could go on, but why? Read the book!

Strange But Not a Stranger contains fifteen stories. One is published here for the first time; the others all appeared in major SF periodicals or anthologies between 1983 and 2001. Unless you read the magazines assiduously you have missed some of these and trust me, you want to rectify that situation as soon as possible. But wait, there's more! An introduction by Connie Willis is better than a story by most authors, and you have that here. You also have an afterword by Kelly, in which he tells us a little bit about how and why he wrote the stories printed in the book. I find this sort of thing interesting, but you have my permission to skip it if you feel you really must. I even like the title, though I don't think it's particularly appropriate. I mean, come on! Any SF book stuffed full of well-developed character, original plots, thrilling action, and real humanity could wear such a title proudly. And it's just an invitation to those who tend to make bad jokes.

But even if you can live without the intro., scorn the afterword, and barely glance at the full-color Eggleton cover, you really need to read this book. And I won't make any puns about the title.

David Kopaska-Merkel edits and publishes Dreams and Nightmares, the world's oldest continuously published genre poetry magazine. Dreams and Nightmares, as well as David's 8th and 9th chapbooks, "The Ruined City" and "Shoggoths," are all available from projectpulp.com; DN and "The Ruined City" are also available from shocklines.com. Several of his poems have been published in Strange Horizons and can be found in our Archive. David lives in the deep south, surrounded by tornadoes, kudzu, football fans, and river cane. But that's another story.