Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://kellyrobson.com/
CITY: Toronto
STATE:
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married A. M. Dellamonica (a writer).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Chatelaine, wine and spirits columnist, 2008-12.
AWARDS:Prix Aurora Award, 2016, for Waters of Versailles; Nebula Award for Best Novelette, 2018, for A Human Stain.
WRITINGS
Short stories published in anthologies, including New Canadian Noir, In the Shadow of the Towers, and License Expired. Contributor to periodicals, including Asimov’s Science Fiction and Clarkesworld.
SIDELIGHTS
Kelly Robson is an author of speculative fiction. “Science fiction, fantasy, and horror are my blood,” she told a Locus interviewer. “I can’t live without them. For many years, writing in the genres I love felt beyond my reach, so I started with historical fiction and the best I could hope for was to bring a speculative sensibility to that genre. I believe science fiction, fantasy, and horror provide a writer with the brightest, truest, and widest spectrum of colors to illustrate the mysteries, contradictions, and untapped potential of human nature.”
Her novel Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is “pure science fiction,” Robson told Paul Semel at this eponymous website. It is set in 2267, when environmental disasters have forced humans to live underground in colonies where their basic needs are met but their lives are rigidly controlled. The protagonist, Minh, is an ecological scientist, and she and her colleagues have begun rehabilitating the earth’s surface to make it habitable once again. Funding for their work has dried up, however, as banks have become more interested in financing a new invention, time travel. She sees an opportunity to use time travel to the project’s advantage, though, when she and her fellow scientists are given the chance to go back to 2000 B.C. to the fertile valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia. She hopes she can learn enough about this ecosystem to replicate it in her own time, and she also seeks to gain knowledge about the Temporal Economic Research Node (TERN), the mysterious organization behind time travel. The expedition is marked by clashes among members of her team, which includes Minh’s longtime friend Hamid, ambitious young graduate student Kiki, and TERN representative Fabian. There are some obvious generational differences. Mihn, who is in her eighties, grew up in a time of widespread illness, had to have her legs amputated to due an infection, and was fitted with prosthetics, while Kiki, in her twenties, came of age when many ailments had been eradicated and has never known anything but good health. The team also comes into conflict with the people of ancient Mesopotamia and their king, Shulgi, who are extremely suspicious of the intruders. Additionally, there is much intrigue involving TERN. The book’s title refers to the scientists’ time-travel craft, named the Lucky Peach in honor of Minh’s project of establishing a peach orchard on the earth’s surface.
The world of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is “post-ecological-disaster but it’s not a dystopia,” Robson told Semel. She explained: “I’m passionate about providing an antidote to all the future dystopias we have been seeing over the past decades. I wanted to provide a fleshed-out idea of a viable future for all humans. Something optimistic.” In another interview, at a blog called My Life My Books My Escape, she added: “One of my themes was the idea that humans lose a lot of potential by focusing on short-term goals. So much of what’s worthwhile in our lives takes a long time, and is far more complex than we know.”
Several reviewers praised Robson’s plot, characters, and world-building. “She tells a sharp story about how looking to the past can help with the future and some of the pitfalls that come with a world without consequences,” related Andrew Liptak, writing online at Verge. The tale “is engaging and thought-provoking, as is the world that she sets it in,” he continued. Locus contributor Gary K. Wolfe noted: “The sheer richness of invention in Robson’s story, from having the time travelers first arrive in the past at a ‘Home Beach’ in the south Pacific to Shulgi’s ancient military strategies, is close to astonishing, and her conclusion is both surprising and dramatically appropriate.” On Tor Books’ website, Alex Brown reported: “Lucky Peach is full of great characters. Intriguingly, Robson hints at certain character tropes—the hard-ass older woman in charge, the excitable young apprentice, the sinister middle manager, the laissez-faire male genius—but only to show how incomplete those tropes are. Her characters are greater than the sum of their parts.” They are “fascinatingly complex … with rich inner lives, deep personal histories, and intersectionally diverse backgrounds,” Brown went on.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked that “dazzling technology and an endearingly cranky main character make this an engaging read, but the plot gets off to a slow start,” focusing on the funding of and preparation for the trip back in time. Wolfe, however, thought the time Robson spent on the grant-making process was “an example of her meticulous attention to detail.” Another Locus reviewer, Liz Bourke, commented that the novel “comes alive in the details,” including “Minh’s passion for restoration and for ecosystems and her distress at coming face-to-face with violent death; in her bafflement at and affection for Kiki, and her growing realisation … that her generation has failed Kiki’s in letting the banks dominate the decisions they make.” Brown predicted that Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach would appeal to a broad audience, saying; “There’s enough wicked cool tech to satisfy hard SF geeks, character development to please SF dilettantes, and fantastic storytelling to enamor everyone else.” Wolfe added that the novel shows Robson to be “one of the most accomplished and versatile new writers” in science fiction. Liptak concluded: “Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is a splendid read, one that had me wanting far more by the time I turned the last page.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2018, Rachel Colias, review of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, p. 31.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach.
Locus, August, 2016, “Spotlight on: Kelly Robson, Writer”; March, 2018, Liz Bourke, review of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach; Gary K. Wolfe, review of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach.
ONLINE
Kelly Robson Home Page, http://kellyrobson.com (June 24, 2018).
My Life My Books My Escape, https://mylifemybooksmyescape.wordpress.com/ (March 14, 2018), interview with Kelly Robson.
Lela E. Buis website, https://lelaebuis.wordpress.com (April 6, 2018), review of A Human Stain.
Paul Semel website, http://paulsemel.com/ (April 18, 2018), interview with Kelly Robson.
Rocket Stack Rank, http://www.rocketstackrank.com/ (January 14, 2017), review of A Human Stain
Tor Books website, https://www.tor.com/ (March 14, 2018), Alex Brown, review of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach.
Verge, https://www.theverge.com/ (March 24, 2018), Andrew Liptak, review of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach.
About
I am an award-winning short fiction writer whose work regularly appears in major speculative fiction markets. Many of of my stories have been selected for year’s best anthologies, and have been translated internationally. I’m a regular contributor to Clarkesworld’s Another Word column. In 2018, my time travel adventure Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach debuted to high critical praise.
In 2018, my story “A Human Stain” won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, and my novelette “We Who Live in the Heart” is currently a finalist for the 2018 Theodore Sturgeon Award. In 2017, I was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. In 2016, my novella “Waters of Versailles” won the Prix Aurora Award and was also a finalist for the Nebula Award and World Fantasy Awards. My short story “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” was a finalist for the 2015 Theodore Sturgeon Award, and my short story “Two-Year Man” was a finalist for the 2015 Sunburst Award.
I grew up in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. When I was a teenager I competed in barrel racing and was crowned princess of the Hinton Big Horn Rodeo. From 2008 to 2012, I had the good fortune to write the wine and spirits column for Chatelaine, Canada’s largest women’s magazine. After 22 years in Vancouver, my wife (fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica) and I now make our home in downtown Toronto.
Like you, I'm a passionate reader. I spent most of my teenage years either hanging out at the drugstore waiting for new issues of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, or when I was in the city, lurking in the SF and Fantasy section of the bookstore. This was pre-Internet and since there were no bookstores in my town and the library was pretty bare, good books -- the kind that made my heart sing -- were precious treasures. To this day, nothing is more important to me than reading, nothing is more delicious than a great novel, and few people are as important as my favorite writers.
My writing life has been pretty diverse. I've edited science books, and from 2008 to 2012 I had the great good luck to write a monthly wine column for Chatelaine, the largest women's magazine in Canada. I've published short fiction at Tor.com, Asimov's Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and a number of anthologies. Several of my stories have been chosen for "year's best" anthologies, and in the past two years I've been a finalist for several high-profile awards.
My favorite writers are Connie Willis, Walter Jon Williams, Michael Bishop, Jack Womack, Hilary Mantel, Alan Bennett, Patrick O'Brian, A.M. Dellamonica, Saladin Ahmed, Gemma Files, Maureen McHugh, Cat Rambo, Peter Watts, and Caitlin Sweet. I have a huge soft spot for classic literature, including Jane Austen, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy, Ford Maddox Ford, John Galsworthy, George Eliot, and Mrs. Gaskell. I also love reading non-fiction -- history, historical geography, and science.
Quoted in Sidelights: “pure science fiction,”
“post-ecological-disaster but it’s not a dystopia,” Robson told Semel. She explained: “I’m passionate about providing an antidote to all the future dystopias we have been seeing over the past decades. I wanted to provide a fleshed-out idea of a viable future for all humans. Something optimistic.”
Exclusive Interview: Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach Author Kelly Robson
With a title like Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach, and a cover that depicts a woman with cybernetic octopus-like tentacles for legs, you’d expect Kelly Robson’s time travelling sci-fi novella — which is now out in paperback and on Kindle — to be, well, weird. But in the following email interview, she explains that the book is also, well, political.
Kelly Robson Gods Monsters And The Lucky Peach
Let’s start with the obvious questions: What is Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach about?
In 2267, to avoid the effects of ecological turmoil, most humans live underground in highly managed, dense urban habitats. My main character, Minh, is a member of the generation that first began re-colonizing the Earth’s surface and rehabilitating ecosystems. She’s an ecological scientist, and she’s angry because the work she’s dedicated her life to has been stalled by the invention of time travel; the banks simply aren’t interested in funding long-term projects any more.
When Minh gets the chance to time-travel to 2000 BCE to do a past state assessment on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance not only to do exciting work, but to have the chance to expose the shadowy think tank that controls time travel technology.
Where did you get the impetus for Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach, and how different is the finished novella from that original idea?
The story seed came from a Mesopotamia exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, which I visited multiple times. One of the items was a statue of a king carrying weapons which were specifically meant for killing monsters. Imagine a king with monster-killing weapons. His whole job is to kill monsters to keep the kingdom safe, but he’s never seen a monster. What would he think about that? How would that affect him?
In the end, the story became more about the time-traveling humans who the king sees as monsters, rather than the king himself. Though Shulgi, who was an actual Akkadian king, is an important character.
Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach is clearly a science fiction story, but is there a subgenre of sci-fi, or combination of them, that describes the book better?
I think of it as pure science fiction. Some have called it hard science fiction because of the focus on ecological science. Since time travel is impossible I’m not sure it deserves that designation, but I’m happy to embrace it.
As you mentioned, the plot of Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach is set-up by an ecological disaster. First, does the novella have a socio-political message, or is it just used as a set-up?
All fiction is political, but not all fiction is didactic. I try not to be didactic. I’m passionate about providing an antidote to all the future dystopias we have been seeing over the past decades. I wanted to provide a fleshed-out idea of a viable future for all humans. Something optimistic.
In my head, I call my setting “Professional Services World.” It’s post-ecological-disaster but it’s not a dystopia. It’s a post-scarcity world. Nobody starves, and everyone has their basic needs met, but it’s not a utopia either. Humanity has reorganized itself into underground city states with the world economy based on the idea that the only thing of value is human time. This allows cities to trade expertise with each other.
Another founding concept of this world is the idea that people all have different needs when it comes to quality of life. The cities that can offer the most people the highest quality of life will be the most economically powerful. But not everyone likes the same things, so the world is very diverse. People can move freely from one city to another, following their idea of bliss.
You kind of touched in this already, but did you set out to tell a story with a socio-political message, or did it just naturally come up in the course of writing the story?
If we agree that all fiction is political, there’s no getting around a book having a socio-political point of view. Mine are pretty simple.
I believe that organizations that treat any humans as worthless are evil. I believe that the handover of power from one generation to the next is never going to be smooth or easy. I believe that we should treat the earth as a closed system and work hard to keep from destroying the natural ecosystem processes that support our civilizations. And I believe that true, lasting change takes a long time, but unfortunately humans aren’t really very good at long term thinking.
Time travel is also a big part of Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach. But when it came to deciding how time travel would work, did you look more towards versions in fiction or to theoretic scientific theories?
Luckily, time travel is impossible, so we’re not constrained by science. Everyone who writes time travel stories creates their own rules to suit the kinds of stories they’re interested in telling.
I’m not interested in paradoxes, so I’ve designed my time travel to exclude that possibility. Basically, mine is time travel without consequences. Very powerful, but not of much practical use — and with great dramatic possibilities.
So what fictional descriptions of time travel did you based Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach on and why that?
I’m heavily influenced by Connie Willis’ time travel stories [which include her novels Lincoln’s Dreams, Doomsday Book, and To Say Nothing Of The Dog], which I have always loved. Like Connie’s, my time travelers are historians. But mine aren’t as pure of heart as hers, and like real historians, they’re very concerned with getting funding for their research.
Now, calling the novella Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach makes me think there might be some humor in this story. But is it more like the situational humor of, say, a John Scalzi novel [Old Man’s War, Head On], or a more obvious approach like Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy?
It’s situational humor. To me, one of the funniest thing in the book is the image of Minh riding a bike. She has six octopus prostheses for legs, and her research assistant Kiki is pretty amused by it. And there’s quipping humor, too. Hamid, who is the gay veterinarian who time travels with them, cracks a lot of jokes to lift the mood when Minh is getting too intense.
Of course, the title also makes me think of James And The Giant Peach. So, yeah, I’m gonna go there: In what ways was Roald Dahl’s classic an inspiration on Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach?
I didn’t intentionally reference James And The Giant Peach, but it’s appropriate because Roald Dahl’s book is about a self-contained habitat that sustains and nurtures its occupants, and that’s how I see the cities in my world.
Speaking of Dahl, Scalzi, and so on, are there any writers or stories that had an influence on Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach, but not on your previous novella, Waters Of Versailles, or any of your short stories?
I’d say all my work is influenced by the writers I love: Connie Willis, Michael Bishop, Walter Jon Williams, and Alan Bennett.
How about such non-literary influences; was Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach influenced by any movies, TV shows, or video games?
There’s a video game aspect to my mechanics of time travel, where you can repeatedly time travel to the same point in time and replay your actions until you get it right. You can also create a decision tree to different outcomes, like Groundhog Day. This is like real life played as a video game.
As you know, a lot of science fiction stories are not stand-alone tales, but are parts of larger sagas. Is Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach a self-contained narrative or the first book in a series, and why is it whatever you made it?
I wrote it to be self-contained, but there will be a sequel. I was surprised when readers called for a sequel, because I didn’t see the ending as a cliffhanger at all. My guess is that as a novella — 40,000 words — the story has more of a short-story ending than a book ending. It’s a satisfying emotional conclusion but the plot obviously can go on. Which is kind of interesting; maybe this is the difference between a novel and a novella?
Makes more sense than page length, given how novels used to be as short as modern novellas. Anyway, what can you tell us about the sequel?
I’m writing it now, and it’ll be from the point of view of Kiki’s, Minh’s 23-year-old research assistant. She’s a very likable character and it’s fun to be in her head.
Obviously, if people are interested in this series, they should buy Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach now, and at least three or four more times just to be super cool. But is there any reason they shouldn’t also read it now, as opposed to waiting for the sequel?
It’s a good story, so I’d recommend reading it now, of course. [grins]
Of course. Earlier I asked about the movies, TV shows, and video games that may have influenced Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach. But has there been any interesting in making it into a movie, show, or game?
I’ve had a few bites from Hollywood but I’m not holding my breath. Those things rarely work out.
And which of those do you think would work best?
Definitely a video game. I think it would make an amazing Ubisoft game [the publisher of such games as Far Cry 5, Assassin’s Creed Origins, and Ghost Recon Wildlands].
Kelly Robson Gods Monsters And The Lucky Peach
Finally, if someone enjoys Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peach, what would you suggest they read next and why?
I’d recommend my story at Clarkesworld, “We Who Live in the Heart,” which is a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. It’s loosely related to Gods, Monsters, And The Lucky Peachand draws on the same economic worldbuilding concepts.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Science fiction, fantasy, and horror are my blood,” she told a Locus interviewer. “I can’t live without them. For many years, writing in the genres I love felt beyond my reach, so I started with historical fiction and the best I could hope for was to bring a speculative sensibility to that genre. I believe science fiction, fantasy, and horror provide a writer with the brightest, truest, and widest spectrum of colors to illustrate the mysteries, contradictions, and untapped potential of human nature.”
Spotlight on: Kelly Robson, Writer
August 28, 2016 Spotlight
Locus Magazine, Science Fiction Fantasy
Kelly Robson grew up in Hinton, Alberta, Canada and graduated with a degree in English from the University of Alberta. From 2008 to 2012, she wrote the wine and spirits column for Chatelaine, Canada’s largest women’s magazine. She and her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica, relocated from Vancouver to Toronto in 2013.
In 2015, Kelly’s first stories appeared in Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and Asimov’s, and in the anthologies New Canadian Noir, In the Shadow of the Towers, and License Expired. This year, her stories appear in five ‘‘Year’s Best’’ anthologies and she is a finalist for five awards: Nebula, Sturgeon, World Fantasy, Aurora, and Sunburst.
Tell us about your multiple-award-nominated story ‘‘Waters of Versailles’’ – what’s it about, and why did you write it?‘‘Waters of Versailles’’ was a huge breakthrough in craft. In 2013 my ego was utterly crushed when I was laid off from a job I loved. We took the opportunity to move from Vancouver to Toronto, and over the next six months I forced myself to work in a new way: slowly and deliberately, while paying strict attention to crafting scenes. When ‘‘Waters of Versailles’’ was done, I had finally learned to produce work I’m proud of.
The first story seed was the image of the Champagne fountain – a massive, wasteful Baroque extravagance, and I ended up exploring the idea that the act of nurturing a child changes you. In ‘‘Waters of Versailles’’, womanizer and social climber Sylvain is forced to nurture the magical creature his fortune depends on, while supplying the French nobility with the latest status symbol: the flush toilet.
I write about parenthood a lot, which is odd because we don’t have kids and never wanted them. Because the parental urge is completely alien to me, I can explore the subject without illusion or romanticism.
What one story of yours are you most fond of, that you’d like to point our readers toward?
My first published story ‘‘The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill’’ appeared in Clarkesworld, and it’s a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. The story is heavily influenced by one of my favorite James Tiptree, Jr. stories ‘‘The Only Neat Thing to Do’’, which is, like all of Tiptree, extremely dark.
Tiptree’s story creates a massive emotional impact, and I wanted to bring that kind of power to bear on the systemic failure of Canadian political and justice system to protect the most vulnerable members of our society – indigenous women.
What’s the particular appeal of SF/fantasy for you? Why write that instead of, say, mysteries or literary fiction?
Science fiction, fantasy, and horror are my blood. I can’t live without them. For many years, writing in the genres I love felt beyond my reach, so I started with historical fiction and the best I could hope for was to bring a speculative sensibility to that genre.
I believe science fiction, fantasy, and horror provide a writer with the brightest, truest, and widest spectrum of colors to illustrate the mysteries, contradictions, and untapped potential of human nature.
We hear you’re working on a longer piece – a time travel novella. Can you give us any details?
Drafting this story has been like birthing a watermelon. I have a lot of work to do on it, but after nearly a whole year of pushing, it’s finally drafted.
‘‘The Last Landing of the Lucky Peach’’ is set several hundred years in the future. The world has just begun to recover from a mass extinction event, but the invention of time travel by secretive think tank TERN has blocked the flow of funding for long-term ecological restoration projects. Minh, an elderly fluvial geomorphologist, is enraged at having her life’s work disrupted by the illusion of quick-fix solutions to the world’s problems, so when she’s given the opportunity to travel to 2000 BC Mesopotamia for a past-state ecological assessment of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance to uncover TERN’s secrets.
You’ve made a big splash in a short time with your stories. Any plans to write a novel?
Not in the foreseeable future. I’m having so much fun writing short fiction, and it’s incredibly rewarding. I have several concepts bubbling away, including two more Versailles novellas which, I hope, will form a satisfying story cycle.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you or the work you do?
I’m ridiculously pleased with my story in the ChiZine anthology Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond, edited by Madeline Ashby and David Nickle. Unfortunately, the anthology is only available in Canada, where Ian Fleming’s work is now in the public domain.
Writing in the Fleming universe was nothing I’d ever considered before, but it was an absolute hoot. All the contributors – including Alyx, Charles Stross, Jeffrey Ford, Karl Schroeder, and James Alan Gardner – have said they had huge fun with their stories. Mine, ‘‘The Gladiator Lie’’, is an alternate ending to From Russia with Love, where Bond is captured by Tatiana Romanova and brought to a Siberian collective fur farm. It’s unhinged and perverse. Writing it was a demented pleasure.
Ellen Datlow has recently acquired my Gothic Horror novelette ‘‘A Human Stain’’ which is forthcoming next January at Tor.com.
This Spotlight feature appeared in the August 2016 issue of Locus Magazine.
Quoted in Sidelights" “One of my themes was the idea that humans lose a lot of potential by focusing on short-term goals. So much of what’s worthwhile in our lives takes a long time, and is far more complex than we know.”
AUTHOR INTERVIEW: KELLY ROBSON
FDEC0989-50AF-4A86-9E30-6D3949F6A70E
Today I am interviewing Kelly Robson, author of the new Science Fiction novella, Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach.
◊ ◊ ◊
DJ: Hi Kelly! Thanks for agreeing to do this interview!
For readers who aren’t familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself?
Kelly Robson: I grew up in Alberta, and lived in Vancouver for 22 years before moving to Toronto in 2013. Though I’ve been a writer all my life, I only started publishing fiction in 2015. And I owe it all to Toronto! It’s such a great city, with a terrific creative community.
DJ: What is Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach about?
C684CFF4-B43C-4A62-95FF-EF5051E1DD94
Kelly: In 2267, to avoid the effects of ecological turmoil, most humans live underground in highly managed, dense urban habitats humanity. My main character Minh is a member of the generation first began re-colonizing the Earth’s surface and rehabilitating ecosystems. She’s an ecological scientist, and she’s angry because the work she’s dedicated her life to has been stalled by the invention of time travel. The banks simply aren’t interested in funding long-term projects any more. So when she gets the chance to time-travel to 2000 BCE to do a past state assessment on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance not only to do exciting work, but to have the chance to expose the shadowy think tank that controls time travel technology.
DJ: What were some of your influences for Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach?
Kelly: Connie Willis’ time travel stories and books, definitely — “Fire Watch,” Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Blackout, and All Clear. Connie is a huge influence on my writing. Like Connie, I’m not interested in paradoxes, so I’ve designed my time travel to exclude that possibility. Basically, mine is time travel without consequences. Very powerful, but not of much practical use. I figure there’s enough drama to be had simply by time travel being possible! But unlike Connie Willis, I’m very interested in the economic consequences of time travel.
DJ: Could you briefly tell us a little about your main characters? Do they have any cool quirks or habits, or any reason why readers with sympathize with them?
Kelly: Minh is an 83 year-old fluvial geomorphologist (a scientist who studies rivers). When she was a small child, she fell victim to a roundworm epidemic and her legs had to be amputated. She uses six octopus-type prostheses, and she loves them — “Everyone should have six legs,” she says.
Hamid is Minh’s best friend, an equally old gay veterinarian who is very small in stature — he’s a little person — but big in personality. He’s passionate about biodiversity, and likes animals better than people — especially horses. People from Minh and Hamid’s generation are called Plague Babies.
The third character is Kiki, a 23 year-old research assistant from the generation known as the Fat Babies. They’ve grown up with artificial immune systems and high tech medical innovations, and have never known what it is to be sick. Kiki is enthusiastic and energetic, and all she wants is the opportunity to do important work.
DJ: What is the world and setting of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach like?
Kelly: In my head, I call my setting “Professional Services World.” It’s post-ecological-disaster but it’s not a dystopia. It’s a post-scarcity world. Nobody starves, and everyone has their basic needs met, but it’s not a utopia either. Humanity has reorganized itself into underground city states with the world economy based on the idea that the only thing of value is human time. This allows cities to trade expertise with each other. Another founding concept of this world is the idea that people all have different needs when it comes to quality of life. The cities that can offer the most people the highest quality of life will be the most economically powerful. But not everyone likes the same things, so the world is very diverse. People can move freely from one city to another, following their idea of bliss.
DJ: This may have skipped some reader’s attention, but Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is actually a novella. What is it about the novella format that you like? Do you feel there is a particular advantage to telling your story that way over the novel?
Kelly: A novella is an excellent length for Science Fiction — long enough for complex worldbuilding, but short enough to tell a punchy, compact, focused story. I love reading novellas!
DJ: What was your favorite part about writing Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach?
Kelly: I love my characters! Minh, Hamid, and Kiki became so precious to me. They’re some of my favorite people and I wish I could meet them in real life.
DJ: What do you think readers will be talking about most once they finish it?
Kelly: I hope they’ll talk about the surprises in the story, and about the complex worldbuilding. I hope they’d love my characters like I do.
DJ: Did you have a particular goal when you began writing Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach? Was there a particular message or meaning you are hoping to get across when readers finish it? Or is there perhaps a certain theme to the story?
Kelly: One of my themes was the idea that humans lose a lot of potential by focusing on short term-goals. So much of what’s worthwhile in our lives takes a long time, and is far more complex than we know. Usually, if we think a problem is simple, that just means we don’t understand it very well.
DJ: When I read, I love to collect quotes – whether it be because they’re funny, foodie, or have a personal meaning to me. Do you have any favorite quotes from Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach that you can share with us?
Kelly: “The past is another country; we want to colonize it.”
DJ: Now that Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is released, what is next for you?
Kelly: I have two stories coming out this year: “What Gentle Women Dare” in Uncanny Magazine, and “Intervention” in Infinity’s End, an anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan.
DJ: Where can readers find out more about you?
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Kelly-Robson/e/B00Y56SGWY/
Blog: https://kellyrobson.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kelly.robson.7545
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13461530.Kelly_Robson
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kellyoyo
Essays on writing at Clarkesworld: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/another_word_01_18/
DJ: Before we go, what is that one thing you’d like readers to know about Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach that we haven’t talked about yet?
Kelly: I believe in a Bright Green future, where the problems humanity has created can be mitigated or at least managed by green technology. I’m optimistic about the future and never give in to doom-and-gloom. I believe negative thinking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Humanity will always have problems — some very dramatic ones — but I believe we go on to the stars.
DJ: Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to answer my questions!
6/4/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1528171008178 1/2
Print Marked Items
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach
Rachel Colias
Booklist.
114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p31+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach. By Kelly Robson. Mar. 2018.176p. Tor, paper, $14.99
(9781250163851); e-book, $3.99 (9781250163844).
They say that "those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it," but what if the fate of future
generations depends on learning history for the very sake of repeating it? When most think about time
travel, they consider the future; Robson instead imagines a time riddled with bioeconomic crises, doomed if
the characters in her novel cannot replicate a biologically lush and forgotten past. Readers are transported
back in time to 2000 BC with a team of scientists scrambling to collect information from the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers in the hopes that they'll be able to replicate the bio-diverse aquatic ecosystems in their
own desolate future. The stakes are so high that some members of the team are willing to sacrifice anything
for the sake of their mission, even if that means making the past pay for their mistakes. But as we all know,
the past has a way of coming back to haunt you. Robson's science-fiction adventure, her first full-length
novel, will leave you wondering: What's scarier--living in the past or planning for the future?--Rachel
Colias
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Colias, Rachel. "Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 31+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250882/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=67951315.
Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250882
6/4/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1528171008178 2/2
Robson, Kelly: GODS, MONSTERS,
AND THE LUCKY PEACH
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Robson, Kelly GODS, MONSTERS, AND THE LUCKY PEACH Tor (Adult Fiction) $3.99 3, 13 ISBN:
978-1-250-16384-4
A high-concept story of time-traveling scientists trying to fix the future by returning to the past.
Minh's generation has been working for years to try to repair the ecological damage done to the Earth, but
the invention of time travel has drained funding away from these complicated remediation projects. Now
Minh and her colleagues have the chance to tackle a time-travel project of their own--going back to study
Mesopotamia in a pristine state as preparation for restoring its ecosystem. Minh wants this job, but getting it
won't be easy. Not only will she need to win over the funders; she'll have to find a way to work with her
"ridiculously frenetic" young colleague Kiki, who wants this job for her own reasons. Robson (A Human
Stain, 2017, etc.) has created a richly detailed world in which the environmental disaster that forced
humanity to retreat below the surface of the Earth is so far in the past it's not even worth mentioning.
Dazzling technology and an endearingly cranky main character make this an engaging read, but the plot
gets off to a slow start, bogged down in the process of Minh and her colleagues' preparing a proposal and
interviewing for the time-travel consulting job. The adventure that ensues when they do make it to ancient
Mesopotamia is exciting, but the book suffers from packing all the suspense into its second half.
The strong worldbuilding will appeal to sci-fi fans, but a slow-burn plot that spends too much time on the
logistics of time travel weakens an otherwise appealing story.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Robson, Kelly: GODS, MONSTERS, AND THE LUCKY PEACH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461676/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=508b5b20. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461676
Quoted in Sidelights: “She tells a sharp story about how looking to the past can help with the future and some of the pitfalls that come with a world without consequences,” related Andrew Liptak, writing online at Verge. The tale “is engaging and thought-provoking, as is the world that she sets it in,”
“Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is a splendid read, one that had me wanting far more by the time I turned the last page.”
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is a time-travel adventure full to the brim with ideas
2
A sharp, optimistic time travel adventure
By Andrew Liptak@AndrewLiptak Mar 24, 2018, 9:00am EDT
SHARE
Photo by Andrew Liptak / The Verge
Time travel is a classic trope in science fiction, posing questions about fixing the past, paradoxes, or simply spectating in a time long before your own. In her new book, Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, author Kelly Robson spins out a fantastic story that neatly sidesteps the inherent problems that come along with messing with your past. Instead, she tells a sharp story about how looking to the past can help with the future and some of the pitfalls that come with a world without consequences.
By the 2260s, Earth is in tough shape, and humanity has burrowed under its surface to survive. Massive cities kept the species alive, and in the six decades before the story begins, new generations of humans have emerged, set on fixing what was broken. Minh is one such worker: she’s a researcher who’s spent her life studying and restoring river ecosystems. There’s been a problem, however: time travel has recently been invented, and that has begun to pull money and attention away from the work that will make the surface of the planet habitable again.
Some spoilers for Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach ahead.
Image: Tor.com
When the opportunity arises for her to lead one of the first research teams into the past to aid reclamation efforts, Minh assembles a small group of colleagues: Kiki, a fabrication specialist; Hamid, a large specialized animal; and Fabian, a strategic historian from the Temporal Economic Research Node (TERN), the organization that invented time travel, who acts as their guide in the year 2024 BCE. Once there, however, she finds that while the region’s inhabitants are living millennia in the past, they’re able to comprehend the threat that these new visitors pose, and the travelers’ interactions with the Mesopotamians presents its own set of ethical challenges.
Robson recently explained that she wasn’t really interested in playing with time travel paradoxes, and unlike Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World — which is all about paradoxes — the time travel in Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is consequence-free: when travelers go back, they essentially create an alternate timeline, which collapses once they leave. There’s no impact on their future, which makes their work a bit easier: they don’t have to worry about stepping on that stray bug, for fear of throwing the timeline out of whack.
What I appreciated the most was how Robson structured the book: each chapter opens with a sequence that clearly comes later, and she makes it obvious that while the people that Minh and her team encounter live thousands of years in the past, they’re not idiots. They recognize the danger that these strange new people and accompanying objects pose, and their arrival plays into their own power struggle in 2024 BCE.
But this consequence-free travel is dangerous. Fabian explains that TERN takes tourists back all the time, and that they sometimes run into problems. As a result, he has no qualms about being aggressive in their defense, at one point killing a group of soldiers who go out to investigate the strange objects that appeared in their fields. Kiki argues that they’re still people, and how they treat them reflects them. Minh just wants to focus on gathering her data, but the conflict threatens to tear the team apart as danger looms.
Robson’s story is engaging and thought-provoking, as is the world that she sets it in. While reading it, I was considerably reminded of the world featured in Annalee Newitz’s fantastic debut novel Autonomous. Like in that novel, the world has faced considerable societal and climate-related challenges, but people haven’t simply gone underground and huddled for shelter, waiting for everything to get better. Robson sets up a world where life goes on: and while this is a short, quick read, this is a novella that’s positively stuffed with things to look at. There’s complicated generational structures — Minh is a “plague child,” part of a generation that faced incredible scarcity and illness, while her research partner, Kiki, is part of a generation known as the “Fat Babies.” She hasn’t experienced the same hardship as Minh, and Robson deftly layers these tensions in between the characters, making their outlook on the world as unique as their bodies — Minh, with prosthetic legs, while Kiki enjoys a massive, healthy body.
Like Autonomous, Robson uses her world to take a close look at the larger societal structures that inform the world. Banks have a significant degree of control over cities, organizations, and individuals, buying and selling individual debt, and essentially financing the big projects that Minh and others are working on. But while those institutions make it possible for people to get an education or run big projects, Robson points out, they only do so when it’s in their interest. As a result, time travel isn’t used for research purposes: it’s used for tourism. This echoes some arguments made by Kim Stanley Robinson in last year’s New York 2140, which looks at the ties between capitalism and climate change. Robson doesn’t quite go as far here, but the point is apparent: capitalism-style economies aren’t great at tackling the bigger issues that face society.
Much of this thinking runs in the background as Minh and her team go deep into the past, and it’s a testament to Robson’s writing style to cram all of this in unobtrusively alongside a fun, optimistic science fiction adventure. Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is a splendid read, one that had me wanting far more by the time I turned the last page.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Lucky Peach is full of great characters. Intriguingly, Robson hints at certain character tropes—the hard-ass older woman in charge, the excitable young apprentice, the sinister middle manager, the laissez-faire male genius—but only to show how incomplete those tropes are. Her characters are greater than the sum of their parts.” They are “fascinatingly complex … with rich inner lives, deep personal histories, and intersectionally diverse backgrounds,”
“There’s enough wicked cool tech to satisfy hard SF geeks, character development to please SF dilettantes, and fantastic storytelling to enamor everyone else.”
The Future Is Past: Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson
Alex Brown
Wed Mar 14, 2018 11:30am 3 comments Favorite This
Kelly Robson’s killer novella Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach opens 250 years into our future. Many decades prior, catastrophic climate and environmental change forced humans into massive underground metropolises, or “hells.” Eventually, the plague babies—survivors of epidemics that burned through the hells in years past—braved the topside in an attempt to reclaim the land. One of those topsiders is Minh, a river rehabilitator in the struggling Calgary habilitation center. With the solid if not abundant financial backing of the banks, she and other plague babies were doing good work repairing damage to the earth to make it livable once more. And then the organization known as TERN invented time travel and everything fell apart. What little cash there was now goes to shiny new short term projects full of flash and bang rather than not so exciting long-term ecological necessities. Minh, who saw her livelihood and all her work’s meaning disregarded in the wake of TERN, is left bitter and bored.
When Minh gets the chance to use TERN to finally do some good, she pulls together a rag-tag crew and sets off to run river analysis in ancient Mesopotamia. At first, Minh, Kiki (an overeager grad student), Hamid (an old friend and wannabe cowboy), and Fabian (their TERN contact) have everything under control, but their well-planned expedition quickly falls apart. Tense interpersonal relations, historical conflicts, and shady tech wreak havoc on their project right from the beginning. The past, present, and future collide in unexpected yet devastating ways.
BUY IT NOW
If the mark of a good book is that regardless of length, it leaves you panting for more, then Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is one of the greats. I literally screeched when it ended. So loudly I woke my pet rat up out of his nap and sent him skittering under the couch. No joke. This novella is far bigger on the inside than its 230 pages belie. Robson lured me in with the promise of time travel and post-apocalyptic survival, lulled me with R&D proposals financial finagling, and hit me hard with an epic adventure.
Lucky Peach has as much world building as most full-length novels. The novella tells two stories simultaneously, one set in ancient Mesopotamia and the other in Minh’s present. Robson deftly keeps them apart, the former gradually revealing itself to the latter, making it all the more thrilling when they finally fold in on each other.
Her vision of the future is full of cool, connective technology, but is rooted in reality. Despite being staggeringly advanced, it’s all so banal. People can use biometrics tech that allows them to control their physiology, but only if you pay the license fee. Scientists have glacier seeds, can create rivers from nothing, and have brought animals back from extinction, but still have to draft project proposals and secure funding. They invented time travel, but the tech is locked behind NDAs and proprietary walls and used almost exclusively for tourism. And Robson isn’t that far off from the truth. Look at us today: we have smartphones that can do things that were literally impossible when I was a kid, and what do we do with them? Mostly just watch dumb videos and share fake news.
For me, world building, no matter how intricate, isn’t enough to earn my adoration. Without compelling characters to hook me in, my interest will only go so far. Given the tenor of this review, it should be no surprise to learn that Lucky Peach is full of great characters. Intriguingly, Robson hints at certain character tropes—the hard-ass older woman in charge, the excitable young apprentice, the sinister middle manager, the laissez-faire male genius—but only to show how incomplete those tropes are. Her characters are greater than the sum of their parts.
Minh and Kiki were my particular favorites. The two women are at once complements and contrasts. Where Minh is closed off, stubborn, and frustrated, Kiki is effervescent, determined, and open-minded. Minh sees the TERN job as a chance to secure capital for future Calgary projects, but for Kiki it’s the adventure of a lifetime and the chance to prove herself. Kiki is desperate for Minh’s approval and sees in her flickers of a mentor, parent, older sister, and friend. Minh, meanwhile, explores her tempestuous relationship with Kiki through her own reluctance to engage and connect. They’re fascinatingly complex characters with rich inner lives, deep personal histories, and intersectionally diverse backgrounds.
I’ve said a million times that I don’t like science fiction. But every time Tor.com sends me another novella unlike any sci-fi I’ve ever read before, I end up loving the hell out of it. Maybe it’s not that I don’t enjoy the genre itself but that I’m reacting negatively to trope-y, technobabbly, non-diverse sci-fi? I don’t know, but I’m digging the experience of getting to know a genre I typically don’t dabble in. If you dig Robson’s world as much as I did, you be pleased to know there are two more entries to explore: “We Who Live in the Heart” is free through Clarkesworld and her novelette “Intervention” in the upcoming anthology Infinity’s End.
Sci-fi fans and non-sci-fi fans alike should pick up a copy of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach. There’s enough wicked cool tech to satisfy hard SF geeks, character development to please SF dilettantes, and fantastic storytelling to enamor everyone else.
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is available from Tor.com Publishing.
Quoted in Sidelights: “The sheer richness of invention in Robson’s story, from having the time travelers first arrive in the past at a ‘Home Beach’ in the south Pacific to Shulgi’s ancient military strategies, is close to astonishing, and her conclusion is both surprising and dramatically appropriate.”
“an example of her meticulous attention to detail.”
“one of the most accomplished and versatile new writers”
Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson
May 4, 2018 Gary K. Wolfe
Locus Magazine, Science Fiction FantasyGods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, Kelly Robson (Tor.com 978-1-2501-6385-1, $14.99, 240pp, tp) March 2018. Cover by Jon Foster.
There is much to admire in Kelly Robson’s novella Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach – her surprising skill at rigorous SF worldbuilding after a career distinguished mostly by clever fantasies like “The Waters of Versailles”, her nuanced characterization, especially of a cranky, middle-aged woman protagonist (with six leg-like tentacle prostheses), her very original deployment of a familiar SF time-travel technique – but the one that struck me very early on, before we even learn much about this post-cataclysmic 23rd century, was a lot more modest: Robson seems to know a good deal about real-world grant writing. This isn’t as trivial as its sounds. Too often, SF writers conveniently overlook the somewhat messy processes by which science gets funded, but Robson opens with a convincingly bureaucratic RFP, complete with unrealistic deadlines, from a bank affiliated with something called Centers for Excellence in Economic Research and Development (CEERD) and, more immediately relevant to the plot, a division called the “Temporal Economic Research Node (TERN)”. The acronyms alone are terrifying. More than gods and monsters, this is the sort of thing that strikes dread into the hearts of working scientists, and I suspect Robson had a lot of fun making it up, even though the organization itself quickly recedes into the background of the story. It’s also an example of her meticulous attention to detail, though.
The novella essentially falls into two parts. In the first, we meet Minh, that aging environmental geologist with tentacles for legs – the result of damage caused by ringworm, she explains at one point (“the pandemics hit us hard”) – whose story is presented in parallel with much shorter snippets from the point of view of the ancient Mesopotamian king Shulgi (the connection between the viewpoints quickly becomes apparent). Minh is a plague baby, one of a group of survivors of a massive ecological collapse who, after decades of hiding out in subterranean communities called hells, have begun trying to repopulate the surface through a combination of demonstration habitats, called habs, and ecological restoration projects. But funding has been scarce, and the discovery of more glamorous time-travel by the above-mentioned TERN has made it even more difficult, so when Minh and her team receive a request for proposals to travel back to 2024 BCE Mesopotamia in order to study the drainage basin of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as a guide to future restoration projects, they seize on the opportunity to gain resources from their erstwhile nemesis. Minh’s enthusiastic and ambitious young assistant Kiki provides a lively contrast to the older woman’s caution and cynicism, and her colleague Hamid serves at times as a kind of buffer.
The second half of the story focuses on the actual trips back in time, in a vessel named the Lucky Peach (after Mihn’s ongoing efforts to establish a peach orchard on the surface). This takes us into somewhat more familiar SF territory, with the time travel itself not really affecting the past, since timelines created by travelers apparently evaporate when the travelers leave. The clash of cultures and worldviews between ancient and future societies (together with the occasional ironic comeuppances) is at least as old as L. Sprague de Camp and Poul Anderson, but Robson is less concerned with playing historical games than with developing more complex relations among her characters. The passages from the point of view of Shulgi are carefully restrained, more mythical in tone, and convincingly alienating: the distant past, it turns out, really is a different country. The sheer richness of invention in Robson’s story, from having the time travelers first arrive in the past at a “Home Beach” in the south Pacific to Shulgi’s ancient military strategies, is close to astonishing, and her conclusion is both surprising and dramatically appropriate. If there had been any doubt that Robson is one of the most accomplished and versatile new writers (her SF career only dates back to 2015), Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach should dispel it.
This review and more like it in the March 2018 issue of Locus.
Liz Bourke Reviews Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson
April 21, 2018 Liz Bourke
Locus Magazine, Science Fiction FantasyGods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, Kelly Robson (Tor.com Publishing 978-1-250-16384-4, $3.99, 232pp, eb). March 2018. Cover by Jon Foster.
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson is cunningly structured, a sly sleight of hand that sees two parallel stories told simultaneously. One of these stories is entirely linear, as befits a time-travel narrative. The other story… is not.
In Mesopotamia, in or around 2024 BCE, the king Shulgi finds his people and his kingdom beset by odd signs and omens, including strange-shaped demons who kill some of his people. The priestess of the moon, Susa, believes that the signs mean the gods desire Shulgi’s death. Every chapter begins with a paragraph or three from Shulgi’s perspective, and it becomes clear that he’s a clever and honest man doing a difficult job in overwhelming circumstances.
The other strand of the story starts in 2267. Minh’s a plague baby, part of the generation that first moved back up to the Earth’s surface from the underground hells in order to reclaim humanity’s ancestral habitat. She’s spent her life restoring river ecosystems, but funding for long-term projects has been slim since the discovery of time travel. An opportunity arises to take a team to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in 2000 BCE, and Minh is determined to win the bid and do the best damn job possible. So is her administrative assistant, Kiki, a young woman from the younger generation, the “fat babies,” who desperately wants meaningful work. She wants to do something that matters. Hamid, of Minh’s generation and one of her colleagues, just wants to do his job while indulging his obsession with horses.
Time-travel, according to TERN, the secretive agency that controls the time-travel technology, cannot change the present. The past that they visit, according to TERN’s physicists, is a closed loop that collapses once time travellers leave: it has no lasting existence apart from the time-travellers, so it’s barely real. It – and its inhabitants – don’t matter. Things – and people – can be brought from the past into the present from which the time-travellers left, but not from the present into the future. The health-and-safety and time-travel specialist assigned to Minh’s team, Fabian, treats the inhabitants of the past as disposable, because, to him, they are.
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach comes alive in the details. In Minh’s passion for restoration and for ecosystems and her distress at coming face-to-face with violent death; in her bafflement at and affection for Kiki, and her growing realisation – prompted by conversations with Kiki – that her generation has failed Kiki’s in letting the banks dominate the decisions they make. This is a world where private banks control what gets done, and where debt is a seldom-mentioned presence, but is constantly in the background in the ways in which communities, individuals, and small groups interact, and a world in which amazing advances in medical science haven’t solved the problem of chronic illness. There are cool drones and amazing science-fictional biological advances. Minh has six lower limbs, all tentacles like an octopus; in order to make sure she can have a place on the team, due to volume constraints, Kiki has her own original legs removed and replaced with goat-footed prosthetics.
This is a world in which the differing moral imperatives of Kiki and Fabian lead to the team learning that it’s not just the inhabitants of the past that are disposable. The novella concludes with an open-ended moment, one that raises more questions than it answers, but Robson’s sly, deft storytelling has already left us all the hints we need to see the questions she’s really offering for us to answer: what do we owe to past generations, to future ones, and to each other? And what do we owe the world?
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, her Patreon, or Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
This review and more like it in the March 2018 issue of Locus.
Saturday, January 14, 2017
A Human Stain, by Kelly Robson
Story illustration by Sam Wolfe Connelly
Read this story
(Horror) Helen comes to Meersee in Germany to be a governess for her friend’s nephew. The child is young and peculiar, the staff are old and peculiar, and more peculiar things turn up by the minute. (9,734 words; Time: 32m)
Rating: ★★★☆☆ Average
"A Human Stain," by Kelly Robson [bio] (edited by Ellen Datlow), published on January 4, 2017 by Tor.com.
Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)
Pro: The excellent narration and dialogue quickly sweep the reader into this story, and it holds one's attention all the way to the end.
In terms of plot, Helen just wants to earn some money and get back to her life in Paris. Bärchen needs to replace the nursemaid, Mimi, who is almost used up. Or perhaps they need to feed someone to the monsters in the lake from time to time. (No wonder the staff won’t tell her anything!)
Helen isn’t a good person, though. She’s the sort who gets drunk, sleeps until the afternoon, breaks into family crypts—the sort who schemes to seduce a young girl who’s subordinate to her, who wasted all her money in Paris, etc. It’s not a surprise that she comes to a bad end.
Con: She hardly deserves an end quite this bad though.
The biggest problem with the story is that the big reveal, that the beasts in the lake are the parents of the little boy, is hard to believe. Nothing to that point had suggested that Peter or Bärchen weren’t human.
It seems unfair that Helen licks the fluid from Peter’s fingers due to some external compulsion, since, from that point on, her fate is set.
Other Reviews: Search Web, Browse Review Sites (Issue 01/04/17)
Kelly Robson Info: Interviews, Websites, ISFDB
Review of “A Human Stain” by Kelly Robson
April 6, 2018
Lela E. Buis Best Short Story, Bestseller, book review, Book sales, books, dark fantasy, diversity, fantasy, fantasy romance, LGBTQ, literary awards, literary sf, Nebula Awards, political correctness, SFWA, short stories, short story, social inclusion, Speculative fiction, Tor Books, Tor.com castle, Germany, governess, horror, Kelly Robson, nebula award, Nebula finalist, novelette, playgirl, sea serpent, sensory imagery, Tor.com Leave a comment
This novelette is a finalist for the 2017 Nebula Award. It falls into the horror genre and was published by Tor.com. This review contains spoilers.
Helen York is an English expatriate and down on her luck, so she is happy to take a position as governess when her friend Bärchen offers it. The position is to teach Bärchen’s orphaned nephew Peter, who stays at a beautiful castle overlooking a lake in Germany. Although beautiful, the place is clearly neglected, with dust everywhere and small bones scattered through the rooms. Peter’s nursemaid Mimi is young and looks attractive as a potential lover, but she allows Peter to wander at will. Helen finds him in the cellar trying to open the crypt door. The cellar is crusted with salt and smells like a meat larder, but she is happy to find a good store of wine as well. Can she ignore those seductive smells from the cellar? What are those things floating in the lake? And why does everyone at the castle have bad teeth?
Good points: The narrative here is third person from Helen’s point of view, and very well crafted. Helen’s responses and her conversations with Bärchen and the other servants quickly reveal her playgirl character and unsuitability for the job as governess. There’s a foreboding as Helen gradually discovers the strangeness of the castle, and the story rises to a horrific climax that was hard to forecast. There’s enough description of the setting to make it creepy, and a lot of sensory imagery as the scents from the cellar start to get to Helen.
Not so good points: This doesn’t quite hang together. It appears the family isn’t really human, and that they go through a life cycle from larvae to humanoid to sea serpent. So, I gather the crypt is where they hang corpses for the larvae to feed on, but how the scents accomplish this is a huge stretch. If you can create hallucinations, there are easier ways to get people into the lake.
Two and a half stars for the failure to make good sense.