John Kessel

When this ARC showed up, I had two immediate thoughts: “How has nobody done this before? That’s brilliant!” and “This can’t possibly work as well in practice as I want it to.” And y’know, guys? Kessel pulls this off with aplomb though the story weakens towards the ending due to his unwillingness to change the plot of Frankenstein.

The thing that impressed me the most about this is how true the points of view feel to the source material. Mary Bennett’s parts sound like Austen, show more and Frankenstein’s and the Creature’s like the relevant parts of Frankenstein, though I think a bit of modern language and terminology snuck in. (And yes, there is a bit of a love triangle. No, it didn’t go how I was hoping.)

Kessel also stays very true to the characters, though he’s had to do a fair bit of character development on Mary. She’s older, wiser, interested in science which is how she hits it off with Frankenstein, but still recognizably the awkward girl of Pride and Prejudice. I liked seeing the Frankenstein characters from her point of view as well, and for that matter, the ones from P&P. Frankenstein and the Creature are equally true to their source and sympathetic. To a point. I mean, Frankenstein is still kind of a prick.

As for the story itself… it went places I wasn’t entirely expecting, from either the Regency romance direction or the “create a Bride to escape the Creature” one. It kept things interesting, as did the alternating POVs which played off each other well, and helped to make the book more than the pastiche mashups can end up as. It’s certainly a modern-feeling novel.

My only real complaint, beyond Kessel’s desire for this to be an interlude in the Frankenstein story, is that there were moments when I felt either the characters’ timelines didn’t line up with each other or that the timelines didn’t sync with known history well enough. A small thing, though. I definitely liked this enough to be recommending it on release day and if the summary raised your eyebrows like it did mine, you’re probably the target audience.

Warnings: One use of the g-slur. Class consciousness.

7.5/10 show less

John Kessel does not write a lot of fiction, by the standards of his fellow SF writers, but he maintains a high level of quality, as in this collection of recent stories. He is a literature professor, and it shows in his interest in history, literary and political, in particular of the 19th century. He often examines the conflict between the individual and the social, a focus which still allows for great variety. Many of the stories start from historical characters, or existing literary show more works. We see how the economy really works, what a failed, violent man may do with a Power, a crucial moment in the life of director Orson Welles, and other possibilities, both straight science fiction and magical realism or fantasy. "The Red Phone" is hilarious and erotic. "Pride and Prometheus" brings together exactly the two, famous 19th century stories you think it does, respecting both - it's a treat. At the heart of the collection are four stories set in a future, utopian, feminist society. One of these, "Stories for Men", won the Tiptree award. The Society of Cousins, located in a domed lunar crater, has a gender and sexual-preference mix that seems to be about what we have today, but has social, economic and political structures which lead to generally harmonious relations between men and women - while women make most major decisions. I have the impression that this utopia might actually work. An impressive achievement, although flawed in that all the stories turn on the intrusion of male agression, or on its possibility. Must it always be about the men? However, Kessel leaves room for more stories about the Society, and I certainly hope he writes them. show less

John Kessel’s Pride and Prometheus is fan fiction in the best sense of the term. In days of long ago yore, students learning to compose in Latin might be assigned to write an Ovidian ode or an oration in the manner of Cicero. Kessel, who teaches creative writing at N.C. State, has upped the stakes by having characters from Jane Austen interact with characters from Mary Shelley. Note: This is not a pastiche like Pride and Prejudice with Zombies. Kessel treats both stories seriously and show more gives the world views of both writers the respect they deserve. I was especially impressed with how well he preserves the style of both. Mary Bennet, now a spinster at 31, struggles to preserve her rational morality when confronted with the chaotic passion of Victor and his creature. Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein were published only four years apart, but Kessel makes it clear that they come from diverging worlds with quickly changing language. show less

I got turned on to this collection by a truly glowing review by Matthew Claxton in his Unsettling Futures newsletter, and I can confirm this book delivers. Sycamore Hill is an invite-only science fiction writer's workshop, the post-graduate version of Clarion and its ilk. Given that Bruce Sterling is my favorite living science-fiction author and I recognized a handful of names on the cover as heavy writers with big ideas and serious chops, I figured I'd give it a look.

I was really too young show more to experience 90s science-fiction when it happened, but this was actually a golden moment for the genre. Serious futurism was out from under the mushroom cloud binary of the Cold War, and the writers were GenX and Boomers at the peak of their abilities. It was slightly more possible to make a living writing fiction, before a certain Everything Store that owns this website and the maw of Digital Content consumed everything. Science-fiction was still a ghetto, before every Iowa Writer's Workshop literary fic head decided that straight realism wasn't enough and they could write about clones and diseases and digitally altered selves, but it was a ghetto with ambition!

What elevates this collection is that it brings the reader into the magic circle of artistic creation, with short notes of the authors reacting to each other's stories in the Milford Method style (and as S.L. Huang among others have pushed back, Milford is not the only method), and you can see where pros think a story is weak, and how it was improved.

Sterling's "Bicycle Repairman" leads the collection, and is a favorite. I also enjoyed Jonathan Lethem's "The Hardened Criminals" as a prison drama of absent fathers, Maureen F. McHugh’s "Homesick" in it's study of a dedicated dancer, and Alexander Jablokov "The Fury at Colonus", a retelling of the myth of Orestes from the point of view of the Fury as a cop facing down retirement in a setting half mythic Greece and half suburbia.

As Claxton points out, they don't make them like this any more. Even as we've been liberated from the burdens of physical text, we're bound by ever shorter attention spans. Intersections is a fine vintage, and well worth reading! show less