Praise for Burn:
With an intriguing set of characters and a plot both chilling and charming, this remarkable tale belongs in most SF collections.
—Library Journal
Kelly’s many-layered story pivots on a set of paradoxes, asking questions about the difference between innocence and willful ignorance, responsibility and balance, and the true essence of nature.
—Publishers Weekly
[T]his affectionate, winsome short novel will make many recall Ray Bradbury at his best.
—Booklist
With his immaculate prose and perfect structural tricks, Kelly’s book offers a richly satisfying blend of adventure and philosophy.
—SciFi.com (Grade: A)
Kelly has written something fresh…some of the fundamental concepts of sf in an innovate way.
—The New York Review of Science Fiction
Burn is great stuff. Smart, funny, formidable, and unlike anything else out there. James Patrick Kelly has written some of my very favorite short stories. As a matter of fact, I get anxious when I haven’t read a Kelly story in a while. Can’t we just clone him?
—Kelly Link, Hugo and Nebula winner, author of
Magic For Beginners
A dynamic tale with brains and heart. Thoreau’s ideas on simplicity and civil disobedience rub against one another, and they ignite.
—Eileen Gunn, Nebula award winning author of
Stable Strategies and Others
James Patrick Kelly is one of the masters of science fiction. He imagines futures both high-tech and human, both dizzyingly complicated and determinedly simple, and then sends us to Walden, where simplicity is anything but, and even Henry David Thoreau begins to look disturbingly different. Burn is inventive, moving, and involving. It’s James Patrick Kelly at his best, and there’s nothing better.
—Connie Willis, Hugo and Nebula award winning
author of Doomsday Book
Kelly’s special genius is in writing stories that are so human that they wrench and warm your heart at the same moment. Combine that with the kind of vivid, alien techno-extrapolation in Burn, and you get a powerful cocktail of the strange and the hauntingly familiar.
—Cory Doctorow, author of Someone Comes to Town,
Someone Leaves Town and co-editor of Boing Boing
James Patrick Kelly’s Burn’s deceptively simple surface veils a half-dozen paradoxes. In a distant galactic future, it takes us to a new world that seems old, replete with human comedy and personal tragedy. It tells us about town ball and apples and forest fires. It gives us a world of fully realized human beings in the hands of post-human politics, and a hero and heroine you’ll care about, turned round and round by fate or the gods or powers who think they know what is best for them. Burn is a story of love, loss, luck, and fate, and you won’t forget it.
—John Kessel, author of Good News From Outer Space
Burn may seem at first like a space opera with firefighters and Transcendentalists, but there’s more going on beneath its compelling story—questions of progress and responsibility, intervention and witness, technology and truth. The ending is extraordinary, forcing us to reconsider everything we’ve taken for granted in the story so far. This is science fiction that Thoreau himself might love!
—Strange Horizons