Okay, here’s the problem with James Patrick Kelly. In the first place, he’s not James Patrick Kelly, he’s Jim, and whoever heard of a genius named Jim? You didn’t hear anybody calling James Dean “Jim.”
In the second place, geniuses are supposed to be dark, difficult, egotistical, tortured, arrogant, brooding, unreliable, passionate, and complex. They’re supposed to dress in black leather, do and say outrageous things, drink too much, engage in brawls, and then either A) wrap their Porsche around a tree or B) OD in an Olsen twin’s apartment. You know, Marlon Brando. Norman Mailer. Mozart.
Jim is nothing like that. He’s sunny, friendly, unaffected, responsible, even-tempered, and so socially well-adjusted he even went to his senior prom. He’s fun, funny, and charming, and we’re just not used to geniuses looking and acting like this.
Nevertheless, he is a bona fide genius. The trick is that he saves all that darkness and complexity and passion for his writing. He’s devoted his life to that most difficult, tormented, and outrageous of art forms—the short story—and has produced a series of brilliant, multi-faceted, perfectly-cut gems—”Dancing with Chairs,” “The Cruelest Month,” “1016 to 1,” “Rat”—dealing with subjects from nanotechnology to the Statue of Liberty to fruitcake, and with genres from hard SF to comedy to slipstream. No matter what he’s doing, his stories have flawless construction, pitch-perfect voice, and an uncanny ability to take the most harmless of subjects—a toy telephone, say—and transform them into something dangerous, to take the most tired of clichés and show them to us in a way that makes them not only look brand-new, but gives us a new and profound insight into them.
My personal favorite story (aside from whichever one I happen to be currently reading) is “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” a tale about nursing homes and robots. But under the deceptively simple surface lies a profound look at guilt, atonement, and the infinitely complicated relations between fathers and children. And all in a few short easy-to-read pages. Nobody else could do that. And nobody else could have written “Men Are Trouble,” “Chemistry,” “Think Like a Dinosaur,” “The Leila Torn Show,” “April is the Cruelest Month,” or “Why School Buses are Yellow.”
And that, after all, is the nature of genius, isn’t it? Being and doing something unique and irreplaceable. Including being the first-ever genius named Jim.

A disclaimer: I freely admit I’ve been crazy about Jim Kelly since the moment I met him sitting in the hall at a Worldcon thirty years ago. He’s been a wonderful, supportive friend all those years, and there’s still nobody I would rather sit in the hall or do anything else with. For this reason, what I say about him should probably be taken with a massive grain of salt. Except about his writing. Loving the author and loving his work are two entirely different things, and I would read his stories with the same admiration and delight if I’d never met him. But I’m thankful every day I did.

Karen Joy Fowler

I knew and loved Jim Kelly by work and by reputation before we even met. I had published a few stories myself and was just starting to attend some cons, west coast only, ones I could drive to. So I was meeting some writers and hearing about others. Jim Kelly’s name came up frequently and what was said about him was pretty uniform. Jim Kelly, I was told on more than one occasion, is the nicest guy in science fiction.
I finally met Jim at a Kinko’s in Raleigh, North Carolina. We’ve known each other for decades now and, over that time, I’ve heard him called other things as well—the plot doctor, the shape-shifter. Yes, he is much more than just nice. He is witty, brainy, ambitious, and accomplished. He is great company, the best, in fact—interested in everything, well read, perceptive, and occasionally, but nicely, competitive.
But I want to say a few words here in favor of niceness. Maybe I feel defensive because a writer whose story I was critiquing once told me he thought the worst response anyone could have to his work was to say it was nice. Maybe I HAD just said it was nice. I don’t remember. But in my brain and my mouth, there is nothing simple or simple-minded about niceness. It’s a lot harder than it looks. Sure, anyone can manage brief public displays of it. But the genuine article? The nicest guy in science fiction? If it were easy, everyone would be that.
Over the years I’ve seen Jim be nice in public and in private, in good times and in bad, before coffee and after wine. I have seen Jim be nice on little sleep and less food. Jim’s sort of niceness takes effort, attentiveness, wit, and imagination. It is an interesting, a provocative, sparky sort of niceness, nothing reflexive or dull about it. It is magnetic. When Jim is on one side of a party and I am on the other, then I know I am not in the place I want to be.
I wouldn’t characterize Jim’s work as nice. Some of it is, but some of it is rough or edgy or sly. He is a quintessentially protean writer; no single adjective suffices for the whole. I have read a ton of Jim Kelly and I continue to be regularly surprised at where he goes and what he’s doing with his fiction. With the name removed, I’m not convinced I would recognize all of his stories as his. That, like niceness, is another hard thing to pull off.
Much of our relationship has taken place in the context of the Sycamore Hill writing workshop. On the day my story is on the block, Jim’s response is one I await with a particular nervous anxiety. Jim is a brilliant critic, and strong, as I am not, on plot. But that’s not why I’m nervous. I’m nervous because I know Jim will have given me a generous reading. An ungenerous reading can sink a brilliant story. But a story that doesn’t survive a generous reading is a story with problems. Even when that critique is delivered in the nicest possible way.

Bruce Sterling

James Patrick Kelly has a solid New England yeoman reticence. Kelly lacks the showboating weirdness of many science fiction writers, guys who tend to have spikey, odd, finny names, like Lem or Pohl or Poul or Sturgeon. In person Kelly comes across as a bluff-looking Irish guy bouncing a basketball.
But I’ve spent a lot of time in close quarters with James Patrick Kelly. He never behaves as a gaseous interstellar intellectual, yet he is nevertheless keenly and even somewhat scarily intelligent. Thinking back over the Kelly oeuvre, I’m struck not by its solid craft but by its visionary qualities.
Most writers crafting a story whose protagonist is a thieving street rat would be playing mythical and metaphorical tricks; a Kafka-style fantasy riff of a man turned into a rat, a Philip Dick ontological charade of melting realities. In the Kelly story “Rat,” the rat is very simply and lucidly a rat. He’s a big urban rat in soiled clothes who lives in a nest of tattered dollar bills.
Not much is made of this; there’s no fancy sleight-of-hand about it. Not only do we not ask how this happened, we’re somehow maneuvered into a situation where we can’t even ask.
Much the same goes for the Kelly character whose mother is the Statue of Liberty. This conceit sounds a lot more fey than it is in practice; by the time we’re dragged through the bizarre yet quotidian world of that story, Mom’s statuesque proportions are the least of our difficulties.
James Patrick Kelly knows what he’s doing, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve seen him do it, not just with his own work but other people’s. How often I’ve quietly marveled as he takes damaged works of fiction in hand, skillfully breaks them down to their functional components, and deftly reassembles them so they run lighter, faster, and cleaner. Nobody applauds him for it. They just stare at him, with the vaguely discomforted look of creatives who should have thought about it that way all along.
There are few to match him.

Jonathan Lethem

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, sure, but James Patrick Kelly—Jim to me, now—actually got to make three first impressions on me. Three at least. As a ravenous teenager, awed by the field I was trying to enter, he stood (in my mind) as the dangerously cool older brother whose omnipresent preeminence (omnipreminence?) I’d have to both emulate and, well, partly overthrow, in order to hang my own star in the sky. With Fowler, Kessel, Robinson, Shepherd—among others, but for me, those above all—he represented the flavor of line-by-line literary chops, ambidextrous talent, and cocksure ambition that it seemed to me was just then taking over the genre’s short story tradition. In other words, in my mind’s eye, he looked a bit like James Dean looks to Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause. Then, when quite suddenly I found myself competing against him for a Nebula Award for best novella, before we’d ever met, Jim defied the rivalrous situation, dropped a postcard’s jotting of gracious, comradely praise into my mailbox, out of nowhere, still just about the most angelic collegial gesture I’ve ever experienced from another writer. There was no reason he had to do it, but he did—and with a single stroke, made me feel welcomed into a community I still could barely imagine the reality of. Last, I actually got to know him. And he turned out, yes, to be that brilliant writer who’d written those stories that had made that impression, and that improbably kind soul who’d sent me the comradely postcard, but he was also one of the least pretentious, most charming, raffish, and simply likeable persons-who-call-themselves-writer, I’d ever met or ever hope to.
The funny thing about the dumb opening joke I started out with here, is that it seems to me that the brilliance of the storyteller James Patrick Kelly, that master of freshness and surprise, is accidentally captured there: he goes on making first impressions, against all law or likelihood, reinventing himself each time out, always questioning the basic premise of what a science fiction short story can be, or a James Patrick Kelly story, or a story in the first place. May he for many Junes to come.