The Wreck of the Godspeed:

THE WRECK OF THE GODSPEED, by James Patrick Kelly. Golden Gryphon Press, 2008, 361 pp., $24.95.
ISBN 1-930846-51-7

You never know what you are going to get from a Kelly story. Kelly stories are as unpredictable as five-day weather forecasting in April in New York.

“The Best Christmas Ever” features Albert Paul Hopkins and Ellen Marelli, who are literally the only two humans around after a world catastrophe. They live in a world in where personal robots care for their every need. The bots’ mission – hope to make life comfortable enough for the humans to procreate – even though the man knows the world is merely a digital fantasy, a sham created by the bots.

In “The Dark Side of Town,” cheating in a relationship still makes its mark, and creates its own tensions, despite any changing technology.

“Serpent” asks the question: so what REALLY was going on in the Garden, and why did the devil himself feel motivated to actually help humankind?

“Bernardo’s House” is designed with an Artificial Intelligence that can do just about anything, who grows lonely when Bernardo, his keepsake, who left to go to the hospital, never returns. Instead, a girl named “Fly” stumbles into the house – the house, a convivial home if there ever was one, delights in helping Fly.