The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel

Speculative shorts don’t come much better than the 20 featured in this wide-ranging collection from Nebula Award winner Kessel (Another Orphan). It takes a brilliant author to pull off a Jane Austen–Mary Shelley mash-up, but Kessel does so with aplomb in the moving and suspenseful “Pride and Prometheus,” which introduces Mary, the most bookish Bennett sister, to Victor Frankenstein. “Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!” makes plausible an offbeat dystopian future in which “everyone lives in automobiles, traveling on an endless highway, never stopping,” and cleverly combines this quirky premise with dated tech, a deadly forbidden zone called the Median, and robotic artificial intelligences. Space opera fans looking for something different than the usual political conflicts playing out among the stars will find “Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance,” in which stolen plays are crucial to humanity’s survival, to be a mind-blowing example of what the subgenre is capable of. Across the board, these exceptional tales showcase Kessel’s remarkable ability to encourage suspension of disbelief through even the wildest what-ifs. This is a master storyteller at work. (June)