Burn - Hardcover

Kelly, James Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1892391279 ISBN 13: 9781892391278

Publisher: Tachyon Publications, 2005

Synopsis

Nebula Award Winner
Hugo Award Nominee

Burn is James Patrick Kelly at his best, and there’s nothing better.”
―Connie Willis, author of Doomsday Book

The tiny planet Morobe's Pea has been sold and renamed Walden. The new owner has some interesting ideas. Voluntary simplicity will rule in the Transcendent State; Walden is destined to become a paradise covered in lush new forests.

But even believers find temptations in the black markets; non-believers are willing to defend their ideals with fire. Walden's only hope may lie with a third option: a very unlikely alien intervention.

In Burn, James Patrick Kelly (Think Like a Dinosaur) delivers an innovative, entertaining, and morally-complex vision of the perils of idealism.

About this title

About the Author

James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards and his fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. His most recent publication is a career retrospective in Centipede Press’s Masters of Science Fiction series entitled James Patrick Kelly. His sixth novel Mother Go is forthcoming from Audible.com and a short story collection The Promise of Space will be published in October by Prime Books. With John Kessel he is co-editor of Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology, Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka, The Secret History Of Science Fiction, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post Cyberpunk Anthology. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.

Reviews

Hugo-winner Kelly (Think like a Dinosaur) mixes hard-edged extrapolation with messy human issues in this thought-provoking SF novel. The inhabitants of Transcendent State, a colony of "true humans," have rejected advanced technology for lives of voluntary simplicity on a world renamed Walden. They are threatened by the pukpuk, survivors of a previous settlement who seek to stop plans to cover the planet with healthy, dense forest by setting fires in the wilderness. Now even Walden's citizens are beginning to question their charter's tenets of simplicity, secretly trading produce and handmade goods for pukpuk tech through a thriving black market. The spark that will ignite Walden's final conflict comes from one of its own, firefighter Prosper "Spur" Leung, when he unwittingly contacts the High Gregory of Kenning, ruler of a distant world. "I make luck," the High Gregory says, turning Spur's commitment to Walden's (and Thoreau's) philosophy of self-reliance and the primacy of nature upside down. 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. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Bored while recovering from burns received in the line of duty, fruit farmer turned fireman Spur decides to contact similarly named people throughout the Thousand Worlds. He reaches a boy on a throne, who says he makes luck and becomes very interested in Spur's world, the small planet Walden, designated a simple--living utopia by the wealthy man who bought it from its mother planet. A few days later, homeward bound from the hospital, a hover stops the train to take Spur aboard. On the aircraft are the boy, a gaggle of other children from other worlds, and their superintendent. The kids are all extraordinary and, as it happens, intent on resolving the warfare on Walden, which consists of the pre-utopian inhabitants setting forest fires to resist the forestation of all the land the Waldenites don't farm. Besides its fireman hero (a reversal of Montag in Fahrenheit 451) and its would-be-utopian setting, the warm humanity and rural sympathies of this affectionate, winsome short novel will make many recall Ray Bradbury at his best. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Tachyon Publications
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1892391279
• ISBN 13: 9781892391278
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 178