James Patrick Kelly was born in Mineola, NY, and grew up in a suburb called Pound Ridge. His father commuted to Manhattan for a Fortune 500 company, and his mother stayed home and raised Kelly and three brothers. “About the only thing memorable about this time was that two other kids around my age in Pound Ridge would grow up to have a career writing science fiction, Elizabeth Hand and James D. MacDonald.” Kelly graduated magna cum laude from Notre Dame with a BA in English lit. “I felt that going to Notre Dame was a mistake, although it obviously made me, for better or worse, into who I am. Notre Dame was an all-boys school while I was there, and I spent my time there fighting a rearguard action in the sexual revolution. I realized this almost immediately and thought about transferring but decided instead to accelerate and graduate in three years.” Kelly also attended the Clarion Workshop twice. Shortly after, in 1977, he became a full-time writer.

Just over a decade later, following a divorce, he needed to supplement his income. “I applied to the roster of the Artist in Residence Program of the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Over the next decade, I did brief residencies from grades three to twelve in upwards of fifty schools around the state and ate more bad lunches than I care to remember. I was getting kids to write science fiction and fantasy stories. This is where I first started developing my teaching chops. It turned out that I was pretty good at it, and from my AIR experience, all my other teaching gigs blossomed . . . When I got the call to teach at Clarion, I felt like a circle was closing.” Kelly taught at Clarion ten times, Clarion West twice, and Odyssey once. He also taught at Stonecoast (for over a decade) and Sycamore Hill.

From the beginning, genre had its eye on James Patrick Kelly: his second published story, “Death Therapy” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1978) made it into The Best Science Fiction of the Year #8 edited by Terry Carr for both Del Rey/Ballantine in the US and Gollancz in the UK. F&SF bought several more pieces, and from there, Kelly seems to have had an unstoppable career. To date, he has over a hundred short stories out, seven collections, five anthologies (coedited with John Kessel), a few novels, a bunch of novellas and novelettes, lots of nonfiction, and much more. He’s been up for a slew of SFF awards, landing on the Hugo ballot nine times and the Nebula ballot thirteen times. Wins include a Locus Award for short story “Itsy Bitsy Spider” (June 1997, Asimov’s), a Nebula Award for novella Burn (Tachyon, 2005), and two Hugo Awards for novelettes published in Asimov’s: “Think Like a Dinosaur” (June 1995 issue) and “1016 to 1” (June 1999 issue).

Kelly spent a few years in the Boston area, then moved to New Hampshire—just after attending Clarion—and has lived in New Hampshire ever since. “I suppose I might be called ‘outdoorsy,’ and New Hampshire suits my tastes in recreation. I like to hike and ski and run trails. I live on a lake and take my first quick dunk of the year on my birthday, April 11, and my last sometime in October. From June to September, I wake up, brush my teeth, and immediately start my day with a half-mile swim.” He’s an enthusiastic gardener, currently tending twenty-eight different daylily cultivars and a dozen hostas. He also still writes column, “On The Net,” for Asimov’s, which began in 1998: “I must say that while it started as a vehicle to recommend interesting sites to visit on the World Wide Web, over time it has also evolved into a mishmash of tech journalism and insider reviews of genre trends.”

His latest is his eighth collection, The Book of Bots, due this month from Fairwood Press.

Who do you see as some of your literary heroes, and why? Has the list of literary heroes changed over the years?

The SFF writers who most influenced me when I was starting out were Ursula K. Le Guin and Robert Silverberg, although stylistically I was very much taken by Cordwainer Smith and Alfred Bester. But as I learned my craft, I connected with my own cohort, like John Kessel, Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, and Karen Joy Fowler, just to name a few. I’ve had unprecedented access to these wonderful writers because I was lucky enough to workshop with them and hear them discuss their fiction and my own. Through exchange of ideas and lively debate with them, I came to realize what was important to me about writing and science fiction.

You’ve been publishing fiction since the seventies and have new work coming out at numerous venues. Recent pieces have landed on Locus Recommended Reading Lists, and one was a recent Sturgeon Award finalist. What does it take to keep selling fiction across a span of decades?

It is important to keep reading what is being written right now in order to contribute to the ongoing literary conversation that defines our genre. Although every generation has its moment of peak relevance, that time will inevitably pass. My strategy to forestall fossilization is to stay as current as possible with what’s being published. While I certainly can’t keep up with all the short fiction in all the magazines, I am always looking for new writers to follow.

You’ve also been teaching for a long time. How did attending Clarion impact your writing, and has teaching also had an impact on your writing in important ways?

Attending Clarion helped me realize how my stories were going wrong, which was incredibly useful. But identifying problems doesn’t get stories written and can sometimes lead to discouragement. The only way to learn to write is to write a lot. However, one of the best ways to learn to write better is to show the work to astute readers for comment and to keep an open mind when they read your stories back to you. The workshop mindset I learned at Clarion is not only the foundation of my teaching style, but it is also the foundation of my professional career. Almost all of what I have published, both fiction and nonfiction, has benefited from either workshopping or review by trusted readers. But the secret sauce of Clarion is that it introduces you to the collegial world of our genre. At Clarion, you might meet writers—both aspiring and well-published—who could become your trusted readers.

If we study your career via the lens of ISFDB, SFADB, and similar databases, we see a smooth, continual career. Have things always been smooth, or were there ups and downs?

My first decade of serious writing was a struggle. At one point, I put five hundred rejection slips (History lesson: in the olden days, editors rejected you by snail mail!) in a box and stored it in the attic. Almost all of what I’ve submitted since then has sold somewhere. But I’ve had personal challenges that have slowed the writing throughout my career. I was a stay-at-home dad in the eighties, got divorced in the nineties, and struggled with alcoholism throughout my adult life. Despite these, I managed to publish at least some fiction every year, even if it was just a story or two. If more than a few weeks pass when I’m not working on fiction, I get antsy, or guilty, or bored. And once I get past the first couple of pages of a new project, I have to finish it. It’s a blessing and a curse.

A fair number of your accolades come out of novellas and novelettes. How does your approach change if you are writing at these lengths, as opposed to novels or short stories?

It’s hard to say, actually, since short stories tend to sprawl into novelettes and some novelettes want to be novellas when they grow up. I am a headlight writer, and while I have a notion of the destination, I navigate the route on the fly and sometimes detours lure me into the countryside. A novella creates a world that needs a population of robust characters in action across time. There are fewer people in a novelette and probably much less elapsed time in the plot. I like to write stories that observe the unities of time and place, with no big time jumps or globe-spanning scene changes, and these are often short stories. Many of my novels have been what some call fix-ups, in that they are designed to incorporate shorter pieces into a larger canvas. Although some writers shy away from the idea of theme, I find it helpful to think about what my stories are really about, aside from plot, character, and setting. I never write to theme, but I often discover it while writing or as I review the first draft. So for me, the shorter the piece, the more sharply drawn the theme should be. A longer piece will offer a complex but more indeterminate thematic statement.

For folks who haven’t read your work, how do you describe what you do? What are the things you tend to write about or focus on—and has that changed throughout your time as a writer?

I was about to say that I take pride in the fact that my work ranges over all the subgenres of SFF, but I have to admit that if I had concentrated on one or the other of them, I might be better known. I’ve written a lot about robots and AI, and I have a loose series of stories set in what I call my Thousand Worlds that feature a future in space where FTL is possible but hard (I know, I know, it’s all rubber science) and humanity has spread to many solar systems. I’ve written a lot of near-future SF. I had a story in the classic Mirrorshades anthology, which I suppose makes me cyberpunk adjacent. Although what I’m best known for is my science fiction, about a third of my stories are fantasy, dark fantasy, or slipstream. My personal favorite fantasy is a weird rom-com set in medieval Hungary called “The Rose Witch.” It’s about a witch and a prince who lives with his pigs in a ruined castle. It debuted here in Clarkesworld. I currently have a ghost story under submission; there have been half a dozen others. I’m fascinated by doppelgangers. The 70–30 mix of SF to fantasy has been pretty consistent throughout my career.

What do you see as the role of collections for authors as well as for publishing—what makes them important?

For many writers, collections offer career validation. As wonderful as it is to see your prose on a screen here on Clarkesworld, holding a book made of molecules with your name on it is a glorious experience. You can give it to your mom! Readers will ask you to sign it! Reviewers may review it! However, it is a sad fact of publishing that collections don’t sell as well as novels, and agents will often advise their clients that publishing a collection will hurt their novel sales going forward. Sigh. In my opinion, stories are the research laboratory of our genre, and collections are a way to assess the successes of our most talented practitioners.

The Book of Bots is your latest collection. What distinguishes this one from prior collections?

For the most part, the stories I chose for my previous seven collections were ones I had most recently published. Whenever I’d accumulate fourteen or fifteen, I’d get the itch to collect them. Luckily, I found editors willing to scratch that itch! But this one is different. I conceived it as a kind of personal history with stories about robots and AI from the last thirty years presented in chronological order. Between the first, “Itsy Bitsy Spider” (1997) to the most recent, “Je Ne Regrette Rien” (2026), there has been a revolution in robotics and AI. Technological advances have closed some futures off, while expanding others.

Because of this, my thinking has changed about the future of robots and AI and our relationship with our digital creations. We recognize now that Asimov’s Three Laws are mostly aspirational as technologists replace them with strategies like guardrails and alignment. Since our own understanding of consciousness is incomplete, I’ve written stories about robots with simulated consciousness as well as AIs that are intelligent but not conscious. The entanglement of robotics with the slave narrative was baked into robotics from the very beginning by Karel Čapek in R.U.R. and several of the stories in the new book interrogate the idea of robot rights. While turning off your computer is not significantly different than turning off your car, for many people, turning off their robot companion may well be as traumatic as putting a favorite pet to sleep. And what if that digital companion is conscious? Since I could not fit all the ideas I have about robots and AI into my fiction, I have included two essays that present my influences and my current thinking in a more focused way.

Six of the fourteen stories originally appeared in Asimov’s, and one more originally appeared in an anthology edited by Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams. Is it fair to say that there is some affinity between that magazine (or Sheila Williams’ taste) and your style? Can you speak a bit to this, and to the general idea of author-editor/magazine relationships in the field?

I have been very fortunate to have had a relationship with Asimov’s pretty much since the beginning of my career. Some of the stories in the book were bought by Gardner Dozois and others by Sheila Williams. I met both of them early on. Gardner was a writer pal and supporter before he came to Asimov’s, and I was the first writer Sheila ever took to lunch when she was just a junior editor. Gardner was, and Sheila is, among my closest friends in the field.

Editorially, both of them got what I was trying to do, and because of that, gave me space to try new things. For example, there is a story in The Book of Bots called “Undone” about a revolutionary and her sentient spaceship in the far future. At several points in the story, the ship uses its power to reverse time in the external world five minutes while it and the protagonist continue going forward in a time bubble, in effect jumping back five minutes. On the page, this is shown by splitting the text into two columns. On the right, the reader sees what is happening in the time bubble to the protagonist and the ship while the other column reprints the sentences of the previous paragraph backwards, like this: backwards paragraph previous the of sentences the reprints. Sheila and Gardner let me get away with that typographical nightmare! And each of them separately argued me into writing my column “On The Net” in 1998, despite my aversion to deadlines. I just turned in the 157th installment.

The piece with the oldest publication date in The Book of Bots is “Itsy Bitsy Spider” from the June 1997 issue of Asimov’s. What is this piece about, and why did you want it to find new readers?

While I certainly wasn’t the first to look at robot companions for the elderly, “Itsy Bitsy Spider” is an early example of what has become a common idea. It’s about a woman named Jen visiting her father, from whom she’s been long estranged, in a senior living development. When she knocks on the door of his apartment, a little girl answers. In a dizzying series of revelations, Jen realizes that the “girl” is a realistic robot version of herself, who is caring for her father. He suffers from dementia, and he believes he is caring for her. Family secrets are revealed, and Jen recaptures some of her own lost history. “Itsy Bitsy Spider” got some notice back in its day with a Locus Award and a Nebula nomination, but what I wanted to show with its inclusion here was that even back then I was wondering about the problem of turning off a trusted robot. The father will die someday, and Jen and her robot self must sort out what will happen then.

The most recent publication date is “Je Ne Regrette Rien” from the January 2026 Clarkesworld. What is this piece about, and how does it speak to your evolution as a writer?

I had the good fortune to be invited to speak and teach in China several times recently, and this is my first attempt to use fiction to understand what I saw there. Fifty years from now, a Western computer scientist named Reed Cheng visits a Chinese research facility run by China’s largest robot company. While they make many different models, what catches Cheng’s attention is an experimental program to design ultrarealistic humanoid robots capable of self-programming. The intent of the program is to see whether it is possible for these robots to function unnoticed in human society. There are only six of these prototypes, and Cheng learns that the corporation is considering scrapping the program because of the high costs of maintenance and resistance by the Chinese people to robots passing as human. Cheng himself is skeptical of the need for these robots but is fascinated by how they are attempting to understand humans by observing their behavior and programming simulated emotions. (Note: While at present the West may be slightly ahead of China in AI development, the Chinese are well ahead of us in deploying AI in humanoid bodies. And since China has a declining population, the Chinese are all in on these robots.)

Most of the prototype robots in the story are enhanced industrial robots, loaded over time into increasingly advanced bodies. Of course, changing bodies changes who they are, and while they remember all their previous “lives,” it is as if they are remembering the history of a stranger. This intrigues Cheng, who has recently been rejuvenated at age one hundred and three but has been informed that further rejuvenation will be ineffective. This goes directly to one of my writerly obsessions about the nature of identity. For example, I must accept that I wrote “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” but I’m not sure how much I recognize of the Jim of 1997. There’s a lot about him that I’ve forgotten and more than a few things that puzzle me.

“The Comedy of Science” and “Robots on Parade 2026” are both original to the collection. What can you tell us about these stories without spoiling the read?

These two longish essays explain why I chose to collect these stories. As I said, I write a column for Asimov’s about SFF on the Internet that focuses on trends in technology and the unique culture of our genre. The essays are in an informal style I’ve developed over the years. “The Comedy of Science” is a wry look at the history of robots and AI in science fiction based on my own extensive (but by no means comprehensive) reading. “Robots on Parade 2026” is science journalism that looks at the current state of robotics and attempts to balance the hyperbolic promises of the tech bros against the prophesies of cultural doom by the AI dissidents. Both pieces represent my own best research and serve to expand on what I’ve learned about AI from writing my column.

Is there anything else you’d like folks to know about The Book of Bots?

My hope is that parts of it will make you laugh. If not, write me, and I’ll apologize profusely.

You’ve also edited several anthologies and done some reviewing work. As a reader, what do you look for in fiction; what delights you the most? And does this change if you are reading for pleasure, reading for reviews, reading as an editor, or as a teacher?

As a reader, I look for morally complex characters, narrative momentum, and original conceptualization. I’m a sucker for unreliable narrators and am always questioning what I’m being told. But surprise me, and I’m yours! Unfortunately, I find it harder and harder to fall into the dream of an SFF story, in part because I tend to second-guess the writer and in part because I’ve read so much that I get impatient with the standard beats, no matter how skillfully they are accomplished. I read a lot out of genre and enjoy mystery and crime fiction, where I seem to be able to turn my inner critic off. Huge fan of Patrick O’Brian! I comb the bestseller lists to read work outside my comfort zone.

As someone with extensive experience teaching as well as a massive collection of books on the craft of writing, what is your favorite advice to new authors trying to break into the industry?

I am ever mindful that there is a continuous spectrum of achievement in fiction writing, from competence to mastery to resonance. Every story falls somewhere on this left-to-right line. At the start of my career, my stories tended to land left, some just barely past competence. Nevertheless, they sold, and I was happy with them. As I learned my craft, stories landed further to the right, eventually flirting with mastery, although progress was by no means continuous. Some were better than others, maybe due to content or to degree of difficulty or to the phases of the Moon. But they were the best I could do with the material at the time, and I was proud to see them in print. A couple of them achieved resonance, a quality that I think of as living on in the reader’s imagination after she turns the last page. But just because I write one resonant story doesn’t mean the next story, or the next five, will be of equal impact.

So this is the lesson I’ve learned that I’d like to pass along. If you have a long career, you will write many stories. Over time, they will sort themselves out for better or worse in your estimation and that of your readership. As long as you are submitting stories you believe in, congratulate yourself for finishing them and celebrate when they are published. There’s no profit in comparing them to one another or to those of your colleagues. Instead, just write the next one!

Is there anything else you’d like folks to know about you or your work? What are you working on now? What do you have coming up that Clarkesworld readers should know about?

I have a novella coming out in Asimov’s next year called “The Devil’s Mass,” which concludes a series I’ve been writing about Fay Hardaway, a private eye solving cases in a future in which aliens have disappeared all the men in an effort to stave off environmental collapse. Also in 2027, Fairwood Press will reprint Ninety Percent of Everything, a collaboration by Jonathan Lethem, me, and John Kessel. It was a finalist the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 2000.