Nobody
remembers now (due to the past couple decades of history feeling like
a millennium), but once upon a time James Patrick Kelly's Think
Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories was a major talking
point in science fiction. The publishing sphere was contained enough
that most readers were aware of the majority of what was happening,
and the collection was a triumphant capture of one the genre's
brightest new voices. An established name, Kelly followed it up with
another collection, 2002's Strange but Not a Stranger.
The
collection kicks off with a piece of Cold War Americana pierced by
the uncanny: “10¹⁶ to 1?”. It's the 1950s and young Ray lives
for superhero comic books. Playing in the woods near his Long Island
home one day, he discovers an odd man, a man who seems to know the
future. Ray's life twists sideways in the aftermath, and through
that transition Kelly gives readers a twisted piece of Golden Age
American loosely reminiscent of Jeffrey Ford's “Shadow Year” or
Harlan Ellison's “Jeffty is Five” .
