Jeremy Adam Smith
 |
Essays, Articles & StoriesRecent Publications More or Less Greatest Hits Praise for Jeremy's fiction “Jeremy Adam Smith’s ‘Three Creations’… is as at once beautiful and mythic… entertaining and thought-provoking.” – Lit Haven, reviewing issue 4 of Flytrap "[In "Pyramus and Thisbe,"] Smith delves deep into the emotion called love and also reveals its tragic shallow flaws when that emotion is driven by false assumptions. Overall, a strong story, even when Smith sometimes falls away from showing and goes into telling mode. But in this, I think he does so on purpose to give the tale an authentic, mythic feel. Possibly the best and most meaningful story in this issue, and well worth the read, despite its length." –Tangent Online, reviewing issue 9 of Apex Digest Praise for Jeremy's novella "The Wreck of the Grampus" Honorable Mention, The Year's Best Science Fiction (Tor, 2009), edited by Gardner Dozois Honorable Mention, The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (Prime, 2009), edited by Rich Horton Honorable Mention, UNPLUGGED: The Web's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (Wyrm, 2009) One of the best science fiction novellas of 2008 -Rich Horton, Asimov's "Jeremy Adam Smith’s wonderful 'The Wreck of the Grampus'... is a lengthy tale, perhaps 20,000 words, and every part of it is a pleasure to read. It presents wonder in its Neptunian coldness and shares valuable, if small, nuggets of warmth between its isolated, frustrated characters. Pym, the tale’s first-person protagonist, grows greatly over the story’s course, becoming both more human and more android as he develops (androids are no mere sub-humans, here; the trope of humanity’s traditional strength versus its creations is undermined by the revelation that the most developed androids possess a greater emotional range than any human)...I highly recommend this story." –The Fix Short Fiction Review 'The Wreck of the Grampus' "is one of the best, if not the best science fiction story I have read this year... It has robots and deep philosophical questions and giant undersea creatures. Believable human characters, deeply human in their ways, and some deeply strange. This is a future that does not leave me cold like many post-singularity stories do, which are so common these days. In those stories, you can almost feel the silicon wrapped around you. Not here. There’s so much I want to say, so many surprising bits, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. I think it’s absolutely fantastic, and the author, Jeremy Adam Smith, and Eric Marin, the editor and publisher, should have as many kudos I can throw at them. This is damned good science fiction. Read it."–Jeremiah Tolbert A note: What's up with the science fiction? Most readers will come to this website after having first encountered me as a journalist who mainly covers family and fatherhood, plus politics. Indeed, that's how I make my living and how most people know me in the world. And so some may be surprised to hear that I also publish short stories, both conventionally literary stories and science fiction stories. The literary stories (here's one example) will probably seem perfectly respectable to most people. But the stories with androids and rocket ships? Not so much. I want to explain where I'm coming from, not out of defensiveness, but because I see this as an opportunity to evangelize. When most people think of science fiction, they think Star Wars and its literary relatives. That's fine; I enjoyed Star Wars when I was seven years old and I enjoy it now. I can't wait to watch it with my son, when he gets old enough. But there are other science fiction traditions. Firmly inside the genre, we have folks like Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Samuel R. Delany, J.G. Ballard, and more--writers who are thoughtful, creative, and accomplished. Outside the genre, in what we like to call the mainstream literary world, Dorris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Jonathan Lethem, and Michael Chabon, among others, have all written science fiction stories, with varying degrees of success. The question is why. Why has science fiction become so pervasive? The reason, I think, is simple: Science fiction is the only branch of literature in which we can engage creatively with the technological and social changes that have shaped human lives for over three centuries, ever since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. In the face of technological upheavals that have ranged from mass production to flight to nuclear energy to space travel to the Internet to genetic engineering, human cultures have acquired special needs for catharsis, ethical debate, philosophical speculation, and imaginative play--all needs that science fiction tries to fulfill. That's why I think science fiction is important, and that's why I write it. |
|
