Polestars are single-author collections published by celebrated UK small press Newcon, and they really do live up to the publisher’s claim of presenting outstanding writers.
You won’t find many household names here (yet!), but the authors are selected due to the quality of their writing, and RB Kelly is no exception. Her stories, which explore the liminal spaces of consciousness, are subtly powerful and always surprising. Often I thought I knew where a story was heading, only to be wrenched out of this mental security by a sudden shift in direction.
Most of the tales focus around a central dilemma (often a moral one), and Kelly has a definite talent for choosing eye-opening problems and ideas which give the narratives a potent kick.
Readers will get that spine-tingling feeling many times whilst reading this book, and as I did, the urge to nudge their partner or ring up a friend and say ‘Hey, listen to this!’ They include such themes as robots falling in love with each other, suicide-addicted thrill seekers who have their consciousnesses uploaded into new bodies each time they die, societies where citizens are given a certain number of hours to live and a built-in clock they can monitor as it ticks down, sentient beings born inside computer networks, and empathic societies in which people need mental shields to protect themselves from being overwhelmed by their compatriots’ thoughts.
But really, the true beauty of these stories is in the quality of the writing and characterisation. They mostly involve only a few, sometimes only two, characters, and the clever ideas would not have half the impact if these elements were not so good.
This is proven in ‘Love Story in DY-161’ and ‘Like Sleep Without Dreams,’ which do not contain moral puzzles like the others, but in many ways are the best in the collection, presenting two people thrown together in extreme circumstances and how they interact, how their relationships evolve and how the individuals end up changed because of this. Witnessing these characters was delightful, even when the story was just a snapshot of a life without a strong beginning, middle or end to the situation. This is the reason why I, and probably most, will want to return to RB Kelly and source other books by her. In fact, I’m about to start reading her novel Edge of Heaven right now! And will follow this up with On the Brink. The former won the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair and was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, and the latter longlisted for the BSFA Award for Best Novel.
Different Wavelengths can be purchased at newconpress.co.uk, and I would highly recommend it.
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