A is for Alien
By Caitlin R. Kiernan
Dust jacket by Jacek Yerka
Interior illustrations by Vince Locke
Afterword by Elizabeth Bear.
Limited: (sold out)
Trade: $25
ISBN: 978-1-59606-209-2
Length: 216 pages
A is for Alien is award-winning author Caitlín R. Kiernan’s first collection devoted entirely to her science-fiction work. It includes the critically acclaimed novelette “Riding the White Bull” (chosen for The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 22nd Annual Collection), along with seven other tales of a less-than-utopian future. Ranging from the wastelands and mountains of Mars to the streets of a late 21st-Century Manhattan, from the moons of Europa and Saturn to an iceless Antarctica, these tales bring Kiernan’s trademark brand of the eco-gothic to bear on what it means to be human and the paths and decisions that may face mankind only a little farther along.
Cait has decided on the material that will be in the bonus chapbook (nearly 19,000 words) included with the limited edition: "Between the Flatirons and the Deep Green Sea", "Persephone", "Hoar Isis", as well as dream sequences from her online journal that led to more recent SF tales. The cover will be by Richard Kirk.
Limited: 250 signed numbered copies with a chapbook of bonus fiction
Trade: fully cloth bound hardcover edition
Table of Contents
-- Riding the White Bull
-- Faces in Revolving Souls
-- Zero Summer
-- The Pearl Diver
-- In View of Nothing
-- Ode to Katan Amano
-- A Season of Broken Dolls
-- Bradbury Weather
-- Afterword by Elizabeth Bear
From Publishers Weekly
"Known for dark fantasy that skates the edge of horror, Kiernan (Tales of Pain and Wonder) turns to science fiction with equally unsettling effects in these eight stories."
From Library Journal:
"...this collection of eight tales of sf/horror adds to Kiernan's reputation as the inheritor of Lovecraftian creepiness."
From Booklist:
"The grace and subtlety with which Kiernan inverts the roles of us and them, of those who seek to belong and those who watch from the sidelines, makes for unnerving but extraordinary storytelling... The eight stories in this slim volume are, in short, exquisite containers for the strange paths of her imagined futures. In reading these pieces, you become other, and the better for it."
