Bradbury Weather

Dust jacket illustration by Richard Powers.

Subterranean Press is pleased to announce Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Bradbury Weather, their largest collection yet at 800 pages.

Though Caitlín R. Kiernan is known primarily as a preeminent author of the weird and the macabre, and is often cited as Lovecraft’s successor, during the three-decades of their career they have also been a prolific author of science fiction. Indeed, Kiernan’s first SF tales appeared in print before any of their weird fiction (“Persephone” and “Between the Flatirons and the Deep Green Sea,” both 1995). And while their science fiction has often been praised by critics, the author has only ever released a single collection specifically devoted to their SF — A is for Alien (2009). Finally, with the publication of Bradbury Weather, almost all of Kiernan’s science-fiction short stories and novellas have been collected in one volume.

These twenty-eight tales paint a picture of dystopian futures, first contacts gone horribly awry, the limits and dangers of technology, and encounters with the alien within us all. From Earth to Mars to distant exoplanets, from the past to the present to the future, Kiernan surveys a cosmos that is strange and marvelous and oftentimes inimical to human life. A paleontologist by training, they bring to their SF a deep understanding of science, its methods, and its limits, with their scientific background often informing and lending an authenticity to their tales of deep time, deep space, extraterrestrial life, and things that might be.

The signed limited edition of Bradbury Weather will be accompanied by Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale, a time travel novella making its print debut. (See below for a full description.)

Table of Contents:

• Author’s Introduction
• Riding the White Bull
• Faces in Revolving Souls
• Onion
• Galápagos
• Zero Summer
• The Pearl Diver
• In View of Nothing
• Ode to Katan Amano
• Hydrarguros
• A Season of Broken Dolls
• Tidal Forces
• The Steam Dancer (1896)
• The Dry Salvages
• The Worm in My Mind’s Eye
• Tall Bodies
• Paleozoic Annunciation
• Our Lady of Arsia Mons
• I Am the Abyss and I Am the Light
• The Road of Needles
• Another Tale of Two Cities
• Goggles (c. 1910)
• A Barrenness of Daffodils, A Lerna of Ills
• Ballad of a Catamite Revolver
• Whilst the Night Rejoices Profound and Still
• Cherry Street Tango, Sweatbox Waltz
• A Chance of Frogs on Wednesday
• M Is for Mars
• Bradbury Weather
  
  
• Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale (bonus volume, to accompany the signed limited edition only)

About Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale

In 1989, the US government becomes aware of a strange ribbon of light pulsating in the skies above the freezing, desolate plains of Harding County, South Dakota, a ribbon of light that proves to be a portal to one specific moment in time, sixty-six million years in the past. Not very long before an immense asteroid collided with the earth, ending the world of the non-avian dinosaurs. This one moment in the distant past becomes a place that can be visited, observed, studied, even exploited by corporations and big-game hunters.

A paleobotanist arrives on the shore of shallow sea in South Dakota, and though she’s only come to study extinct plants, soon she will come face to face with one of the most terrifying creatures inhabiting this world.

In the tradition of Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” Caitlín R. Kiernan draws on their expertise as a paleontologist and geologist to recreate a vanished era, then shrouds it in modern-day conspiracy and espionage.

Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover

Limited: 600 signed numbered hardcovers with the bonus volume, Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale