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.

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.