The Dry Salvages

Blurb

The Dry Salvages is a futuristic science fiction story of novella length by Caitlín R. Kiernan, published in 2004 as a stand-alone hardback volume by Subterranean Press. The story consists of two parallel narratives, one set in the novella's present-day and the other in the novel's past. Told as a first-person narrative, the story is being written down with three antique ballpoint pens by Audrey Cather, an exopaleontologist and the lone survivor of an ill-fated mission to an extrasolar planet, Cecrops, a gas giant orbiting the low-mass red dwarf star Gliese 876. The Montelius mission included two other human astronauts, Peter Connor and Joakim Hamilton, and one parahuman astronaut, Umachandra Murdin, along with a number of androids. Its object was to investigate evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization which had long ago mined Piros, a moon of Cecrops. A blend of dystopian sf, Lovecraftian horror, and cyberpunk, along with elements of space opera, the novella paints a grim view of the future and of interstellar travel and alien contact.