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mferrante83's review against another edition
4.0
I’m pretty terrible at reading short fiction. I’ve said that before. It isn’t an easy form to write in and when reading it I always feels the siren call of longer prose. So, when I say that A is for Alien is one of the more engrossing collections I’ve read, amongst a very tiny list of collections I’ve actually read, you should understand that for me that is pretty high praise. Perhaps it is Kiernan’s use of one of my favorite Lovecraft quotes as the collection’s opening epithet but from the very beginning I found reading the the stories collected here to be a pleasant, though frequently bleak and depressing, experience.
Full review available here.
Full review available here.
megapolisomancy's review against another edition
2.0
Kiernan, it is becoming clear to me, walks a very fine line between the "gothic," as in a literary focus on the sublime found within an oppressively dark atmosphere, and the "gothic," as in teenagers who wear black leather trenchcoats and listen to awful industrial rock and get off on freaking out the squares (parents). I think it's clear where my sympathies lie.
Either way, we have here a relentlessly grim set of (beautifully written!) stories that infuse a science-fictional setting with a kind of pestilential cosmic dread by way of Lovecraft filtered through H. R. Giger. This isn't just a dichotomy of mood, either: these stories also walk a narrative tightrope between a kind of standard SF mode of "realism" (you know what I mean) and a more surrealist expression of dream logic. This interaction is even further mirrored in the subject matter of each story, all of which quite literally involve the infusion of human bodies with nightmarish alien elements- be they actual extraterrestrials, Lovecraftian demonic entities, or simple human technology.
As you might have picked up from the first paragraph, this fixation of Kiernan's on bodies works better at some points than others, hitting rock bottom when (you guessed it) it combines with her "gothic" (the bad kind) "edginess" to produce stories focused on sexual violence as the means to be creepy and shocking. I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: can we have a moratorium on that awful, problematic, tiresome tactic, PLEASE?
Riding the White Bull was by far my favorite story in the collection, and incidentally basically a note-for-note transposition of Kiernan's "Houses Under The Sea", which was my first exposure to her writing and what led to me picking up this collection. Both stories revolve around an investigation into some sort of vague disaster, a video recording of which is constantly and hauntingly referred to. They also share a noir-ish tone, but where "Houses" focused on a suicidal water cult, "Riding" deals with the aftermath of some sort of alien plague brought back from Jupiter. This idea of an alien plague that physically deconstructs its victims recurs throughout these stories, as do human-esque androids and machine-esque cyborgs and bio-engineered post-humans, to the point where it isn't entirely clear if they all take place in the same future history or not. Given the similarity of themes and the dreamlike atmosphere of much of this material, though, I guess that doesn't really matter at all.
Faces in Revolving Souls: good, but nothing to blow me away. Society has by and large rejected those who have chosen to refashion their bodies with bits and pieces from various animal species (each becoming a "species of one"), but what happens when a woman attempting to join them is rejected by the new technology itself? Actually the more I think about this one the more annoyed I am by its literal approach to "beautiful unique snowflake" individuality.
Zero Summer had a lot of elements that I enjoyed but they never really converged the way I wanted or expected them to. Another one told in a kind of fragmentary style, wherein the tale of a pair of astronauts realize that they are actually disposable androids is interspersed with the story of the ex-junky from whom the personality of one of the machines was derived.
The Pearl Diver, even more than the previous story, frustrated me with an excellent setup (a woman muddling her way through the day-to-day office drone in a corporate panopticon dystopia) that then disintegrated into a dreamlike experience of salvation (?) ... or something.
In View of Nothing: A woman, having failed in some sort of assassination attempt, is being interrogated by her target. Or is having a nightmare? Or is dead? Who knows? This, I think, is where the combination of realism and nightmare worked best, because the character and narrative were actually slipping back and forth between the two, and the descriptions of the city outside of the room where she was confined were truly nightmarish. Buuuuuuuuut this was also the story where weird rape fantasy stuff starts intruding, ruining the other aspects of this story with disappointingly juvenile teenage goth bullshit. I mean, seriously, you think that presenting a woman being sexually assaulted in some sort of "alluring" manner puts you OUTSIDE of mainstream society?
Ode to Katan Amano: Ugh. This one is about an android sex slave who becomes obsessed with some sort of doll or puppet as an object of salvation. At the time I assumed this was the story most oriented toward the teenage goth "take that mom and dad!" attitude...
A Season of Broken Dolls: ... but I was wrong! This one I didn't even bother finishing, another trans-humanist examination of shocking mutilations and two women living together who actually hate one another and I just couldn't force myself to get through it. Kiernan's tricks were wearing pretty thin by this point.
Bradbury Weather: My second-favorite of the bunch, concerning a woman living on Mars (inexplicably inhabited only by women?) who is looking for her ex-girlfriend, who has left to join some sort of cult dedicated to sacrificing their bodies to yet another alien plague/lifeform that incorporates individual humans as disgusting Giger-esque biomechanical organs, or something. Like "Riding the White Bull," this one really skillfully generates a creepy, despairing atmosphere as the reader is slowly fed clues about the looming extraterrestrial threat even while being guided around these desolate (post-apocalyptic?) communities wherein humans themselves were and are the agents of destruction.
The first and last stories (and maybe "The Pearl Diver") are worthwhile, skip the rest.
Either way, we have here a relentlessly grim set of (beautifully written!) stories that infuse a science-fictional setting with a kind of pestilential cosmic dread by way of Lovecraft filtered through H. R. Giger. This isn't just a dichotomy of mood, either: these stories also walk a narrative tightrope between a kind of standard SF mode of "realism" (you know what I mean) and a more surrealist expression of dream logic. This interaction is even further mirrored in the subject matter of each story, all of which quite literally involve the infusion of human bodies with nightmarish alien elements- be they actual extraterrestrials, Lovecraftian demonic entities, or simple human technology.
As you might have picked up from the first paragraph, this fixation of Kiernan's on bodies works better at some points than others, hitting rock bottom when (you guessed it) it combines with her "gothic" (the bad kind) "edginess" to produce stories focused on sexual violence as the means to be creepy and shocking. I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: can we have a moratorium on that awful, problematic, tiresome tactic, PLEASE?
Riding the White Bull was by far my favorite story in the collection, and incidentally basically a note-for-note transposition of Kiernan's "Houses Under The Sea", which was my first exposure to her writing and what led to me picking up this collection. Both stories revolve around an investigation into some sort of vague disaster, a video recording of which is constantly and hauntingly referred to. They also share a noir-ish tone, but where "Houses" focused on a suicidal water cult, "Riding" deals with the aftermath of some sort of alien plague brought back from Jupiter. This idea of an alien plague that physically deconstructs its victims recurs throughout these stories, as do human-esque androids and machine-esque cyborgs and bio-engineered post-humans, to the point where it isn't entirely clear if they all take place in the same future history or not. Given the similarity of themes and the dreamlike atmosphere of much of this material, though, I guess that doesn't really matter at all.
Faces in Revolving Souls: good, but nothing to blow me away. Society has by and large rejected those who have chosen to refashion their bodies with bits and pieces from various animal species (each becoming a "species of one"), but what happens when a woman attempting to join them is rejected by the new technology itself? Actually the more I think about this one the more annoyed I am by its literal approach to "beautiful unique snowflake" individuality.
Zero Summer had a lot of elements that I enjoyed but they never really converged the way I wanted or expected them to. Another one told in a kind of fragmentary style, wherein the tale of a pair of astronauts realize that they are actually disposable androids is interspersed with the story of the ex-junky from whom the personality of one of the machines was derived.
The Pearl Diver, even more than the previous story, frustrated me with an excellent setup (a woman muddling her way through the day-to-day office drone in a corporate panopticon dystopia) that then disintegrated into a dreamlike experience of salvation (?) ... or something.
In View of Nothing: A woman, having failed in some sort of assassination attempt, is being interrogated by her target. Or is having a nightmare? Or is dead? Who knows? This, I think, is where the combination of realism and nightmare worked best, because the character and narrative were actually slipping back and forth between the two, and the descriptions of the city outside of the room where she was confined were truly nightmarish. Buuuuuuuuut this was also the story where weird rape fantasy stuff starts intruding, ruining the other aspects of this story with disappointingly juvenile teenage goth bullshit. I mean, seriously, you think that presenting a woman being sexually assaulted in some sort of "alluring" manner puts you OUTSIDE of mainstream society?
Ode to Katan Amano: Ugh. This one is about an android sex slave who becomes obsessed with some sort of doll or puppet as an object of salvation. At the time I assumed this was the story most oriented toward the teenage goth "take that mom and dad!" attitude...
A Season of Broken Dolls: ... but I was wrong! This one I didn't even bother finishing, another trans-humanist examination of shocking mutilations and two women living together who actually hate one another and I just couldn't force myself to get through it. Kiernan's tricks were wearing pretty thin by this point.
Bradbury Weather: My second-favorite of the bunch, concerning a woman living on Mars (inexplicably inhabited only by women?) who is looking for her ex-girlfriend, who has left to join some sort of cult dedicated to sacrificing their bodies to yet another alien plague/lifeform that incorporates individual humans as disgusting Giger-esque biomechanical organs, or something. Like "Riding the White Bull," this one really skillfully generates a creepy, despairing atmosphere as the reader is slowly fed clues about the looming extraterrestrial threat even while being guided around these desolate (post-apocalyptic?) communities wherein humans themselves were and are the agents of destruction.
The first and last stories (and maybe "The Pearl Diver") are worthwhile, skip the rest.
nancywif's review against another edition
2.0
I really like most of her novels, but most of these stories just did not hold my interest. The first and last stories are the best, and they made me not dislike the whole collection. Since I have read all of her novels I thought I should check out some of her short story collections. I cannot decide if I just don't like short stories very much or if it was just the subject matter of these stories that made it sort of ho-hum. I'll try one of her other collections sometime to see if I like those stories better.
littleowllost's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
impending_feta's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
cindywho's review
2.0
I often don't love short stories, but I keep reading them! - Kiernan's creepy dark vision crosses over into future territory and sometimes it made sense. The hopelessly dark lovecraftian visions kept me in a grumpy mood all week. The one that left the most impression was the poor little fetish girl at her first conference.
abetterjulie's review
4.0
Her writing is like reading the depths of a dream where you feel as if you have been there before, but there are secrets you can't quite see in the shadowed corners of the room. Rich and gritty. I did wish her endings were a little more clear in some stories.
kellswitch's review
4.0
My reaction to this book is extremely mixed. I don't tend to read dystopias, I don't need all of my stories to be bright and sunshine filled, but I don't usually enjoy overly dark ones either and this is a very dark and nihilistic collection of stories. However I found the language use to be both beautiful and lyrical and I very much felt compelled to read each story no matter how dark. And there is not one truly uplifting moment in any of the stories, they all show the slow, cold disintegration of our societies, our species, in some cases our planet. No explanation is ever given for how we ended up where we do in the stories and the only thing that seems for certain is that things are not going to be getting better. My biggest issue with some of the stories is that there was no ending or explanation at all, not just leaving things vague or up to interpretation, NO explanation for what happened or why, those stories were annoying and almost felt like a waste of time. The only reason I don't consider them a waste of time is because they at least intrigued me enough to be annoyed and really WANT answers. As one example, in one story we are told a character is chosen because she is a zero summer. We are never told, nor even given hints at what that means. Overall though the stories were unique, the worlds created felt unique and I would love to read more based in them, as dark and depressing as they are, and the authors use of language is beautiful and lyrical and I am glad to have read this book.
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