The Dry Salvages

by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Award-winning author Caitlin R. Kiernan, best known for contemporary settings, 'Ggothnoir' tales of pain and wonder, and atmospheric stories of Lovecraftian terror, was first published as an author of dark science fiction. Now Kiernan returns to SF with a masterful thirty-thousand word novella, The Dry Salvages.

Three centuries in the future, though much of Earth has been crippled by war, pollution, and catastrophic climatic change, man has at last travelled to the stars and even found evidence of at least one extraterrestrial civilization. In a bleak and frozen Paris, at the dawn of the 22nd Century, an old woman is forced to confront the consequences of her part in these discoveries and the ghosts that have haunted her for almost fifty years. The last surviving member of the crew of the starship Montelius, exo-paleontologist Dr. Audrey Cather struggles to remember what she's spent so long trying to forget—the nightmare she once faced almost ninety trillion miles from Earth.

Genres: Science Fiction, Horror, Novella, Dystopia, Dark Fantasy, Fiction, Lovecraftian

123 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2004

About the author

Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan is an Irish-born American published paleontologist and author of science fiction and dark fantasy works, including ten novels, series of comic books, and more than two hundred and fifty published short stories, novellas, and vignettes.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception..."

T.S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages"

Caitlín R. Kiernan is a skilled cartographer of horror landscapes, mapping out other-dimensional territories within various urban horror-fantasies (many with eye-rolling covers that apparently do an incredible disservice to the prose within). I'm not too familiar with her work, outside of her compelling, masterful short story "Houses Under the Sea"... but she is On The List. I fully intend to discover her worlds. I'm not sure why I decided to start with what I think is her lone foray into science fiction; maybe it was because I am always drawn to horror in space. a spaceship or a semi-deserted world functioning as a sort of haunted house? count me in!

The Dry Salvages concerns itself with an old woman's memory, her exploration of a particularly ill-fated voyage to an abandoned world and the unnameable horror that lurks there. there's much in this novella about memory itself, its lack of reliability and our own interest in editing our memories, for different reasons but often just to allow us to keep ourselves together. we edit our memories so we don't have to live in the past, in our past mistakes, and Kiernan's prickly protagonist does the same.

honestly, I wasn't too interested in all of that. if I want to read a book about how we reshape our memories, I'll re-read Atwood's superb The Blind Assassin. Kiernan certainly accomplishes her mission - she's a wonderful writer, elegant and subtle and poetic, excellent with the characterization as well - but I was more interested in the mission itself. the novella is one long build-up as our heroine sorts through her memories and deals with a vaguely threatening government cover-up and a charming replicant who lives down the hall. I enjoyed all of the very slowly escalating suspense. I also enjoyed the disturbing ambiguity of it all because I am the sort of reader who dislikes having everything spelled out in my horror.

when the horror does come, it is as ambiguous as ever. I actually had to read the short sequence (a mere 4 pages) a second time to fully understand the horror of the situation. those 4 pages did not disappoint; I was thoroughly chilled. the whole novella worked just fine, although perhaps nothing amazing, nothing I need to re-read... but man those 4 pages were stunning in their strange and terrible implications.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful hard-SF story, an easy 5+ stars! Kiernan uses her background as a working paleontologist to set up her alien planet and lifeforms, on a 'nearby' exoplanet that really could be inhabitable (it's in a planetology database). The moon Piros orbits a smallish Jovian named Cecrops. Piros used to host an alien mining operation, and had a rich biosphere before it lost its water, some 350 million years ago. The narrator, Audrey Cather, is the expedition's biologist and paleontologist. We soon learn that she was the only survivor among her 4-person crew and the larger crew of the ANSA starship Gilgamesh, which is in trouble. Exactly what trouble, I'll leave you to learn for yourself. But there are some genuinely creepy moments enroute.

One of Audrey's crewmates, Umuchandra, is a particularly colorful squid-human cross, complete with chromophores in her skin and vestigial suction-cups on her back. And she is wired with a squid-like nervous system, with dendrons far larger & faster than stock humans. So she is very fast and very strong. And tall!

Audrey is back on Earth writing her memoirs in a cold Paris apartment, living on her meager Agency pension. She befriends a Synthetic person neighbor, who makes her living as an astrologer. One of many nice touches is that the climate of northern Europe has become much colder. Snowstorms in June! Nice to see an author paying attention, that climate change doesn't have to go just one way.

Kiernan describes her work as a "short novel." Indeed, even at around 30,000 words, there's more than enough ideas and material to make a much longer book. I think her choice to make the story-telling elliptical and non-linear works really well. This is densely-packed stuff. You will need to pay close attention while reading -- and I plan to re-read it down the line. Her writing craft is, well, extraordinary. I was a bit concerned that the buildup to the Big Reveal might lead to disappointment, as happens with many lesser writers. You needn't worry about that here! My only criticism is the Addendum, which adds horror for no real gain. I advise you to skip it. Otherwise, a truly remarkable work!

[Althea Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A re-read. I think I appreciated this more, the second time around. A small ground of scientists is sent to join a research team already at a remote moon. When they arrive, they discover that something has gone horribly wrong: the humans are missing or insane, and the humanoid robots are the only ones keeping the mission afloat. Told by a surviving member of the mission, looking back on the events from a distance of many years, the story explores some interesting and complex aspects of what it means to be human, with synthetic, 'normal' and genetically-modified characters, and no easy answers provided. It also serves up some good old-fashioned Lovecraftian horror.


First read - Sept 2008 (or earlier)
A novella of sci-fi horror - not bad!

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant writing, but very brief. While this has been called Kiernan's return to sci fi, it is very much a horror novel. If you remove the starships and andrdoids, you are left with a Lovecraftian tale of scientists who go to the edge of the abyss and find madness. The writing is wonderful and the tension, particularly in the second half of the book is spectacular. My biggest complaint is that the book is brief, and doesn't give suitable attention to relationships between characters and the incident they experience. It felt like it could have been explored more fully. That being said, the tone was wonderful and there is something to be said for leaving the horror to the imagination of the reader.

[Tudor Ciocarlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best SF novellas ever, right there with Beggars in Spain, Nightwings, Houston, Houston, Do You Read? or Nightflyers.

[Felice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second time I've read this short novel, because I didn't feel that I gave it a proper chance the first time around--maybe a decade ago. Then I read it for plot--well, that was a mistake. And I read it for an answer. Not totally a mistake, only partly one. More relaxed in my reading this time I was still occasionally bothered by all the foreshadowing and the author's need to telegraph dread. But the writing is lovely. The "world" is beautifully done, just the right amount given and withheld for it to be believable and even intriguing, and the characters came much more to life this time, despite the fact that some of them weren't entirely human. I know that she is best known for Gothic and horror but this works well as a sci fi story too. My final evaluation is that it is very well done. I'll read her stories next.

[Andrija · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Dry Salvages could also be called "A book in three pens." Taken from the longhand account of Dr. Audrey Cather in 24th century Paris, it is her attempt to come to grips with the events surrounding the starship Montelius trip to Gilese 876. The previous expedition, sent to an exoplanet to study the fossil record and the remains of an alien mining operation over seven thousand years old, has gone dark. Of the four people to go, only Dr. Cather returns.

This short novel speaks more in what it does not describe than what it does describe. The narrator deliberately leaves massive gaps, never answering the most important questions but leaving open tantalizing possibilities. Beautifully constructed, the brevity is its biggest downfall. Much like it's spiritual ancestor, At the Mountains of Madness, the hints it leaves behind demand more information. I wanted to explore the ruins, see the reactions and get closer to the edge of darkness the author dances around. This is not a book for any who want pat answers. But, if you are willing to lose yourself in atmosphere and mystery, there are rewards under the cold, red sun of this other world.

[Sarah Wu · Rating 2 out of 5]

[2.5 stars] was craving something clean and tight and sci-fi, so picked up this short novel. the dry salvages is about as sci-fi as it gets, full of edgy, futuristic ideas about physics and biology, with an abundance of short-hand and made-up terminology that teeters toward heavy-handed, with most of the concepts having already been done before by other works. the worldbuilding is probably the most interesting part: the main cast pretty strictly serves to carry the plot forward. the plot itself reads like a semi-scary doctor who episode from the mid-2010s or a less explicit space horror movie in the style of Event Horizon (1997), Life (2017) etc. the story is essentially an exercise in building suspense, but i found the payoff a bit disappointing as it wasn't anything i didn't see coming, and the characters' constant waffling and the narrator's tortured internal monologue as the story got closer to the climax became a little overwrought at the end-- i found myself thinking "ok, get on with it!" overall, not bothered because this was a quick read and there were some interesting concepts. read as a crossover between lovecraftian horror and blade runner.

[Patricia Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set 300 years into a bleak future, Man has reached the stars, and through space travel discovered the remains of a civilization on a dead moon thousands of miles from Earth. Fifty years later, the last surviving crew member of the star ship Montelius secretly writes down what she remembers, and what Earth's leaders want her to forget, about that harrowing mission. Although I'm not usually a fan of hard sci-fi, at 123 pages this novelette is masterful in language, characters and setting. Atmospheric and powerful.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the beautiful use of language in this book may make up for a narrative that bounces around too much, it doesn't save the book from its ending. The first third of the novel built up an impressive sense of dread, but there was no payoff. I was left wondering why, exactly, three of the characters offed themselves for the milk-and-water events at the core of the story.
One of the earlier reviewers may have been correct about the problem with seeing Cthulhu.

[Jared Millet · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Dry Salvages is a wonderfully spooky SF novella I picked up just in time for Halloween. Kiernan takes a concept that could have easily been a cheap, throwaway pulp short and breathes an incredible amount of depth and character into it. And dread - don't forget the dread. Since it was a small-print-run novella from Subterranean it might not be easy to track down, but that's what Interlibrary Loan is for.

[Joell Smith-Borne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is pretty much hard core science fiction horror. Scary in spaceships, but I'm being flip and this book is way better than that sounds. It's a quick read, almost more a novella than a novel, and I read it through then reread the last 75 pages and decided that if interstellar anthropology ever actually becomes a thing, no way I'm signing up.

[Mark Tallen · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars...This is a very well written novella that I really enjoyed. I read this from The best of Kiernan volume 1 called 'Two World's And In Between'. Caitlin uses wonderful prose and her style used for this story is very effective and it kept me eagerly turning the pages. Recommended for weird fiction fans.

[Nelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is *almost* brilliant - a fine introduction to an author I will certainly read more of - this probably deserves a second read at least.

[Nicholas Siebers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Accessible sci-fi with some superficial resemblance to the SA Corey space opera series "The Expanse", but with very creepy undertones and a Lovecraftian structure in which more is slowly revealed. It is a slim volume and a quick read, and left me wanting to know more... but also maybe glad I don't! Highly recommended.

[xenu01 · Rating 4 out of 5]

God, this book was so good. I was already in love with Ms. Kiernan's prose because of The Red Tree, but this tipped me over into full-on awe. I don't even remember what happens but I still get shivery snippets lodged in my brain sometimes. Perhaps it is time for a summer reread.

[Laura Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite being one of her only sic-fi works, this story was fantastic. I've read much of Kiernan's work, and this suits up wonderfully to be one of her best works.

[Mark Schiffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cryptic, horrific slice of sci fi horror. So, so good.

[Will Dominique · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like there are prob more complex layers to this book that would shift how I view the narrative and could deepen my appreciation for it, if only I were "smart enough" to catch and dissect their meaning. Alas, my two remaining brain cells are too preoccupied with university burn-out at the moment to facilitate the critical thinking + literary analysis that I'm sure would have enriched my reading experience

[Reagan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kiernan is one of the greats, hands down. This novel in particular was great. The characters were interesting, the plot was engaging, and the setup was great. Couple that with Kiernan's insanely beautiful writing, and you have a sci-fi story that you wish never ended.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. A short novel that leaves you wanting more. No answers, no real conclusion, just a mystery. Unsettling and eerie. I really like Kiernan- she writes like a modern Ray Bradbury. Also liked her "A is For Alien" and "Threshold" and the "Red Tree". Did not like her "Drowning Girl" as much.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Augh, so good.

[Esha Nas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great hard scifi work, great terror work as well. Sad to hear the movie fell through, but the book does more justice, in a way.

[Luke Hannafin]

This was a rare re-read for me. It was not the book I remember, exactly, which is kind of funny since it is, to a degree, a book of slippery memories. I still like it, though. The right mix of cynicism and horror and adventure.