Achronal Press, an Odd Small Publisher

Achronal Press is an experiment in print-on-demand technology and internet access to innovative, original material. We are a work in progress and an exploration, publishing top-quality, difficult-to-classify fiction. Our books are available at Amazon and other booksellers.

Wayland's Principia
by Richard Garfinkle
ISBN 978-0-578-03514-7
Trade Paperback, 490 pages
August 2009
$32.95 USD

Alien: Unlike in appearance, history, and thought. Alien: Distant, too distant to reach, too far to travel in a universe bound by the speed of light. Alien: They did not come, but they sent word, words so strange that humans would have to devote their lives to mimicking alien appearance, taking in alien history, and following alien thought in order to understand them. No longer so human, generation by generation these Humans-Reaching-to-the-Alien become Guests on their own world.

Guests learning to think like five alien species so strange that they do not have names for names, let alone names for themselves.

Guests bringing gifts, the thoughts, ways of life, and technology of beings who share nothing in common with humanity or each other but the need for survival, the ability to think, and senses that look outward on the universe.

Earth grew used to these gifts delivered by alien voice and human hand, to alien medicine, alien power sources, alien social organization, alien mathematics. Earth grew comfortable with its Guests.

Until some of the aliens, on a ship in a long slow two-hundred-year arc from world to world, announce that they are coming to Earth to welcome their hosts and Guests.

Hearing of this, one voice cries out a different word for Alien:

Monster

Wayland's Principia is a hard science fiction novel exploring truly alien ways of thinking and living.

Wayland's Principia is available from Amazon Books here.

Achronal Press presents "Igor" and "IgorImage", unusual new computer animation and imaging software for Macintosh computers by Richard Garfinkle. Full details are available on the Igor animation website

Donkey photo, funhouse mirror manipulated

Exaltations
by Richard Garfinkle
ISBN 978-0-578-02362-5
Hardcover, 270 pages
June 2009
$40.00 USD

Peter Refton is a hunter of human lives. Across a score and more of Earths he has caught and captured the most fascinating and pivotal people. The knight who reformed Charlemagne's army. The bureaucrat who oversaw China's expansion and control. The inspirer of wisdom in a million seekers of understanding. Peter Refton is that most dangerous of hunters: the biographer. He has made trophy-stories of so many, and boldly carries their lives around from world to world. Then one day, a story comes to hunt his life.

Now, caught between worlds and aided by a knight, an ancestress, a sorceress and twin warriors, Peter Refton is on a Quest to --

-- To free himself from the coils of the most voracious of stories: the Quest. To fight the Quest itself -- and those who told the story onto him.

Exaltations is an allegorical novel about the ways the channels of stories affect human thought, and about love, faith, devotion, and the tyranny of quests, involving alternate histories and fictional realities wrapped up in a stirring adventure story.

Exaltations is available from Amazon Books here.

The content of this website (graphics, text and other elements) is © Copyright 2009 Richard Garfinkle and Alessandra Kelley. This material may not be reprinted or retransmitted in whole or in part without the expressed written consent of the publisher. All rights reserved worldwide.