Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is our discussion of the 2019 Hugo Award "best novelette" finalist...

“Nine Last Days on Planet Earth" by Daryl Gregory
It can be read on-line at Tor.com.


This is part of our discussion of the 2019 Hugo Award short story & novelette finalists.

Sort of "Day of the Triffids" style, meteors land across Earth leaving spores for alien plant species. The invasive species start beating out Earth's natural flora, disrupting ecological food sources up & down the food chain,.... and then the biosphere spontaneously makes peace with itself and it's all good, no human action required. So, what?

I did enjoy the verisimilitude of a scene in a restaurant booth LT & Doran talking ideas about flowers attracting bees, butterflies & humingbirds while their tipsy friends are calling out their favorite Latin words. Ipso Facto, per se! Ad hoc! Maybe I just have too many tipsy friends.

I liked how there's all this alien stuff going on in the background, but it's really just a simple story of one person's life (he was born, he had kids, he died). But enjoyed the creativity of the various plants/fungi, and also how we might evolve together (e.g. the bacteria in our gut changing so we can actually eat the new plants to make up for the ones that we lost).

Still, even if the aliens considered it a gift and not an invasion, I'd be pretty angry that it wiped out some of my own native plants in the process.

I must admit I thought Calibri messed up the conversion and chopped the end off, it was a bit abrupt with the "some plant moving in the background". Was that Mo eating LT? :)

at the end: I was thinking it was his little SLO-Boy person-plant that got huge?
I enjoyed it in how it balanced details of life / slice of life with the science exploration of this event.
I liked the emphasis on human time bs plant time. It feels a more realistic story somehow than all the crazy and sudden apocalypses that are the usual way stories like these go.

Rachel wrote: "It feels a more realistic story somehow than all the crazy and sudden apocalypses that are the usual way stories like these go. ..."

Short stories & novelettes, in particular, generally prefer fast-onset problems because it's hard to cover decades in 15000 words or less.

G33z3r wrote: "Rachel wrote: "It feels a more realistic story somehow than all the crazy and sudden apocalypses that are the usual way stories like these go. ..."

Short stories & novelettes, in particular, gener..."

Although this one neatly covered an entire lifetime without feeling rushed, or leaving out what was going on either in LT life or with the world around him. Definitely well done in that regard.