IAN WATSON “Slow Birds.” Novelette. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1983. Reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year #13, edited by Terry Carr. Lead story in the collection Slow Birds and Other Stories (Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1985). Nominated for both Nebula and Hugo awards for Best Novelette of 1983.

   Before starting this review in earnest, a description of the Slow Birds of the title is probably a good idea. The setting isn’t stated, but it appears to a rather cut-off area of perhaps a future United States, but if so, an appreciably altered one. The slow birds are a hazard the small population has learned to live with. They are not alive, far from it. They have tubular metal bodies, rounded in front and tapering to a point in back, about the length of a man and the girth of a horse with small wings used for stabilizing, not for propulsion.

   They appear and disappear at random and fly through the air at a constant speed of three feet per minute at the height of a man’s shoulders. Objects they can push their way through, they do. If they can’t, they bank around them. Graffiti on them identifies them, one from another. Eventually one of two things happen. They vanish on their own, or they explode, leaving a circle of flat glass having a radius of two and half miles on the ground below.

   One way to describe how well the inhabitants of five villages which lie close to each other have adapted is to tell you about the competition has developed between them on Mayday every year: a windsail/skating race on a circle of glass next to one of the villages. Jason Babbidge, the story’s primary protagonist has hopes of prevailing against last year’s winner, but as told in some detail, he fails.

   It’s the detail that matters, not necessarily that he fails. Later the same day, Jason’s younger brother climbs onto one of the slow birds, determined to learn, once and for all, where they go when they vanish, only to appear again later. Does he survive the trip? It takes a lifetime for him to return again, with finally an answer.

   When I started this review I was going to tell you what he learned, but now I have decided not to. You may have some idea what the slow birds and why they do what they do, and I did as well. What I did not expect to happen is to have the story turned inside out in such a cosmic mind-blowing fashion, from the scale of a small annual semi-friendly competition to what I will tell you is the exact opposite.

   If ever after I finished a science fiction story by saying to myself “Wow,” this one was it.

   Five stars.