I just read the novelette “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” by Daryl Gregory, and I loved it. If you liked my novel Semiosis, you might like this story, too.

You can read it for free at the Tor.com site, or buy it for your e-reader for only 99¢. Purchase links are at the end of the story.

It tells what happens to a boy when seeds from outer space land on Earth. Are the seeds a disaster? How do they change people’s lives? How do they change the Earth? Why were they sent? None of the answers come easy for the boy in the story, and some of the answers might surprise you, especially in the last few paragraphs when he finally understands.

The year 1968 is getting some half-centennial fame these days. It’s being remembered, rightly, as a difficult time.

The Vietnam War was at its peak, Lyndon Baines Johnson announced he would not seek re-election, Martin Luther King was assassinated, the Black Panthers and Oakland police had a deadly shoot-out, students rioted in Paris, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, the Prague Spring was put down by an invasion, the Democratic National Convention was marked by riots, Richard Nixon won the presidential election — and, in rare good news, Apollo 8 made the first manned-flight orbits of the Moon.

I was thirteen years old.

Some of the unrest and technological change became reflected in the English language. Here are a few of the words and expressions that according to Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler 1968 page made their first appearances in print that year.

The expression gavel-to-gavel probably reflects coverage of the Democratic National Convention. The hippie counterculture had also reached a high point, with new expressions like love beads and peace sign. The Youth International Party also got its start, resulting in the word yippie. A related development was the new acronym SWAT, meaning a police Special Weapons And Tactics unit.

Meanwhile, NASA was busy with the Apollo missions and other space exploration. This gave rise to the words Earthrise, geosynchronous, and pulsar.

The computer mouse debuted in 1968. So did some new computer expressions: alt key, bit rate, word processing, and data mining.

Finally, the expression cash bar first appeared, although the activity it described probably existed before we had a name for it. I was too young to know.

I’ve been traveling.

This morning I was driving north on I-75 in Ohio. Going the other way was a convoy of cherry-picker cranes, the kind crews use to repair damaged electrical lines. I think they were being positioned for recovery efforts after Florence hits the East Coast.

On Tuesday morning I was in Michigan eating breakfast at a Best Western motel. I was up very early, and everyone else in the breakfast room was obviously a tradesman: construction site workers and truck drivers, strong men used to going from job to job and working with their hands.

Television screens on the walls played the CNN morning news, and when it ran a segment on Hurricane Florence, the room went silent and every man watched somberly. These men, or their friends and coworkers, might be called on to haul supplies and repair or rebuild the storm’s damage as their next job. They looked grim, not joyful, at the prospect of plentiful work. Those jobs would bring them face to face with loss and grief, and the future might be hard on their hearts as well as their hands.

I’ll make three public appearances in the first two weeks of September.

On Tuesday, September 4, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., I’ll be at the American Writers Museum in Chicago. I’m part of the Fearless Women in Science Fiction panel with Mary Robinette Kowal, whose latest book is The Fated Sky, and with Tessa Gratton, author of The Queens of Innis Lear. I’ve met them both before, and they and their books are amazing. You can find out more about the panel here at the tickets page and at the Facebook event page.

On Sunday, September 9, I’ll be at the Kerrytown Book Festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’ll appear on a panel with Mary Robinette Kowal again and with Jacqueline Carey. Our panel is from 3 to 3:45 p.m., with a book signing from 3:45 to 4 p.m. You can find out more about the festival at its website and Facebook event page.

Finally, on Monday, September 10, at 7 p.m., I’ll be at the Cromaine Library in Hartland, Michigan, as part of a series called Sallie’s Author Visit. I’ll talk about my novel and getting published. Here’s the library’s webpage and details about the visit.

If you’re in Chicago or Michigan, I hope I get to meet you.

— Sue Burke

Yaqteenya: The Old World by Yasser Bahjatt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked up this book at the freebie table at Worldcon 76 in San Jose and read it on the airplane home. The author was on a panel I moderated, “Exploring a Wider Universe: Beyond the world of Anglophone SF/F,” where he represented the history of Saudi Arabian science fiction and its hopes for the future with deep knowledge and entertaining anecdotes.

When I paged through it, I decided to take it home because I was intrigued by its references to Andalusia, since I lived in Spain for 17 years, and by the story-telling style of discovered documents. Yaqteenya is alternate history, with dashes of science fiction and fantasy. After Granada falls to the Spaniards in 1492 and the Muslims are betrayed and expelled (which really happened), some of them sail west and create an Islamic settlement in the New World. Many of the indigenous tribes there convert. But problems develop that can best be solved by finding out what has happened in the Old World. A young man rises to the challenge. First, though, he must help bring peace to Yaqteenya.

The adventure is fast-paced, carefully structured, and rich with details. Arabic culture permeates the characters’ actions and attitudes. I give it four stars for that – but not five. It could have benefitted from a more professional translation (“brake” and “break” are different words), and the author falls into common cliches, especially the false idea that if someone is bonked on the head, they conveniently black out and later wake up and are just fine besides a bruise. In reality that person has suffered serious brain damage.

Still, the scope of the story is exhilarating, and Islamic alternate history adds an enriching perspective to the question of “what if” that underlays the genre. What if events in 1492 had gone differently? The whole world would have a new trajectory.

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