★★★★☆ – Alright, yeah!

‘Look, there are all those bits that have cracked off the tree,’ Bretet said, making out like he knows all about carbon lifeforms. ‘Something must have put them there.’
‘Leaves,’ I said, remembering our last Earth lesson. ‘They’re called leaves.’

I love a story that describes familiar concepts in unfamiliar terms. There was a series of sci-fi novels written from different species’ perspectives, weren’t there? Some squid creatures or some such? Can anyone tell me what that was? Either way, it’s as titillating here as always.

I can admire the focus and restraint that this story shows. Kemp exudes somewhat of the quality of a Zen master: Countless trifling questions that would niggle at any sci-fi writer abound – How do these boulder creatures locomote? How do they, concretely, restrict the humans? Why are they such staunch environmentalists? – but she either lacks the impulse to get into them, or rightly recognizes that answering them would be liable to at best yield an “oh, huh” and at worst wreck the pacing or eat up precious word count.

The decision to set the story not from the freedom fighter’s perspective but from that of a doubter is an intelligent one – it partly replaces the default tension of “will they succeed or fail?” with a feeling of watching a trainwreck in slow motion. Not that the underdog perspective doesn’t work – far from it; it’s the popular mode for a reason and worked just fine for “Dreamer in the Dark” – but this feels perhaps particularly fitting for the theme and setup of this anthology: that it’s about Earth being thoroughly messed up in a series of freaky-deaky ways.

Incidental spoilers for (this short story and) Earthshock (Classic Doctor Who, 1982): In a rare move, this short story breaks from a particularly famous part of Doctor Who continuity by replacing the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event – rather than Adric on a space freighter, the sapient boulder race from this story (the “Kyal”) decided they’d had enough of theropods. Truly immaterial in the grand scheme of things – especially given that Doctor Who is preeminently unconcerned with “canon” and “continuity” – and perhaps the author hadn’t even seen Earthshock… but it’s fun to see such a concrete manifestation of Faction Paradox’s growth into its own entity, piddling though it may be.