Lambing Season

by Molly Gloss

• Word count: 5625

• Page count: 9

Lambing Season is a 2002 science fiction short story by Molly Gloss. It is about a sheepherder who one night sees an alien spaceship land near her flock.

Lambing Season follows the story of Delia, a woman who enjoys the solitude of herding sheep each summer. Along with her two dogs and flock of sheep she relishes the natural beauty, silence and long walks that come as part of her job. After one particularly trying evening, she sees a green and yellow flash arc across the sky. As she goes to investigate she finds something incredible, yet downright familiar.

This is an amazingly well written story. It spends several pages setting the scene and describing the countryside in detail. I loved reading her descriptions as they brought back several pleasant memories of my own youth. Not only is it enjoyable reading these pages, but it is time well spent as the setting proves to be an integral part of this story. The last half of Lambing Season describes Delia's actions as she investigates the alien ship. A nice, leisurely read with a familiar yet satisfying ending. Lambing Season was nominated for the 2003 Hugo Award and Nebula Award for Best Short Story. It was also listed in the Locus Poll and Asimov's Reader Poll that same year.

While the dogs worked on the lamb, she stood with both hands pressed to her tired back, looking out at the sheep, the mottled pattern of their whiteness almost opalescent across the black landscape, and the stars thick and bright above the faint outline of the rock ridges, stood there a moment before turning toward the trailer, toward bed, and afterward, she would think how the coyote and the sorrowing ewe and the dark of the July moon and the kink in her back, how all of that came together and was the reason that she was standing there watching the sky, was the reason that she saw the brief, brilliantly green flash in the southwest and then the sulfur yellow streak breaking across the night, southwest to due west on a descending arc onto Lame Man Bench. It was a broad bright ribbon, rainbow-wide, a cyanotic contrail. It was not a meteor, she had seen hundreds of meteors. She stood and looked at it.

Where you can find Lambing Season:

• Lambing Season originally appeared in the July 2002 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction.

• Lambing Season has also been collected in Gardner Dozois's fabulous The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction.^†

• You can read a nice HTML version of this story at the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine.

Molly Gloss lives in Portland, Oregon, and has been honored with several science fiction awards, including the James Tiptree Jr. Award for her novel Wild Life.^† You can learn more about Molly Gloss by visiting her website.

If you like this story you may also enjoy Tideline by Elizabeth Bear.

† - This is an affiliate link.  Learn more on my Privacy & Disclosure page.

(This is a revised version of a post which was originally published on BestScienceFictionStories.com on Feb 20th, 2008.)