he shining silver invaders are referred to as "slow birds" because they look something like birds -- at least, they have stubby wings and tails -- and they hang in the air, "flying" forward at the rate of about three feet per minute. They're so thick-skinned that enterprising children frequently carve graffiti into them. No one knows exactly what they are, where they come from, why they appear suddenly out of thin air and then disappear again an hour or a day later. Nor does anyone know why they occasionally explode, melting huge areas of land into flat circles of undifferentiated, smooth glass. All anyone will say is that the birds have been coming and going for a century, and there's no point in thinking too hard about them.
For Jason and Daniel Babbage, the slow birds are just part of life, much like the yearly skating competition held at one of five nearby villages. Each village hugs its own glass field out of superstitious hope -- the birds have never struck twice in overlapping spots, so the edge of a glass plain is logically the safest place to be.
But Daniel's still young and tactless enough to go to the yearly skate race and ask the questions that his elders don't bother with any more: "Where do the birds come from? Where do they go when they aren't here?" And when no one can give him a definite answer, Daniel's young and foolish enough to climb onto a bird's back and find out for himself -- with disastrous results for his family, his village, and eventually his entire civilization.
Crisp, languid details
Ian Watson's intriguing but plodding 1983 story, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, gains a little new life in this new audiotape version. This audio format is occasionally annoying -- particularly due to reader Jim Bond's inconsistent attempts to give Watson's characters accents, which, when he remembers to use them, come across as a haphazard blend of Dickensian Cockney and Minnesotan twang. But the tale itself, a 1984 finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, has some genuine surprises up its metaphorical sleeves.
Watson never makes it clear whether the story takes place on Earth or some distant planet; this is mostly a microcosmic look at how one great unknown can shape the smallest aspects of the world around it. And when Watson keeps to this small focus, he's fascinating. His crisp, languid sense for the tiny details of glass-skating technique, or the thoughts that go through Jason's head when he faces death, make this a winning and compelling story for most of its length.
Unfortunately, like Bond, Watson eventually becomes a little too ambitious. The story ends with an awkward leap from small details to glossed-over decades of history, losing both its tight sense of narrative and its admirable focus on character.
A more straightforward route for author and reader alike would have improved this tape considerably. But even an uneven mystery can still evoke deep curiosity -- and faults aside, there's quite a bit of both depth and mystery waiting in Slow Birds.
