Molly Gloss ”Lambing Season” är en första kontakten-novell om en kvinna som är ute med fåren och följer ett konstigt ljus. Det är en av mina favoriter i genren – kanske mest eftersom inte så mycket händer.

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.

Den är stillsam novell där mötet inte har någon betydelse för någon annan än de som är med om det. Resten av världen lämnas utanför. Det kan den gott göra.