"After a Lean Winter" by Dave Wolverton / David Farland

 

First appeared in Kristine Rusch's F&SF and in Kevin J. Anderson Global Dispatches, reprinted by David Hartwell in his annual retrospective. It was up for the Locus and Nebula awards.

What would have happened had Jack London experienced H. G. Wells's Martian invasion in Alaska?

NOTE: Indirect Spoilers.

Jack London and H. G. Wells might have shared some political visions, but they'd have likely parted ways on where Wells treads here, a surprisingly contemporary perspective on invasion.

But Wolverton finds the path where the two might have met in a kind of survival of the fittest. In a brilliant move, Wolverton extends Wells's speculative ideas and stretches them to their limits at the edge of wilderness and wildness of men, microbes, aliens, and beasts.

Wolverton contrasts the two writerly perspectives with a thesis and antithesis, and steps outside to come up with a neat synthesis. Perhaps "synthesis" is the exactly wrong word for where this story goes. This may be Farland's masterwork of SF. It probably would have or should have won awards had it landed the ending. Still, an impressive tale.