Fairy Tale Spotlight: Tabby [Short Story Review]

[I spoil the entire story.]

"Tabby" is a short science fiction story written by Winston K. Marks. It was published in 1954. It is not a story about a cat. There are no cats mentioned in any manner whatsoever. Glad I could get that out of the way.

The story is about a bunch of marine researchers who are set up on an island. A flying saucer crash-lands into the the water, and, when the top opens up, it releases a bunch of flying insects into the air. Although they try to recover the spaceship, it ends up self-detonating shortly afterwards.

Already this looks like some form of alien attack, but the trick of the story has to do with figuring out what kind of attack it is. At once, the researchers switch from fish to insect research. The bug is a new species not indigenous to Earth. Although they do give it a new scientific name, the nickname for the bug is "tabby," which is where we get our title from. See? Not a cat.

Although the bugs do bite and are really annoying, there's no poison or anything. They are basically just a pest that breeds really fast. It turns out that the real problem are the spiders trying to feed on them. The flies end up upsetting the ecology on Earth and making the spiders go crazy trying to catch the things. Eventually the island ends up covered in webs that are thick enough to catch even birds.

At the end of it all, it is learned that these spaceships have been crashing all over Earth. The humans can't keep up with the breeding flies, and the spiders are going nuts covering everything is webs. The whole thing is horribly overwhelming.

And that's pretty much it. It looks like a successful attack by aliens who had done a little research about how the ecology on our planet was so perfectly balanced. All they had to do was upset one aspect of it and it caused a disaster. It reminds me a little how people in Japan began reintroducing wolves into their ecosystem and they began causing problems. So it's not entirely unrealistic... but it is a tad overexaggerated. It doesn't factor in the adaptability of our planet and its inhabitants.

I'm gonna mark this one off as a light "eco" story. Don't really like those in general, but this one really wasn't that bad. It's short, so I recommend it, but you can certainly find better scifi stories out there than this.

This blog was written on May 2, 2024.

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