THE DAY THE SAUCERS CAME by Neil Gaiman

Short Story Review:
THE DAY THE SAUCERS CAME by Neil Gaiman

The Day the Saucers Came is a wonderfully piece of social commentary, as Neil Gaiman so expertly delivers – at the same entertaining while making us stop and reflect.

The first paragraph describes how saucers land and the people of Earth stare, waiting, wondering. The paragraph ends with: ‘But you didn’t notice.’

The second paragraph tells us that on the day the saucers came, ‘By some coincidence, was the day that the graves gave up their dead and the zombies pushed up through the soft earth…’ And yet again ends, ‘You did not notice this.’

For each paragraph, an additional event is added, so, The Day that the Saucers Came becomes the, Saucer-Zombie-Battling-Gods Day, The Ragnarok and Fairies Day, The Day the Great Winds Came and Snows, and the Cities Turned to Crystal, The Day all Plants Died and Plastics Dissolved, The Day Computers Turned, the Screens Telling us We Would Obey Day… and on and on. And all the while; ‘you didn’t see them coming’, or, ‘you had no idea of any of this’, or, ‘you didn’t notice any of this,’ because…

‘You were looking at your telephone, wondering if I was going to call.’

So it’s either social commentary, or a devoted love story. Either way, it’s incredibly entertaining.

There is no dialogue. The tension is created as each paragraph gets longer and adds more events to it, kind of reminiscent of The House That Jack Built – narrative moving the story forward into the climax because with more and more events. We want to know what it is that is keeping this character so oblivious to all these awesome events.