7.4 /10 1 Votes
Cover artist Sam Weber Publisher Tor.com | 3.7/5 Goodreads Language English Originally published June 2011 Genre Science Fiction | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Awards Hugo Award for Best Novelette Nominations Nebula Award for Best Novelette Similar Charlie Jane Anders books, Hugo Award for Best Novelette winners, Science Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
"Six Months, Three Days" is an award-winning science fiction novelette by Charlie Jane Anders. It was originally published on Tor.com in 2011, and was subsequently reprinted in Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2011 Edition and Year's Best SF 17.
Contents
Plot
Doug and Judy are both precognitive: Doug can see "the future", and Judy can see "many possible futures". They fall in love, even though they both know that their relationship will last exactly six months and three days, and end very badly.
Background
Anders said in a 2016 interview that in this novelette "[t]he big challenge for me ... was how to have a satisfying resolution" to the which-future-is-right question: "they can’t both be right, but they kind of both are right, and how does that work?" In another 2016 interview, Anders commented that her decision to make her 2016 novel, All the Birds in the Sky a "relationship story" was influenced by the relationship that she had created in Six Months, Three Days.
Reception
The story was nominated for the 2011 Nebula Award and the 2011 Theodore Sturgeon Award, and won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette.
Rachel Swirsky described the story as a "philosophical contrast" between determinism and free will. Jim C. Hines said Anders' resolution to the fixed vs. multiple futures conflict was "simultaneously tragic and scary and hopeful", but added that it "felt right for the story".
In 2013, Deadline.com announced that a television adaptation was being prepared for NBC, with script written by Eric Garcia.