Alternate History is usually the story of grand changes. What happens if the South wins the Civil War? Or if Charles Babbage managed to create computing in the Victorian Era? These types of big questions make for exciting World Building, but “The Only Harmless Great Thing” by Brooke Bolander is a smaller and more human story.

It combines two stories from the early 20th century, The Radium Girls and Topsy, the elephant electrocuted by Thomas Edison. The book comes in at under a hundred pages, but the narrative packs quite a bit into the slim volume.

The story is broken into several narratives. There’s a near-future narrative where a graduate student is asking for Elephants to agree to genetic modification to let them glow to warn about buried nuclear waste. There’s a folkloric story about an elephant who disappears into a deep swamp to retrieve all the stories of the past. Then we get the story of Topsy and the last Radium girl. After all the girls die of cancer, the factory that paints the watches replaces them with elephants. The last girl is there training the elephants via sign language.

The idea that elephants and humans can communicate via sign language is probably the most fantastic part of the story, outside of the changes to the timeline. The elephants are cast as profoundly in touch with nature, and their history, similar in the way older writers would have cast an indigenous character. Making them as the stand-in for the world being conquered by the moderns is not only a less dehumanizing approach but gives the story the feel of a folk tale.

It’s clear why this novella won a Nebula award. Its mix of periods and perspectives are fresh and exciting. There isn’t much beyond the premise that wouldn’t spoil the story, so pick this up it is a quick read. Bolander has an impressionistic prose style, drifting into a dreamlike state when putting the reader into the mind of an elephant.

Judging by some negative reviews, that literary quality isn’t for every genre reader. This is something that seems to happen with award winners that lean more toward a literary voice—something that always puzzles me. It’s not a straightforward action narrative, so why should it be written like one? In the tradition of writers like Delany and Ellison, Bolander is pushing against conventions simply by being talented and having a wider breadth of taste than the average author.