Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
- The Road Not Taken (the poem one), Robert Frost
It was a good read. This SF short story is about a failed attempt of invasion by Roxolians, towards a blue, watery planet called Earth.
The invasion fails because of how advanced our(humans') military technologies are. Because in this story, humanity not having found the technology that made inter-star traveling — which is simple enough that all we needed was an eventual discovery — made humanity very advanced in all aspect except that; about medicines, electronics, farming, and again, weapons.
This story unfolds through alternating perspective between Roxolians, and humans; which was indicated by double line-breaks between perspective changes.
What made author choose this way of narrative? Maybe if it was only presented through Roxolian's eyes, it might've feel too distant. I mean, according to the story, shouting "There's an alien ship in the sky!!!!" with a gasp would be something that only humans would do. And without that, what's the fun about alien invasions?
Also what I also found interesting was how humans' perspective takes on a various position (in a space station, scientists, etc.), while Roxolian's perspective is fixed, mainly towards Togram, the protagonist and captain of the ship and the troops.
I believe it helped me to sympathize to Roxolians more than humans, alienating humans as outlier.
This story can be seen as a critism to humanity, but also a kind of r/HFY; frankly, simultaneously.
I found this story through an wiki article about LK-99, which introduced a post that made an analogy from the "discovery" of LK-99 to it. Like, if it was a real matter, we could've seen that other road that we did not taken!
This story is also references the poem with a same name, which seemed like what this story is based on.