This is Not an Accident: Stories by April Wilder

Published by Viking on January 30, 2014

I had never heard of April Wilder before reading this collection of her stories. I am now a devoted fan. The characters in her stories are trying to decide what they want from life. They are forming and readjusting their understandings of relationships and families. They are quirky and lonely and usually a little messed up, but they're not giving up on the only lives they have.

Wilder often pulls off the neat trick of telling light stories about dark subjects. "The Butcher Shop" is about a man who, with little assistance from his friends, is trying to come to terms with the end of his marriage and the lesser disasters that make up his life. While discussing Sammy Sosa's corked bat with a group of friends, the narrator of "We Were Champions" thinks back to the man who coached her softball team when she was sixteen and who, like her current boyfriend, occasionally had sex with her but was really more interested in baseball. In that story, I love her comparison of sex to "two people struggling to fit through a turnstile."

Much of the title story takes place in traffic school. After racing to Iowa for a date she made online, Kit hears a story about a man who hit someone without noticing and begins to obsess about whether she has done the same thing. Her plan to cure the obsession, like everything else in her life, doesn't work out as she expected, but she finds inspiration to change in an unexpected place.

In "Me Me Me," a woman who compartmentalizes her life to the point of schizophrenia tries to decide what to do about a slightly dysfunctional sister who wants to adopt a troubled child. A woman in "Christiania" takes a post-divorce trip with a platonic vegan friend and finds that the relationship is just as exhausting as her marriage.

Alternately sweet and sad, hopeful and realistic, "It's a Long Dang Life" is one of the best madcap family dramas I've encountered in short fiction. Lacey's boyfriend, Paul Odd, 65-years-old and aptly named, wants to marry her but he's in love with Miller Genuine Draft. Odd (who understands that "it's a long life when it's the wrong life, man") gets up and tries his best every day for as long as he can before passing out. Still, he's more fun than the members of Lacey's uptight family. The final paragraph sums up the joys and sorrows of life about as well as anything I've ever read.

The novella "You're That Guy" is a departure from the family dramas that fill the rest of the book. Lurking in the background of this sad macabre comedy are a dead dog and a man who carries a grotesque doll wherever he goes. While some of the characters are strange, we are reminded that people are "only improbable at a distance." Up close, they're just people.

The only story that didn't work for me, "Three Men," is not so much a story as three character sketches of the flawed men in a woman's life: her husband, her brother, and her father. "The Creative Writing Instructor Evaluation Form" isn't a conventional story, but it's quite funny.

Wilder's observant writing style is clever and sharp without calling attention to itself. In their own way, each story reminds us that whether or not life is an accident, we need to make it purposeful. Many of these stories are worth reading twice, to better appreciate the subtle thoughtfulness and good humor with which Wilder teaches that lesson.

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A Darkling Sea by James Cambias

Published by Tor Books on January 28, 2014

The Ilmatarans inhabit Ilmatar, naturally enough, but since they live on the sea bottom, having evolved where volcanic vents warm the water far below the ice-covered surface, it isn't easy to observe them. An attempt to do so leads to an inadvertent first contact between a human and a group of Ilmataran scientists. It doesn't go well for the poor human, who is mistaken for a big fish. But just when you think this is a book about humans and intelligent crustaceans, aliens from Shalina show up. This isn't a first contact; humans and the Sholen are parties to treaties that govern places like Ilmatar and the Sholen are ostensibly present to investigate the human's inadvertent (and potentially treaty-breaking) contact. In truth, a political faction of the Sholen would like to restrict humans to Earth where their meddlesome ways will not trouble the rest of the universe and they intend to eject the human scientists from Ilmatar. Conflict ensues.

James Cambias gave some intelligent thought to the Ilmatarans' social structure and legal system. He imagines how books might be constructed that can be read underwater, how farms might operate, how sound becomes a weapon when wielded by or against a race that depends on sonar, how apprentices might be gained by capturing the young and forcing them to be educated. The Sholen are described in less detail. We know that they are stocky and have extra limbs and breathe oxygen but we don't know much else. Not much differentiates the Sholen from humans, although their social structure is even more dependent on sex and drugs than human societies -- yet the Sholen are not as fun as you'd think those traits would make them. The Sholen are just as scheming, manipulative, self-serving, and underhanded as humans tend to be (creating the risk of interstellar war) while the Ilmataran civilization, despite roving gangs of bandits and culturally controlled violence, has existed for millions of years in a state of relative tranquility.

As much as I liked the Ilmataran (I always like aliens who don't look like lizards), the humanlike (albeit kinky) behavior of the Sholen is unimaginative, as is the typical sf portrayal of scientists as enlightened and benevolent while politicians are selfish and warlike. The humans are the novel's other weakness -- their personalities (to the extent they have any) remain largely undeveloped until late in the story. A Darkling Sea is more a novel of ideas than of characterization, but the ideas are good (the descriptions of humans adapting to underwater life are particularly strong) and the plot pushes all the right buttons (at least for fans of interstellar conflict).

Although A Darkling Sea is a self-contained novel with an ending that completes the story in a satisfying way, it easily lends itself to a sequel, or perhaps to a series of novels about the conflict between humans and Sholen. The final chapter also sets up a reason to return to Ilmatar. I don't know what (if anything) Cambias has in mind, but I will gladly read the next book if he writes one.

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Buzz by Anders de la Motte

Published in Sweden in 2011; published in translation by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on January 7, 2014

After the excitement of Game, HP is restless. He has money and nothing but leisure time, but he begins the second novel of the Game trilogy in hiding, certain that the people who control the Game are after him. When he finds himself suspected of murder in a rather inhospitable country, the reader wonders whether this is part of the Vast Global Conspiracy that revealed itself in the first novel. To get himself into this mess, HP has behaved stupidly, but that's the story of his life. His sister, meanwhile, is searching for the blogger who is ruining her career.

HP's story eventually goes in a different direction as HP finds a job as an internet troll. Anders de la Motte has some interesting thoughts on the impossible task of controlling the internet. One small measure of control is exerted by professional trolls who are paid to leave encouraging or disparaging comments on social networking sites and blogs, praising a client's products and disparaging a client's detractors, writing posts that are fronted by actual (or created) bloggers. If they can't control the internet, they can at least influence trends and "steer the buzz in a direction that suits our clients." Carried to an extreme (as thrillers tend to do), the manipulation of internet content is a way to make the truth disappear. Of course, you don't need to carry the concept to an extreme to appreciate how much of this is going on in the real world.

Unlike many middle novels of a trilogy that seem like filler between two novels that tell most of the story, Buzz advances the overall plot, although not by much. While the first half of Buzz does seem like filler, it eventually tells a self-contained story that readers who have not read Game could enjoy. There is less character development in Buzz than in Game, but the story is smarter and more original than the story told in the first novel. If left me looking forward to the final novel.

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The Ascendant by Drew Chapman

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 7, 2014

Like Christopher Reich's recently released The Prince of Risk, The Ascendant starts as a financial thriller that involves a secretive decision by the Chinese to sell U.S. Treasury bonds. It even features a woman named Alex, as does Reich's novel. In most other respects, the novels follow very different paths. Both are fun escapist fiction, but The Ascendant is the more absorbing of the two.

The Ascendant begins in China with a village in revolt and a mysterious young woman known as "the Tiger," then shifts to New York where 26-year-old Garrett Reilly, a bond analyst with a gift for pattern recognition, discovers that Treasury bonds are being dumped on the market in a way that will create economic panic and devalue the dollar. A small military working group, believing the Chinese have declared war and impressed with Reilly's ability to predict events that military analysts missed, recruits Reilly to lead a project called Ascendant.

Reilly, who can easily clobber four tough guys in a bar fight, isn't your typical Wall Street analyst. He's your typical thriller hero to the extent that he's an arrogant loner who likes to drink and womanize, but he has the deductive abilities of Sherlock Holmes and, unlike most thriller heroes, he has a passionate hatred of the U.S. military. Where the main character in Reich's novel is a typical "master of the universe" hedge fund boss, Drew Chapman's protagonist is a refreshingly quirky antisocial misfit who cares more about computer games than financial power. When he's recruited to do his patriotic duty by joining the Defense Intelligence Agency, he tells the Secretary of Defense to stuff it. His unorthodox approach to heroism makes Garrett an appealing character, at least to readers who like antiheroes.

The other characters are an assemblage of recognizable types (the hawkish Secretary of Defense, the socially awkward computer hackers, the military officer who must decide whether his duty is to follow orders or to do what's right) but they are developed with sufficient care to give each a believable place in the world. The other character who deviates from the norm (while playing only a small role) is Hu Mei, the charismatic leader of a rebel movement in China, who inspires millions by being kind and cheerful.

Although there aren't many of them, the scenes that take place in China capture the nation's essence (something I would not say is true of Reich's novel). Readers who are looking for an emphasis on finance will probably prefer Reich's novel, but I appreciated Chapman's imaginative look at how the manipulation of images might give rise to a social revolution. Apart from some silliness in the middle of the novel (Garrett has to win a simulated military battle to keep his job), The Ascendant seemed like a credible story while I was reading it. After I put it down, I thought "no, that couldn't happen," but the point of escapist fiction is to engage the reader during the process of reading and The Ascendant did that.

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The Polaris Protocol by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton Adult on January 14, 2014

Reading a Taskforce novel is an adrenalin rush. While that could be said of many action novels, Brad Taylor's Taskforce novels have the additional virtue of being intelligent. Taylor has a clear, cliché-free writing style that helps the story move swiftly. Plentiful action scenes contribute to the pace, but Taylor avoids the overdone and over-the-top nonsense that pervades so many action novels. The plots are farfetched but plausible enough for fun escapist fiction. I keep waiting for Taylor to stumble, given the speed at which he is churning out Taskforce novels, but the quality continues to be consistent.

The Polaris Protocol begins with the Taskforce chasing a bad guy in Turkmenistan while different bad guys in Mexico are messing with the GPS system. The reader knows that it's only a matter of time before the Taskforce takes on the new threat to national security. As is always true in a Taskforce novel, everything that can go wrong does ... until the end, of course, when Pike Logan and his team clean up the mess. It's a formula, but it works.

Another part of Taylor's successful formula has been: Pike wants to do something to defeat a menace; Pike is ordered not to do it; Pike does it anyway, saving the world (or at least some part of it) in the process. Taylor varies that formula a bit in The Polaris Protocol. This time Pike is giving the orders and Jennifer is disregarding them. As always, Taylor strikes a workable balance between action and character development, while the addition of friction between Pike and Jennifer adds interest to the story.

The friction arises because Jennifer's brother Jack, a journalist investigating a Mexican drug cartel, accidentally discovers a bigger story that leads to his kidnapping. Jennifer goes to his aid, abandoning the Turkmenistan mission (with Pike's consent), which cheeses off some of her Taskforce teammates. Knuckles is more cheesed at Pike than at Jennifer, particularly when he learns that Pike and Jennifer have been slipping between the sheets during their off-duty hours. That subplot has been developing over the course of the series and it's starting to pay dividends as Jack recognizes the division of his loyalty to Jennifer and to the Taskforce and its mission.

An old nemesis of Pike resurfaces in The Polaris Protocol, but the most interesting character is a different psychopathic killer. Remorseless killers are standard fare in thrillers, but Taylor fashions this one with subtlety. I'm not sure I quite buy the notion of a philosophical psychopath, but he's more entertaining than the usual mindless grunt-and-kill evildoer. Character creation is one of Taylor's skills, particularly his ability to depict both good guys and bad guys in a nuanced way. Pike engages in appalling behavior at the novel's end for a reason that seems justifiable to Pike (covering up all the laws he's broken in this and earlier novels) and perhaps to the reader, although the notion that good guys obey the law is out the window in these novels. Pike muses that Americans want a black-and-white world in which people and governments are either good or evil, but that isn't the world in which we live. Pike understands that and, fortunately for his readers, so does Taylor. None of his good guys are entirely good, just as his bad guys are not entirely evil. That's one reason I enjoy these novels.

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