Category: Rick Wilber

Billie the Kid by Rick Wilber

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Billie the Kid by Rick Wilber (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) is one of his “Moe Berg/Many Worlds” series, and opens off the coast of California on the Japanese submarine I-401. The boat is preparing to launch its three fighter bombers, one of which will nuke LA with Das Biest, a Nazi nuclear bomb rescued from Bergen in the last days of the Reich (there is no explanation given as to why the Germans did not use the bomb themselves).
After this brief opening section, the story switches to Billie “the Kid” Davis, a ninety-four year old woman who is telling her life story to a nurse in a care home. Billie tells of her childhood in Kirkwood (west of St Louis), love of baseball (there is an endless amount of tedious sports description in this part of the story), the girls’ Catholic school she attended, and how she learned to fly (this latter courtesy of her Dad’s job as an aircraft designer). However, after an idyllic childhood, there is a glider crash at her Dad’s company, and he resigns (it wasn’t his fault, but he sensed something might be wrong). The family move to Culver City.
The next part of the story sees Billie go for a trial with a professional baseball team, the Hollywood Stars, and she is hired as a player (their first female team member).1 After a couple of pages of Hollywood life, WWII finally arrives along with Eddie Bennett (this latter character, along with Moe Berg, are agents from another timeline). Billie has a crush on Eddie and so, when Eddie asks Billie to fly a B-25 on a special mission (to sink the Japanese sub), Billie readily agrees. At this point, we are now eleven thousand words into a nineteen thousand word long story.
The second part of the tale (spoiler) pivots from an overlong (and boring) baseball autobiography to a daft Marvel movie story, and sees a small super-competent group of individuals get airborne on a mission to sink the sub (the crew includes Billie, her father, Moe Berg, Eddie, and Hedy Lamarr—who has designed the frequency-agile radio-guided torpedo that they will be using). During this obviously successful mission (it is a Marvel movie remember, no-one gets hurt or killed), we have the ridiculous spectacle of Billie flying the B-25 medium bomber at wavetop height (this after a few hours of training), and dogfighting with, and shooting down, all three of the submarine’s fighter-bombers (partly with “wing-mounted” machine guns I’m not sure any version of the B-25 had, and certainly none of the common variants2). However, all this action doesn’t stop the nuke being dropped off the coast of LA—then (and I’m not sure exactly what happens here, presumably history changes) all effects of the blast disappear and Billie’s previously badly wounded dad is sitting next to her in the cockpit, unaffected.
The final part of the story has further Many Worlds hand-wavium (there is talk about how various timestreams affect each other earlier in the story, if I recall correctly), and sees Eddie in 2045 checking that the right person is President of the USA, that there is women’s sport, and that the “oligarchs were gone for now”. Then (the unaged) Eddie goes tripping through worlds and time to see the ninety-four year old Billie. A suitably sentimental ending is squeezed out.
Half tedium, half nonsense.
– (Awful). 19,750 words.3 Story link.

1. What is the point of showing a female character achieving an ahistorical breakthrough unless that society has also fundamentally changed, and you explain how it happened? This kind of pandering to the readership looks rather frivolous in light of developments since the story was written (i.e. a whole country of women sent back to the 14th Century by the Taliban).

2. The Wikipedia page for the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber—knock yourself out.
 
3. The story is listed as a novelette on the Asimov’s TOC.

Blimpies by Rick Wilber

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Blimpies by Rick Wilber (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) is part of the writer’s “S’Hudoni Empire” series, and opens with Kait Holman dreaming about a “blimpie”—a floating airbag alien with tentacles which is found on the planet S’hudon (think of the balloons in Harlan Ellison’s Medea anthology). When Kait then wakes up she remembers that she is a prisoner on the planet, before observing in some detail the replica room and bathroom the S’hudonni have provided for her captivity (her captors aren’t the blimpies, by the way, but another walking, talking, porpoise-like alien species).
During this—already rambling—beginning, we get a massive data-dump about how she got here:

She takes a breath, says, “This is what happened. I was jogging for exercise along Demeter Road. I’d been doing it for more than a month. It was the new me, and I liked the new me, healthy and happy. I’d had some rough years in there, Smiles, awful stuff with my father is what started it all; but then I got involved with some really bad people. I was doing bad things, destroying myself, really. I almost died a couple of times. If it wasn’t for my brother Peter, I’d be dead.
“Then I found myself. I met a woman, Sarah, who was lovely—so lovely!—inside and out, and we fell in love. I was so lucky! I’d work all day at the vet’s office, helping take care of dogs and cats and ferrets and all sorts of Earthie animal pets. Then I’d come home to Sarah, who taught finance at a local college. She loved to cook, so she’d make dinner while I went jogging, and then I’d finish, shower, and we’d eat and just be together.
“It was a new me, a better me. I had two whole years when I was happy! Happy! The nightly run under the streetlights was part of that, where the shadows seem to chase you as you run toward the lights and then catch up with you when you’re under them and then they rush ahead again as you move on before the next streetlight approaches and it all starts over again. I always thought it was just like life, those nighttime shadows.
“So it was a warm night. I was thinking of Sarah, and how wonderful it was to love someone and be loved in return; and then thinking of Peter and how he’d saved my life twice during those horrible years. He was always there for me and now he was off and gone with Twoclicks.
“But he was famous! Twoclicks, for some reason, plucked Peter from obscurity and raised him to fame as Twoclicks’s Earthie spokesperson. Fame! Fortune! So when Twoclicks announced he was taking Peter along to document the negotiations between Twoclicks and Whistle, and while he was there tell all of us on Earth about the wonders of space travel and wormhole panes and life on S’hudon itself; well, that was amazing! We were all so excited for him. There was an audience of two billion of us Earthies watching as he stood on the ramp of Twoclicks’s ship, waved goodbye to Earth, and walked up into the dark interior. It was so sad and stirring and emotional and I was so proud of him. My brother!”  p. 166

Too many exclamation marks.
The rest of the story alternates between Kait and Peter (and their translators/sidekicks, Smiles and Treble) and sees the conflict between Prince and Twoclicks, two brothers who are in the line of succession to Mother (the Queen porpoise, essentially), play out.
Peter eventually sets off on the Old Road (there are hints about “Old Ones” and leftover advanced technology) in an attempt to visit Kait (it is a good time to attempt this as Prince has been temporarily detained after trying to kill his brother and acting out at an audience with the Queen). Around the same time Kait, with Smiles’ help, escapes, and also sets off along the Old Road.
After some colourful travelogue, snippets about Kait’s backstory (Daddy and drug problems), and (spoiler) the interventions of the blimpies (who rescue Peter from a storm and drop him off near his sister’s likely path), the two are eventually reunited.
The final section sees a perilous journey to Peter’s compound, with Kait pulling an anti-grav sled containing her injured brother. Prince, however, catches up with them, and there is a climactic airborne encounter which sees the blimpies drop the drugged troublemaker—their tentacles have sedatives that apparently work on both the alien S’hudonni and humans—to his death.
If you read this with your brain switched off then you may be able to enjoy it as a YA adventure (my rating below is probably on the generous side), but critical readers may baulk at the following aspects of the story. First, the imperial empire idea is dated and feels like something from the George Scither’s Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine of the late 1970s, not the Asimov’s SF of the 2020s; second, the S’hudonni—with the exception of Prince—are portrayed as cutesy individuals but, apparently, when they are not behaving like Flipper1 on legs, they are annihilating their enemies with ray firing screamships (“weapons that had pacified Earth in one terrible day”); third, the story mostly works by having the blimpies (who in future stories will no doubt turn out to be connected to the Old Ones) move the chess pieces around the board; fourth, it is woefully padded (see the passage above); and, fifth and finally, the story has, in common with much recent SF, a young woman character with major personal problems (which read like boilerplate reader-identification fodder).
A decidedly mixed piece.
** (Average). 29,200 words.

1. Flipper was the dolphin character in a 1960s show of the same name. The series was the aquatic equivalent of Lassie.

The Hind by Kevin J. Anderson & Rick Wilber

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on The Hind by Kevin J. Anderson & Rick Wilber

The Hind by Kevin J. Anderson & Rick Wilber (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020)1 begins with the protagonist, a young woman called Kym, looking at a list of five names she has been given by the Ship’s Council: she is pregnant, and to keep her baby she needs to kill one of these five, who have been identified by the council as a waste of resources. (During the first part of the story we learn that Kym lives on a generation starship called The Hind which was seriously damaged when it flew through a debris field and is now drifting through the universe with its AI shutdown and its infrastructure slowly deteriorating).
Kym soon finds the first name on the list, an old woman called Grandmother Sudio, sitting under a tree in an orchard talking to a group of young children. Kym joins the old woman (with a view to finding an opportune moment to kill her) and they start talking. The old woman’s memory is failing (she can’t keep the kid’s names straight) but Kym eventually discovers that Sudio was working on the bridge when the debris field struck, and that Kym’s grandmother Juliana saved Sudio’s life.
After learning of the old woman’s history and the connection to her grandmother, Kym decides to move on to the second name on her list, a rapist called Galen Porthos. However, after working her way through the ship to the section he works in and getting close, another assassin gets to him before she can and claims the kill.
The third name on her list is Xandi Chan, an ex-Council member but now the leader of a rebel faction trying to repair the ship’s bridge so the remaining survivors can regain control of The Hind. Kym tracks her down and (spoiler), when Chan is distracted by one of the members of a repair team with a leaking spacesuit, Kym strikes—but is intercepted by two of the men in Chan’s group. Chan interrogates Kym, and tells her that the Council want her dead because they want to stay in power—something that won’t happen if Chan gets the ship running again. Kym is converted to Chan’s cause and tells her about Sudio, whose voice commands will enable them to regain control of The Hind if they can complete the necessary repairs and restart the systems.
The final scene sees them restart the ship.
This is a fairly straightforward story but I thought it was well done. Unlike many tales, which feel padded, this one feels like the second half of a longer story: it might have been a more engrossing piece if it had started when Kym found out she was pregnant.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,100 words.

1. The obligatory blog post where Rick Wilber talks about how they wrote the story is here. It’s worth a look.