Ship Happens

Tomil didn't plan to visit Earth. He didn't plan to visit Earth the way most people don't plan to step in something unpleasant — it simply happened, against all reasonable expectations, and now he's stuck with it.

After ending a three-year relationship with a woman whose primary contribution to his life was spending his money on vacations he hated, Tomil books himself a solo trip across the outer systems. He has a rental ship, a synthesizer that produces anything from food to currency to flawless diamonds on demand, and a detailed itinerary that does not, under any circumstances, include Earth. What it also doesn't include is a cascading systems failure that drops him, at sub-light speed, into the one solar system he had planned to admire briefly from a window and move past.

The repair technician is six weeks out. Earth, apparently, is survivable. Tomil — arrogant, sarcastic, and operating at a cognitive level several standard deviations above anyone in the surrounding area — decides that if he's going to be stranded on a primitive planet, he's going to be stranded on his own terms.

What follows is six weeks of a highly superior alien discovering that the Grand Canyon is bigger than his framework for it, that a neighborhood barbecue is harder to escape than a government interrogation facility, that synthesizing flawless diamonds is a spectacular way to ruin an afternoon, and that the woman behind the counter of a rural gas station is the first person in recent memory who is completely unimpressed by him — and that this is, inexplicably, the most interesting thing that has happened to him in years.

Ship Happens is a comedic science fiction novel about arrogance meeting its match, a civilization that lost the word for hope and a species that runs on nothing else, and one rental ship whose repair turns out to be both simpler and more devastating than anyone involved is prepared for.

The button was there the whole time. It was red. It had a label. He read the documentation.

He just didn't press it.