Deadeye and the Widowmaker

Everyone said the frontier would make a man of Wilbur Grubb. Wilbur would rather it didn't.

Wilbur is not brave. Wilbur is, in fact, the least brave man in the sector, and he has the exam results to prove it. He failed the Consolidated Frontier Holdings Certified Safety Examination not by getting the answers wrong but by getting them too right, because the honest answer to "what would you do in a hull breach?" is not be standing anywhere near the hull. The company does not reward that kind of thinking. The company rewards bravado, quotas, and dying with a smile. The company is also, at the moment, extremely short of people, on account of how many of them keep dying with smiles.

So Wilbur gets a duster, a heroic nickname he did not ask for, and a bunk on the CFV Sweetwater: a decaying deep-space mining barge that the company has painted to look like a frontier homestead and staffed with people who have been told, repeatedly and cheerfully, that this is the best thing that could have happened to them. There are mandatory quarterly gunfights. There is a shipboard AI that talks like a friendly uncle and files his cowering as serenity. There is a captain with the swagger of a legend and the judgement of a lemming. And there is a job to do, because the Sweetwater is behind quota, and a corporate auditor has come aboard to decide, very politely, whether the barge and everyone on it might be worth more as scrap.

Wilbur has a plan for all of this, and the plan is: survive. Hide when hiding is called for. Crawl toward the exit when crawling is called for. Read the safety handbook nobody else has ever opened. It is not a heroic plan. It is barely a plan at all. But the strange thing, the thing nobody on the Sweetwater can quite bring themselves to notice, is that it keeps working, and every time Wilbur runs from certain death, certain death somehow ends up happening to someone else.

He is not a hero. He is going to be treated like one, and it is going to be the worst thing that ever happens to him. On the Sweetwater, surviving isn't how you escape the danger. It's how they decide who to send back into it.

Deadeye and the Widowmaker is a dry, warm, wickedly funny satire about the stories we tell to keep the lights on while the future rusts, and about the quiet, sensible, deeply inconvenient wisdom of the one person in the room who just wants everyone to please, please stop trying to die. Deadeye and the Widowmaker is Book 1 of How to Die Gracefully, a five-book comic space-opera series, and the place to begin.

For readers of Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic, Grant Naylor's Red Dwarf, John Scalzi's Redshirts, Douglas Adams, and Barry J. Hutchison's Space Team.