Unexpected Questions with Rick Wilber

Rick Wilber is an award-winning writer, editor and college professor with a half-dozen novels and short-story collections published or under contract, more than seventy short stories in print or sold, two dozen poems, five edited anthologies, and five college textbooks on writing and the mass media in print or in production. His novel Alien Day was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel of 2016. His short story, “Something Real,” won the Sidewise Award in 2012, and his novelette “The Hind” (with Kevin J. Anderson won the 2021 Asimov’s Readers’ Award and the Canopus Award for Best Interstellar Fiction – Short Form.

He is on the faculty of Western Colorado University’s low-residency Graduate Program in Creative Writing, where he teaches and is thesis coordinator in the Genre Fiction program. He is co-founder and director of the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, a top award for undergraduate writers. He is co-founder and co-judge for the award with Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. The father of two adult children, he lives (regrettably, these days) in Florida with his wife, their Bernese Mountain Dog named Snickers, and their two cats, Clare and Kerry, named after counties in Ireland, which he and his wife and daughter have visited often.

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If you were transported into one of your books as a character, what kind of character would you be and what kind of adventures would you have?

I’d be Peter Holman from my novels Alien Day and Alien Morning (and Alien Night, a work-in-progress), because Peter is in many ways reflective of my own life. He’s athletic, reasonably intelligent, well-spoken, but a bit of a doofus (as those who know me, know I am). He is sometimes slow to pick up on how things really are; but he does try to do the right thing when he faces tough decisions, and this works to his advantage. In the novels, he’s a good pro basketball player who is injured out of his playing career and turns to an immersive new-media platform as a commentator and participant in sports and adventure events where audience members feel immersed in his body as he plays baseball or basketball or skydives all while interviewing people.

When the aliens arrive, seemingly benign, they ask Peter to be their human spokesperson and he accepts the gig. It makes him the global human face of the S’hudonni aliens and he winds up emmeshed in some deadly alien politics as two brothers fight to control the new Earth colony.

While I haven’t met any aliens (yet!) in real life, I did grow up in sports. My father was a Major League baseball player, coach, and manager, so I grew up in the clubhouses and dugouts of the Red Sox, Phillies and White Sox and then was the batboy for the Triple-A Charleston Senators when Dad managed there. I was the quarterback of a very good high-school football team, and I played scholarship football , baseball, and basketball at the University of Minnesota and Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville. So, it’s no surprise that I started my writing career as a sportswriter for several St. Louis-area newspapers and some national sports magazines.

I enjoyed sportswriting, but my real love was science fiction. I’d been a heavy reader of science fiction since my childhood and by my late 20s I wanted to write (and sell!) science fiction. I wanted to be a -real- writer. I attended Clarion in 1978, and was amazed by the talent (Pat Murphy was a star of that class) from both the writers and the guest authors who showed up. My final assignment from Damon Knight was a character sketch and he liked that so much he said I should flesh it out into a short story and he predicted it would sell. I did as he advised, and that story, “Horatio Hornblower and the Songs of Innocence,” was my first pro sale, to Roy Torgeson for his Chrysalis Six anthology. Sadly, I never met Roy who died in 1990. I owe him for giving me that chance to start the career I really wanted.

If you were stranded on a deserted planet with only one book to read, but it turned out to be one of your own, how would you feel?

I’d feel awful! No thanks! By the time a book goes through numerous drafts, first readers, agents, and editors, you have not only written the novel, you’ve read it an additional five or six times. And if you’re like me, each additional read finds some little (or big!) thing that needs fixing. Stranded on that deserted planet, reading that novel again and again and -still- finding typos or sentences or whole scenes that need to be fixed would drive me to despair. In fact, I’m in despair just thinking about that! Sisyphus, help!

If you had to choose between being a mermaid or a dragon, which would you pick and why?

Mermaid, definitely. Ok, a merman. I’m an avid snorkeler, and both my wife and daughter have been certified for scuba, so we love being in the water, diving on reefs, admiring the tarpon in Grand Cayman, especially, while keeping a wary eye on the barracuda.

My wife and daughter and I once spent a great week on Grand Cayman with Joe and Gay Haldeman, in a rented house right on the beach (a house previously rented by John Grisham, we discovered when we checked in). Not only did we snorkel every day, Joe and I went down the Cayman Trench in a submersible, down more than 800 feet along the Grand Cayman Wall. It was a fabulous experience.

If you could time travel to any point in history, which era would you choose, and why?

World War II, because the lines of good and evil were so clearly drawn and so visible to all but a few who wore blinders and admired Hitler and Mussolini. I’m at work now on a novel set in Paris and London during the war, so the story has the Gestapo and the Resistance, and a love affair between two spies. I’ve written about this era a lot in my Moe Berg stories. Any specific time and place? Yes, during the Blitz of 1940-41, when all the petty goings-on of everyday life became secondary to surviving the nightly raids by the Luftwaffe and carrying on. Many writers have taken on that time and place, of course, including the amazing Connie Willis, with Blackout and All Clear, which individually and together did a perfect job, to my mind, of diving deep into that time and that place. I would re-read those books to prepare for my time travel.

If you could swap lives with any character from one of your books for a day, who would it be and what would you do?

Moe Berg, during baseball season, and I’d be the catcher for Boston Red Sox while Moe would teach my classes. Being in a big-league game and making the play, knowing I would be a spy in Europe during World War II in a few years would be great. I was a pretty good baseball player so I might have been OK behind the plate, though I’m pretty sure I’d be hitless at bat. And then if I could trade for one other day, I’d be Moe during his time as a spy for the OSS during the war, in Rome, getting ready to go to Zurich and, perhaps, assassinate Werner Heisenberg. Put me in, Coach! Question is, would Moe want to switch with me? Undoubtedly note. Can’t say as I’d blame him.

If you could travel to any alternate universe where a different version of yourself exists, what do you think your other self would be like?

In some alternate universe I’m a high-school or college history teacher and I coach the baseball or basketball teams. I love coaching, I love teaching, I love history.

If you were to write a love story between a human and an alien, what challenges would they face?

I’ve done that! In my S’hudonni stories that have appeared in Asimov’s and elsewhere, and in my Alien Morning and Alien Day novels, there is a shapeshifting alien device whose Earthie name is Heather. She seduces Peter Holman as part of the S’hudonni plan to colonize Earth for profit. What starts as a work of espionage eventually becomes a kind of love for her, or at least that’s what she says to him. Peter falls in a kind of love, as well, though he knows she’s a device and that she’s been built by an advanced society and her job was to seduce him. The challenges they face aren’t sexual (she’s fully functional), but emotional. Can you love a machine, knowing it’s only a sophisticated machine? I think a lot of car lovers might say so, and Peter Holman, in the S’hudonni series, would certainly say so.

If you had to choose between having the ability to speak with animals or plants, which would you choose and why?

Animals, dogs especially. We’ve always had dogs and cats over the many years. Our current dog is a seven-year-old Bernese Mountain Dog named Snickers. Every time we talk with her and she looks up at us and tilts that head to process what she’s hearing I wonder what’s going on in there. She seems very smart, and she’s a big ol’ adorable, huggable dog who idolizes my wife and seems to think I’m all right, too (though definitely second best). I’d love to have a good conversation with Snickers about her life and what she finds the most fun and what she worries about.

Another life form that I’d love to talk with is an aspen grove. When you see a grove of quaking aspens you’re actually looking at one tree, spread through roots to present a whole grove of trees. One famous grove in Utah, Pando, has tens of thousands of interconnected trees. Wouldn’t that be a fascinating intelligence to chat with?

If you had to choose one of your own fictional worlds to live in, which one would it be, and why?

The planet S’hudon, because I’ve researched that so closely. We could do an Elon Musk and have several thousand Earthies in a purpose-built village, on the planet S’hudon, complete with blimpies hovering over the nearby bogs, feeding on the small plants and animals that abound in the bogs. All of this administered through the good graces of Twoclicks, Choice of the Mother, Ruler of S’hudon. (Hey, I love this idea! Expect to see it sometime soon in one magazine or another).

If you had to choose one of your books to be turned into a cheesy made-for-TV movie, which one would it be and who would you want to play the lead roles?

Easy, Rum Point, my baseball mystery (McFarland Books, 2009), where a baseball manager and his local cop daughter run into a murderous drug smuggling gang in St. Pete, Florida and together they outwit the bad guys and solve the crime as the team muddles along. I still intend to write a sequel, where he’s now managing in the minor-leagues in Buffalo and she’s a cop there. Trouble arrives as the bad guy they thought was dead from the first book shows up alive, and bent on revenge. For the daughter cop I’d love to see Sydney Sweeney in the role, and for her baseball manager father, of course it would be Kevin Costner.

If aliens were to visit Earth, what do you think their first impression of humans would be?

Look at them, trying so hard to grow up, but still acting like children. We’ve seen this a hundred times, the race between adulthood and self-destruction. We’re not sure these humans will win that race.

If you were secretly an alien visitor to the Earth, why are you here?

Love this question, because I -am- an alien visitor from the planet we call Harmony and you call Epsilon VI and I’m here because previous visits from those before me saw nothing but trouble. My job is to save your planet from total destruction. Take me to you leader!

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What to Watch For:

My short story, “Jilly in Right,” is in the current January/February 2025 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. It marks my 27th appearance in that fine magazine in either prose or poetry. The multiverse story involves a retired baseball star who wishes he might have been a better husband and father, and his daughter who has Down syndrome and is playing in right field for his old-guy amateur baseball team amidst two possible versions of reality. A fun read. Give it a look.

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