Author: John Wilker
Date: 2018
Publisher: Rogue
ISBN: 978-1-7326287-2-4
Quote: "Are you really human?"
One thing that makes it hard to suspend disbelief in science fiction: stories where humans generally have yet to establish a space base from which English, or any other human language, might be spread, and nevertheless, everyone the human character meets speaks English. This is one of those stories. It reached me bundled together with stories where humans, a few thousand years in the future, are routinely jetting about in space, towing vestiges of recognizable Earth cultures. In those I can suspend disbelief. In this one...well...
Anyway: Humans generally have not left their home planet but Wil has somehow become a qualified starship captain. Sometimes his alien friends advise him to hide because the Sol System is still "protected" as a primitive group whose inhabitants have yet to make contact with other civilized worlds, on all of which, somehow, US English happens to be the dominant language, though some aliens use exotic swearwords. They say "dren" instead of "dern"! The alien character quoted above has read about humans and guesses that Wil might be one, though she's surprised, because "everyone knows" that humans don't fly starships.
We don't learn much about any of the peoples who have civilized this universe, but we do learn that, so far as can be seen, they're all divided into two sexes and it's easy for humans to tell which are which by looking. Apparently it's universal that all males have lower voices than all females, however non-humanoid they may otherwise be.
In a fictional universe like that there's nothing much for the Earthling character to do but save the galaxy. After all, how could all the bug-eyed monsters who've been exploring space longer and built all the spaceports and spacecraft possibly be expected to save themselves without an Earth man to hand them all the answers? All of their worlds have only been waiting for a White man to take them over! Wil is an Anglo-American, so how could he not steer an Ankarran starship better than any mere Ankarran? So Wil does.
Right. This web site's goal is to encourage writers so I'll stop here, encouraging this writer to think longer before writing another novel. All science fiction contains errors that will glare out at readers fifty years after the fiction was written. Some of those errors are, however, forgivable as based in mere lack of data (computers a thousand years in the future look and work just like the computer the author used to write the story), and others are less forgivable as based in lack of understanding of data that's readily available. Reading Out of the Silent Planet, or Native Tongue, or even The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy might help. What makes those three very different stories so superior to this one is that their first-human-visitors-to-inhabited-planets show a little healthy, realistic humility.
Of course, for those who think other planets are there for White men to colonize, there's always the subgenre best represented by Ursula K. LeGuin's The Word for World Is Forest.
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