Rick Wilber's Blog

Launch Day for Rambunctious: Nine Tales of Determination

   I'm really pleased to announce that today, Wednesday, March 25th 2020, is the launch day for my short-story collection, Rambunctious: Nine Tales of Determination, from WordFire Press. Pre-publication reviews and comments have been glowing and I'll paste some of those in below. The book gathers together nine of my personal favorites from the last thirty years of publishing short fiction in the major genre magazines and anthologies. At about 80,000 words, it's a good length, with a novella, some novelettes, some short stories, and a couple of very short stories. Enjoy! The stories include a prize winner ("Something Real," which won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2o12, several stories that made best-of-the year lists, and range from First Contact science fiction to single-parent struggles raising a Down syndrome child. There's some basketball, some baseball, and some Canadian football in the stories here and there, because I come from a sports family and have that background. There are a lot of rambunctious, determined young women athletes, because I've known so many, and there are a few Down syndrome young people because I've known so many of them and raised one of them. I think you'll like the stories. Here are some comments and pre-pub reviews. Because of the current COVID-19 pandemic I'm unable to tour to read and sign copies, so if you'd like a signed copy (either trade paper or hardcover), contact me at my website: www.rickwilber.net and I'll make sure you get one. On to those comments and reviews!

Wilber’s fiction… is rich with sensory specificity, historical verisimilitude, deep psychological kennings, compassion, and plain old joie de vivre. While honoring the stern realities of science—and science fiction—he is also not afraid to exhibit an intuitive, mythic sense of life’s mysteries. … I’d say he’s one of Fantastika’s All-Stars. –Locus  

 “A major collection from what iťs high past time to admit is one of our major writers. Wilber writes with literate flair, compassion, and a deep understanding of human psychology. Highly recommended!” —Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of The Oppenheimer Alternative

 Rick Wilber imparts reality, grit, clarity, and heart to every category of fiction that he chooses to write in…Every story in Rambunctious rattled my cage in an eye-opening, thought-provoking, or heart-stopping way.  Each is a gift."  --Michael l Bishop, award-winning author of No Enemy but Time, Unicorn Mountain, and Brittle Innings

https://books2read.com/u/banlV2

 

Locus Reviews Rambunctious: Nine Tales of Determination

I woke up this first day of March in 2020 to a long and extremely perceptive Locus Magazine review of my Rambunctious: Nine Tales of Determination collection from WordFire Press. The book will be out in a few weeks and I'll be posting material from it and about it over the rest of the month.
The review says two of the stories, in particular, “lend Wilber’s voice a kind of authority and compassion that have helped him carve out a niche identifiably his own. These are sports (usually, but not always baseball) and parenthood, particularly the challenges presented by a child with Down syndrome or an aging and diminishing parent.”
The review also says “The most accomplished and heartbreaking family portrait is ‘Prices.’” (And I'm really, really pleased to see that story praised in this fashion. The story ran in Gulf Stream Review and didn't get any reviewer attention at the time.) The story is about a dead father communicating with the trouble adult son who served as his caregiver. The communication may or not be real, but the emotional values, I'd like to think, are very real, indeed.
The review concludes with "Wilber is at his best with families, and the balance between a life of comfortable mediocrity and the chance to do “something real”—as Moe Berg puts it—seems to haunt his fiction and gives it a distinct and memorable, if at times almost elegiac, sensibility.”
I'm truly humbled by that. And yes, that nails my core interest and aim in much of my fiction. I have an adult Down syndrome son I've written about a lot, and a family background in professional sports (my father was a major-league baseball player back in the 1950s) and both of those things crop up a lot in my stories. Oh, and there are a lot of aliens cropping up now and and again in my stories and novels; but no, I don't actually know any of those.