Published by Tor Books on June 1, 2021
Five years after Alien Morning was published, Rick Wilber returns with Alien Day. Alien Morning was a first contact novel. The aliens are the S'hudonni. They look like dolphins, which is a refreshing change from the tendency to imagine that aliens look like lizards or spiders or humans wearing makeup. Other aliens in the S’hudonni empire look like daffodils and ducks. The S’hudonni appear to be benevolent, but bad things happen on Earth before Alien Morning ends. Now Earth is growing grains and grapes and making hand-crafted beer, whiskey, and wine for export to the thirsty S’hudonni empire.
The ambassador/invader from the S’hudonni is known to humans as Twoclicks. He’s the favored son of the S’hudonni empire’s ruler, the one Mother Over All. Twoclicks, or a version of him (a matter transporter makes duplicate copies of whatever it transports) is back on Earth to bring Peter Holman to the S'hudonnir home world, where he is tasked with witnessing and recording peace negotiations. Peter is the primary character in Alien Day, although it doesn’t seem like he will have the chance to make a serious contribution to the story. As Peter is narrating his voyage, the S’hudonni ship is attacked and Peter’s broadcast is cut short. If that were the end of Peter, however, this would be a short novel.
A good part of Alien Day consists of Peter’s narrative account of his adventures among the S’hudonni, including his friendship with Treble (the youngest heir to the throne), and their effort to rescue Peter’s sister Kait, who is being held hostage by Whistle, the ruler’s less favored child. Peter also narrates Kait’s separate adventures as recounted to him by Kait. When Peter isn’t having adventures or writing letters to Earth about his adventures, he has sex with one of the Heathers, who look human during sex but are actually shape-shifting S’hudonni. I’m not a fan of shape-shifting characters (they seem to be popular in romance novels for reasons I can’t fathom) but Heather isn’t a big part of the story.
The plot eventually works its way back to Earth, where Treble gets a tour from Peter’s former-sort-of-girlfriend, actress Chloe Cary, while Peter’s brother Tom encourages anti-alien militias and saboteurs to make trouble for the S’hudonni. Peter apparently represents a political movement although that theme is not well explored. Various attempts to assassinate Treble and/or Chloe and to capture Tom keep the story moving.
Alien Morning was praised for inspiring a sense of wonder. Alien Day trades off the background created in the first novel without adding much that’s news. Middle novels in a trilogy often seem like a bridge, serving the purpose of setting up the third novel without standing alone as a worthwhile story. The story’s parallel plots — the struggle between Twoclicks and his brother Whistle for control of Earth’s profits, and the conflict between Peter and the tactics of terrorism adopted by Peter’s brother Tom — seem collateral to the larger story. While there isn’t an abundance of meat in the second novel, Rick Wilber serves readers some tasty action scenes.
Twoclicks is more interesting than the human characters. He comes across as a reality TV star rather than a politician, a star who knows that fame and followers allow a politician to get away with anything. Twoclicks is clearly playing a game of chess, using humans as his pawns, but the purpose of his moves is not yet clear. Readers will need to wait for the third novel to understand the Machiavellian approach that Twoclicks is taking in his relationship with Earth. Given the passage of time between the first and second novels, it might be a long wait.
It’s difficult to rate individual novels in a trilogy because the collective work is what matters. If this novel existed in a vacuum, I might recommend it with reservations. Read as a continuation of the first novel and in anticipation that the final novel will make sense of the whole thing, I’m giving Alien Day a full but guarded recommendation.
RECOMMENDED