How To Die Gracefully

How to Die Gracefully is a five-book comic space opera, best read in order, beginning with Book 1, Deadeye and the Widowmaker. Each book is a complete adventure, and together they follow one very reluctant man through a career he never wanted and cannot seem to get out of.

The setting is a magnificent lie. Consolidated Frontier Holdings is strip-mining the Amber Belt to exhaustion aboard a fleet of rusting deep-space barges, and to keep morale up it has made "authentic frontier living" compulsory: cowboy dusters, high-noon duels rebranded as team-building, a saloon painted over the airlock, and a company handbook with a cheerful chapter on how to die gracefully during a hull breach. It is a culture that prizes bravado, quotas, and dying with a smile.

None of which suits Wilbur "Deadeye" Grubb, the least brave man in the sector, who signed on only because the company was short of warm bodies, and who wants precisely one thing out of deep space, which is to not die in it. In a place like this, that turns out to be the most inconvenient ambition a man can have, and the company has a great many ideas about how to cure him of it.

The comedy has a real edge under it. These are stories about the comforting lies we tell to keep the lights on while the future rusts, about nostalgia sold back to us as a morale programme, and about the quiet, deeply inconvenient good sense of the one person in the room who just wants everybody, please, to stop trying to die. They are told by a dry, skeptical narrator in the lineage of Terry Pratchett, Grant Naylor's Red Dwarf, and Douglas Adams.

For readers who like their science fiction funny, their heroes reluctant, their corporations lying, and a skeptical laugh on every page. Start with Deadeye and the Widowmaker, and mind the airlock.