Deuces Wild: Beginner’s Luck is a collection of stories featuring Slap – the younger hero’s nickname – and Tristan, whose nom de plume is not his real identity. Neither hero is exactly what they seem at first glance: Slap is nineteen, naive, and in need of a guide as well as protection. He is also a grieving father and husband.
The planet where Slap lives was colonized by people who preferred less government and more autonomy. This had one serious drawback in that the centralization of this limited authority allowed a gang known as the Mordas to make itself the shadow government. Every single institution founded by the colonists is compromised: police, politicians, banks, the works. Using or dealing with any one of them means dealing at least by proxy with the Mordas. The gang’s current leader is a man named Lyssel.
What do Lyssel and the Mordas want? The land which the ranchers and farmers have built their homes upon and from which they earn their bread. The Mordas tried to convince Slap sell his ranch to them but he refused, so they beat him and broke his back. Then they murdered his wife and infant son along with the old alien working the land with Slap, before burning his homestead to the ground. Slap was taken in by the local tribe of aliens native to this world to heal.
Having healed up, Slap is now mobile and he wants vengeance. He goes to town and puts in for a beer at the local saloon. While he is there, a couple of goons try to jump a much shorter dark-haired man….
The Story
Reacting by reflex, Slap catches one of the men whom the shorter individual tosses in his direction. He keeps the man in a chokehold until he passes out, having already lost his beer due to smacking it into another attacker’s face. The short, dark-haired man who eventually identifies himself as Tristan thanks Slap and takes him somewhere else to eat his dinner, paying the tab for the younger man. He then puts Slap up in a hotel for the night because unknown to Slap, Tristan has a reputation. One that will get anyone even vaguely associated with him killed.
Tristan is here for the Mordas, though he does not explain why to Slap. Normally a loner, Tristan has a personal code of honor which insists that he protect anyone who helps him, whether they intended to assist him or not. Slap reacted by reflex but he still aided him, so Tristan considers himself to be in the younger man’s debt.
Among his many other skills, Tristan likes to plan his operations thoroughly. He sneaks into the Mordas’ base so he can make sure they are adhering to prior protocol, which will make it that much easier for him to take down Lyssel. Unfortunately, the Mordas saw Slap’s performance in the saloon, and Tristan does not yet know that they have a mutual antagonistic history with the younger man. The group plans to kill Slap since they know where Tristan stashed him in an effort to keep him safe.
Cursing a blue streak about having to rework his plans, Tristan doubles back to rescue Slap only to find that the other has dispatched his would-be assassins with startled aplomb. The two end up killing Lyssel and destroying the leadership of the Mordas before they blast off into space using Lyssel’s own ship. It is not as though he will miss it, now that he is dead, after all.
Soon Tristan learns that he misjudged Slap, but the duo still have a problem: Tristan works alone. After being betrayed by someone he trusted long ago, the older man has none whom he will call friend. He went after Lyssel and the Mordas to get to the man who betrayed him as much or more than because the Mordas “needed killing.” He does not want a friend, even one as smart in his own way as Slap, for a traveling companion.
But every time he tries to leave Slap somewhere safe, something necessitates Tristan going back to rescue the kid. Will the two learn to work together? Or will Tristan fail his own code trying to keep the wide-eyed young man “safe” from danger? And just how much of Slap’s innocence will survive in the wild, wild galaxy?
The Characters
Slap is an amiable callow youth with more strength and depth than he lets on. He is also much smarter than he might appear, despite not being a genius, and his good heart is as admirable as it is dangerous. Doing the right thing can come back to bite the do-gooder in various ways and Slap is not prepared for the price his heroism exacts from him. If he is to survive and thrive, he needs a friend, since his family is no longer there to ground him and rebuilding what he lost is still too painful for him to contemplate.
For his part, Tristan is a wily space age gunman with Batman-level skills in fighting, espionage, demolitions, and all-around sneakiness. He also has Batman’s tendency to try to protect himself emotionally by keeping people as far away as possible. When this conflicts with his all-encompassing honor code, however, Tristan finds there is one rule he can neither break nor bend: the rule of his own conscience. How he reconciles having a friend with his mission means shifting and changing in ways that he does not necessarily like but which might, in the long run, be very good for him.
The World
The world is a space western with strong Firefly and Andre Norton flavor. While aliens exist, they are not mentioned often, with the most aliens seen being a native tribe from the world which Slap calls home. Most of the present action is focused on human characters and human problems, leaving much of the universe unexplored but full of tantalizing possibilities.
Politics
None.
Content Warning
Slap is sexually taken advantage of by a woman whose Romanov-type family styles themselves as gods. This is after her brother has had Slap stretched on the equivalent of a rack for days, naked, with barely any water and no food. One madam dresses provocatively and Tristan notes it with distaste. He has a fling with a different lady of the evening whom he likes much better at one point as well. There is also a fair bit of violence in the novel and the Romanov “gods” have a well-earned nasty reputation, proven when the ruler orders a rebel’s flesh to be stripped from his bones while he is still alive. None of this is described in graphic detail but it will be better appreciated by teens and young adults than by young children.
Who is it for?
Fans of space westerns will love this collection, especially if they ever wanted Firefly to expand on its premise of dissidents, overbearing regime control, and people moving out farther afield to avoid government excess. Western aficionados will like the nods to the genre as well as how it is adapted to the setting, while space opera readers will become thoroughly enamored of the political as well as the technological implications in the worldbuilding. Have Gun, Will Travel fans will love Tristan for his laconic attitude while superhero readers will remain interested in how he makes use of the “prepared for everything” tropes. Anyone who wants a book that they can pick up, put down, and pick up again without too much adjustment will enjoy this collection. Those who remember Stargate SG-1 will find that, while the Romanov-lite family are not explicitly alien, they are familiar in their brutality and threat level. Historians who wish that Firefly had tapped more into the American Civil War will find enough hints here to tantalize them into exploring the Deuces Wild universe in more depth.
Why buy it?
It is a Western space opera that would give Firefly a run for its money at the same time it recalls the best of the Old West serials of yesteryear. What’s not to love? Buy it today and see what you think!
Definitely has Clint Eastwood vibes (the plot is similar to that of "The Outlaw Josey Wales").