Published by St. Martin's Press on February 25, 2025
I’m not sure if this was Edward Ashton’s intent — he may have intended only to entertain by crafting a science fiction thriller — but I view The Fourth Consort as an exploration of culture and the difficulty of understanding or adopting cultural norms that differ from our own. Like Mickey7, the novel is also about diplomacy and moral behavior as an alternative to fighting needless battles.
Ashton’s books tend to be uncomplicated stories that don’t require the support of a large cast of characters. In The Fourth Consort, two primary species are in interstellar conflict with each other. Both species are roaming around in our part of the universe in search of new species that might benefit from their guidance. One is called Unity; their leaders belong to a race of creatures with hard shells whose members are known as ammies. The other group is called the Assembly. Members of the race that dominates the Assembly are described as stickmen. The aliens are unimaginative, but that's a small knock on the story.
Unity visited Earth and made a lot of promises about forming an alliance that don’t seem to have been kept. Dalton Greaves is a human. Dissatisfied with his life, Dalton took a job with Unity in exchange for the promise of a vast fortune when he returns to Earth. Dalton’s job is to make first contact with aliens and act as a diplomat for Unity. He’s on a survey ship captained by an ammie named Boreau, who is probably more interested in taking a planet’s resources than in diplomacy.
The planet is populated by minarchs. Minarchs fight with their mandibles, supplemented by spears. Two political factions are struggling to control the planet. The city is ruled by something like a queen, but she is being challenged by members of the competing faction.
Dalton and another human, Neera Agarwal, take a lander to a planet, only to find that a stickman named Breaker has already made contact with the minarchs. The Assembly and Unity ships in orbit manage to destroy each other, leaving Dalton, Neera, and Breaker stranded on the planet. They nevertheless continue their diplomatic missions, a task Breaker pursues by trashing Dalton as a sneaky human who can't be trusted.
The story follows Dalton as he develops relationships with the minarch queen, her Counselor, the Prefect who wants to displace the queen, and Breaker. Dalton earns the minarchs’ respect (or triggers their fear) when he uses his bare hands to defeat a fearsome creature that attacks him in his room. Fortunately, the creature’s venom doesn’t kill humans, making Dalton seem more powerful to the minarchs than he actually is.
The queen takes a liking to Dalton and decides he will be her new consort. To his relief, Dalton won’t be required to have sex with the queen. He is nevertheless unhappy to learn that the queen ate her first consort. The second and third are marking time until they are devoured. Dalton is the fourth.
As events unfold, Dalton makes an enemy of the Prefect, whose lover is killed by the Counselor as she tries to protect Dalton. This leads to Dalton’s designation as the second in a duel between the Prefect and the Counselor. Minarchs tell him that honor compels him to fight his own duel with the Prefect. The duels are dictated by cultural norms that Dalton doesn’t share. Some people go all shivery at the mention of the word honor, but the novel suggests that dishonorable (or just stupid) behavior often results from cultural adherence to notions of honor that serve no purpose. The honor killings of female relatives after they are raped are a human example of abhorrent acts taken in the name of honor.
Novels often benefit from a protagonist who is forced to make a difficult moral choice. Dalton has to decide whether to let Neera rescue him with superior firepower. If he goes with her, his actions as a consort will reflect poorly upon the queen and will probably lead to her death. If he stays and battles the Prefect, his choice will probably cause his own death. If Dalton substitutes his own sense of honor for the views of the minarchs, what choice will he make?
Ashton always tells a good story. The novel moves quickly. It has enough action scenes to give it the feel of a science fiction thriller, but it also has some hidden depth. The characters have well-defined personalities. Ashton is a likeable guy who messed up his life and is trying to atone, or possibly to disappear. Either way, he remains true to himself, even when he must decide whether to make unselfish choices. The blend of action and philosophy has always drawn me to science fiction, and Ashton is following the best traditions of the genre.
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