The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton

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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Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 14, 2023

Antimatter Blues is a sequel to Mickey7. We learned in the first novel that a colony of humans is struggling to survive on a world that is inhabited by large worm-like creatures they refer to as creepers. In Antimatter Blues, the humans discover that the worms have relatives living a hundred kilometers to the south. The relatives resemble spiders, but that’s a product of design, as the worms and spiders are ancillaries that serve a leader. Both the worms and the spiders have trouble believing that the humans are not also ancillaries, much less that they traveled from another star.

Mickey7 is the seventh iteration of Mickey’s body. He joined the colony as an expendable, the guy who performs dangerous jobs that might end in death. Mickey7 died six times, each time uploading his memories before the mission so that his body could be dissolved and printed anew. Is each new Mickey a continuation of the original or a different person entirely? It seems like every recent sf novel I’ve read uses the Ship of Theseus as a metaphor, but it doesn’t work well here. New Mickeys are more like a new ship with the same captain (kind of like Kirk taking command of a new Enterprise every time he destroys the old one).

At the end of the last novel, Mickey made an agreement that he would no longer be an expendable. He enforced the agreement by making the false claim that the creepers had seized one of the colony’s nuclear bombs. Mickey also claimed that he was in communication with the creepers, an exaggeration that kept him alive. Now, thanks to a mishap, the colony needs the bomb and its fuel or it won’t survive the upcoming winter. Mickey is tasked with finding it. That should be an easy task except the bomb is no longer under the rock pile where he hid it.

To recover the bomb, Mickey must alternately enter into alliances with the worms and the spiders. Humans aren’t always good at alliances (even with other humans), as the worms and spiders both discover. The novel delivers entertaining action scenes as humans, who have superior technology but much smaller numbers, find themselves fighting with or against worms and spiders. Yes, there is a shout-out to the Spartans at Thermopylae, although the Spartans didn’t have the benefit of superior arrows.

The story is amusing, as Edward Ashton intends it to be. The action is fun. Mickey is a likeable character, as are his friends Berto and Cat and Mickey’s girlfriend Nasha. Each character has a distinct personality with all the depth they require for a story of this nature. The colony’s leader is a jerk, playing the role of a foil who contrasts with the decency of the likeable characters, but even jerks can be redeemed, at least in fiction. The novel’s modest attempts at poignancy are modestly successful.

Antimatter Blues works because it doesn’t overreach. It’s meant to be a comedic science fiction action story and, on that level, it reaches its goal. I would suggest reading Mickey7 before reading Antimatter Blues, but Ashton provides sufficient background to fill in readers who don’t want to bother with the first one.

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Mickey7 by Edward Ashton

Published by St. Martin's Press on February 15, 2022

Mickey7 is the kind of book that science fiction readers don’t often see — an intelligent story of alien contact that suggests diplomacy is preferable to war. Edward Ashton assembles several familiar science fiction components (colonization of new worlds, storing consciousness and transferring it to an artificially created body, aliens that have a distributed intelligence) and assembles them into an entertaining story that seems fresh despite its familiarity.

The future Diaspora is a recurring theme in science fiction — the idea that humanity will develop the technology to colonize other planets and that (as history shows) plenty of people will be willing to risk danger for the chance to make a new life in a new place. In this version of the future, humans have little choice but to flee from Earth after nearly destroying the planet. Mickey7 takes a deeper-than-average dive into likely reality of colonization. It’s possible to identify planets in the Goldilocks zone that show evidence of having an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, but it’s impossible to know whether those planets will support human life, even after a hundred years of terraforming, until humans try to establish a colony. Occasionally colonies thrive. Usually colonists manage to get by or everyone dies.

The plot is fairly simple, with only a few significant characters and a straightforward storyline. In this case, simplicity is a virtue. Mickey got into some trouble and needed to get off a planet. He joined a colony ship in the only available position — as an expendable. His memories are downloaded and his DNA is recorded. When he dies — and that’s part of the job, because some jobs require human exposure to radiation or other deadly environments — a new body will be printed, his last-recorded memories will be uploaded to his new brain, and he’ll be good to go. Except for the dying part, which is usually quite unpleasant.

During one of his trips outside the dome, Mickey’s seventh incarnation falls down a hole and into a labyrinth of tunnels. His friend assumes that Mickey will soon be eaten by indigenous creatures called creepers. By the time Mickey makes his way out of the tunnels, Mickey8 has been printed. Having two versions in existence at the same time creates all sorts of problems with food rations, so at least one of them will have to go. When neither volunteers, they try to keep their dual existence a secret. That’s an entertaining premise for a story that explores the complications of two identical guys canoodling with two different women while each tries to make do on half the usual rations.

The story eventually leads to a confrontation between the Mickeys and their boss, as well as between the Mickeys and the indigenous life forms. The resolution suggests that creative people can solve problems without killing everyone in sight. I might recommend Mickey7 for that alone, but I also recommend it because the story as a whole is fun and the characters are likeable.

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