by Edward Ashton ★★★☆☆
With both Mickey 7 (my #13 book of 2022) and its sequel Antimatter Blues earning strong 4-star ratings from me, I was excited to receive an ARC of Edward Ashton's latest novel, The Fourth Consort, and to see what he had come up with in a non-Mickey world. The novel's protagonist is Dalton Greaves, a human from Earth recruited by an alien-led company called Unity to help them find and colonize other more primitive civilizations across the universe. He's paired with Boreau, a giant snail-like creature and commander of their mission, and Neera, another human who is tasked with studying new planet biospheres and resource bases. Dalton's job is to make first contact with other species and effectively act as Unity's diplomatic liaison.
The novel opens with one such first-contact meeting, between Dalton and a group of creatures called minarchs. Via a translation device, Dalton is able to communicate with the minarchs, and we learn that he's not the first to contact them. Just days prior, a "stickman" from Unity's rival colonization company, known as "the Assembly", had visited, and the novel becomes a competition between Dalton and the stickman to determine who can best befriend the minarchs and secure the planet for their respective group.
When Dalton, Neera, and the stickman—who comes to be known as Breaker—are temporarily stranded on the planet, the stakes are raised. While the off-planet visitors may be more technologically advanced, the minarchs have a natural predatory advantage over the humans. The minarchs are "considerably bigger than a human...with a half-dozen armored legs, a segmented, tapering body that ends in a wickedly barbed tail, and an insectile head topped by a predator's forward-facing eyes." Add in that stickmen are even more lethal, a group used as "the Assembly's shock troops" and notorious for being killing machines, and Dalton is at constant risk of death and dismemberment.
Against that backdrop Ashton builds a scenario in which Dalton must unravel the internal politics of the minarch society, while keeping himself alive and also keeping alive the hope that he can preserve the relationship for Unity. While the situation is perilous, the tone is somewhat jocular (not dissimilar to what we saw in Ashton's Mickey 7 novels), and so the level of white-knuckling is kept to a minimum. However, despite the potential for layers of palace politics, there's not a tremendous amount of mystery or plotting in the novel. The most interesting wrinkles come when Dalton's translation device struggles with certain parts of the minarchs' and stickman's language, leaving critical holes in Dalton's understanding of what those species are actually saying to him. The margin for error is already slim given the complexity of understanding nuances of a new society, and omitting key concepts as "<UNTRANSLATED>" adds an extra layer of stress to Dalton's mission. It's also a low-effort way to build in some misdirection, and one that Ashton employed a bit too often as a crutch when needing to manipulate a situation.
While the novel was enjoyable, it lacked some of the depth of plot that I'd come to expect from Ashton via his previous books. He uses flashbacks to Dalton's time before arriving on the minarchs' planet to help more fully develop that character. That was, for the most part was an effective tool. But like the "untranslated" crutch above, there were also moments where doling out that backstory in pieces felt too convenient, never more so than when it's casually revealed near the end of the book that Dalton happened to participate in an unusual sport in high school and college, just before having skills in that sport would become useful in a situation. That reveal felt a little lazy, and honestly unnecessary.
And so overall this one was just okay. I wasn't disappointed by the read, but it fell short in places to the level of my expectations following the Mickey 7 novels. I'd suggest starting with those if you're looking for a sci-fi novel with a decent dose of humor and societal commentary—they're quite good. The Fourth Consort felt a bit lackadaisical by comparison, and it's probably one you can skip.
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