AFTER THE FALL, latest Edward Ashton outing

AFTER THE FALL
EDWARD ASHTON
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Would humans really make great pets?

Humans must be silent.
Humans must be obedient.
Humans must be good.

All his life, John has tried to live by those rules. Most days, it’s not too difficult. A hundred and twenty years after The Fall, and a hundred years after the grays swept in to pick the last dregs of humanity out of the wreckage of a ruined world, John has found himself bonded to Martok Barden nee Black Hand, one of the "good" grays. Sure, Martok is broke, homeless, and borderline manic, but he’s always treated John like an actual person, and sometimes like a friend. It’s a better deal than most humans get.

But when Martok puts John’s bond up as collateral against an abandoned house in the woods that he hopes to turn into a wilderness retreat for wealthy grays, John learns that there are limits to Martok’s friendship. Soon he finds himself caught between an underworld boss who thinks Martok is something that he very much is not, a girl who was raised by feral humans and has nothing but contempt for pets like John, and Martok himself, whose delusions of grandeur seem to be finally catching up with him.

Also, not for nothing, something in the woods has been killing people.

John has sixty days before Martok’s loan comes due to unravel the mystery of how humans wound up holding the wrong end of the domestication stick and find a way to turn Martok’s half-baked plans into profit enough to buy back his life, all while avoiding getting butchered by feral humans or having his head crushed by an angry gray. Easy peasy, right?

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My Review: I really hope y'all're catching on to Author Ashton. I confess I don't *get* why people weren't excited by Mickey17, because I thought it was a decent adaptation of Mickey7 as well as a good movie on its own; but mostly I'm a bit bumfuzzled as to how all Author Ashton's books aren't on the bestseller list. Every one I've read has been good-plus. I enjoy them, I spend time after reading them pondering about this bit that's really made me think, or that character who's so awful it must've been a big hoot to write them (specifically thinking of the one in The Fourth Consort of whom I said "'kindness and acceptance' sounds better than 'craven lickspittle sycophancy' doesn't it.") In a lot of ways this novel feels like Author Ashton taking a crack at some of the ideas not fully explored in that story.

I'm really thinking mostly of the ownership angle we delve into in this story, the ethics of cannibalism are unambiguous in The Fourth Consort whereas the Grays in this book are arguably the more vicious in their treatment of humans because they see us, say "aww how cute" and then go right on looking at us like there is nothing else to say or think. Someone who slaughters and eats you regards you as valuable; someone who views you as fungible, as a pet, does not. In a lot of ways it feels like the plays from the Roman Republic and early empire where the clever slave runs master's business better than master, saving the day and earning master's gratitude but never respect.

Like all Author Ashton's work, you're going to get some funny lines, and you'll never have any trouble remembering who said what to whom...I think that's why I like the Mickey series and why I think Director Bong did too, there's such a clear sense of the main characters' identity. What there isn't is a clear path towards resolving the conundrum the story orbits around: Is the condition of the humans going to change for the better? John and Martok are coming out of these events in a different state than they entered them but...well...is there a larger point to this larger story? If not, why bear down on it?

I enjoyed this stand-alone read, I thought it raised interesting points and gave me some good pondering to do. I was not convinced this was the best place to end the story, but it wasn't like it was poor on a craft level. It just could've leveled the read up, but chose not to.

Not the worst, or least forgivable, authorial peccadillo. I'll definitely await the next Ashton book with attentive eagerness.

ANTIMATTER BLUES, Edward Ashton's second Mickey7 novel

ANTIMATTER BLUES (Mickey7 #2)
EDWARD ASHTON
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Summer has come to Niflheim. The lichens are growing, the six-winged bat-things are chirping, and much to his own surprise, Mickey Barnes is still alive―that last part thanks almost entirely to the fact that Commander Marshall believes that the colony’s creeper neighbors are holding an antimatter bomb, and that Mickey is the only one who’s keeping them from using it. Mickey’s just another colonist now. Instead of cleaning out the reactor core, he spends his time these days cleaning out the rabbit hutches. It’s not a bad life.

It’s not going to last.

It may be sunny now, but winter is coming. The antimatter that fuels the colony is running low, and Marshall wants his bomb back. If Mickey agrees to retrieve it, he’ll be giving up the only thing that’s kept his head off of the chopping block. If he refuses, he might doom the entire colony. Meanwhile, the creepers have their own worries, and they’re not going to surrender the bomb without getting something in return. Once again, Mickey finds the fate of two species resting in his hands. If something goes wrong this time, though, he won’t be coming back.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I AM A VERY BAD MAN. I read this book in November 2022, made some notes on a document last computer, and...brain being its usual saboteur self...filed it as "done and dusted" thus forgetting to write an actual review.

Thank all those useless gods I never delete documents.

This is textbook idiotry. Guard against this carelessness, all y'all, and you will maintain your good standing with the review aggregators. Perfectionism is Public Enemy #1 for book reviewers, that is if they want to have their pick of the goodest of the good stuff to read. I am super lucky in that I do get a lot of excellent reads, but a chunk of disappointing turndowns too.

But enough about me, let's discuss Author Ashton's second Mickey7 novel. Well...this is Blogger so no one can talk to me here so I'm more or less soliloquizing. Still.

I hope you've read Mickey7 and seen Mickey 17 by now. If not I strongly urge you to do so; the latter in a theater. I'll say that the film deserves a sequel mostly because Niflheim is such a great visual experience, and seeing that cast (as necessarily amended) perform this story would be a major hoot. Robert Pattinson's endearing turn as an Expendable reformed many many times...eighteen to be precise...was pitch-perfect. This idea of slave labor made palatable to bourgeois sensibilities by being done by not-quite humans is one I've enjoyed since encountering it in Doctor Who's Eleventh Doctor episode "The Almost People" in 2011. I'm quite sure the earlier written versions, eg Cordwainer Smith's Scanners or the opposite end of the social scale of Richard K. Morgan's "Meths,", provided some inspiration for the Expendables and are due a lot of credit, but for me seeing the embodiment of the slave class as people-but-not-quite created by technology was a key a-ha moment.

Mickey7, now back to being Mickey Barnes after the events of the first book, is no longer considered an Expendable. He is also now the only person on Niflheim who can communicate with the planet's aboriginal inhabitants, the creepers. Interspecies harmony is, as always seems to be the case when equals share territory, conditional and intermittent. As this story opens, things are about to bust into open conflict because the creepers have The Bomb, just as the colonists need to use it for the fuel they'll need to survive a Niflheim winter. (Funny how it's always okay for the colonizers to have The Bomb but never the aboriginals.)

Hijinks of the bloodiest, most lethal sort seem destined to ensue. Of course the whole plot hinges on whether and how they ensue, or don't, and whether poor schlemiel Mickey7 (no more intellectually gifted now he's no longer considered an Expendable) can get The Bomb's urgently needed fissile material back from the very anxious creepers.

As he can communicate with them after a fashion, he's privy to a fact...the creepers seem to have another enemy besides the colonists...that could bring about a more secure peace as well as get The Bomb's fissile material back before winter comes to freeze the colonists into personcicles. Nothing like ganging up on a common enemy to create a warm glow of camaraderie, is there.

Shorter and lighter than Mickey7, this read was from the off one I'd hold to a lower standard. It's truly as fun a read as the first was, it's a solidly executed plot, and it has the great good fortune of lifting a lighter psychic load than its older sibling. Most of the hardest to explain stuff is already explained. We're more about learning Mickey7's mannerisms and exploring his human limitations. I think it was a lot less substantive (not always a bad thing), and as stated above, would greatly enjoy a film of it. Not very likely as Director Bong's not a maven for sequels.

The ethical considerations of colonialism are less weighty than those of slavery to my mind. That makes this story a very easy-to-enjoy diversion.

THE FOURTH CONSORT, latest sci-fi funfest with a serious well-made point from Edward Ashton

THE FOURTH CONSORT
EDWARD ASHTON
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A new standalone sci-fi novel from Edward Ashton, author of Mickey7 (the inspiration for the major motion picture Mickey 17).

Dalton Greaves is a hero. He’s one of humankind’s first representatives to Unity, a pan-species confederation working to bring all sentient life into a single benevolent brotherhood. That’s what they told him, anyway. The only actual members of Unity that he’s ever met are Boreau, a giant snail who seems more interested in plunder than spreading love and harmony, and Boreau’s human sidekick, Neera, who Dalton strongly suspects roped him into this gig so that she wouldn’t become the next one of Boreau’s crew to get eaten by locals while prospecting.

Funny thing, though—turns out there actually is a benevolent confederation out there, working for the good of all life. They call themselves the Assembly, and they really don’t like Unity. More to the point, they really, really don’t like Unity’s new human minions.

When an encounter between Boreau’s scout ship and an Assembly cruiser over a newly discovered world ends badly for both parties, Dalton finds himself marooned, caught between a stickman, one of the Assembly’s nightmarish shock troops, the planet’s natives, who aren’t winning any congeniality prizes themselves, and Neera, who might actually be the most dangerous of the three. To survive, he’ll need to navigate palace intrigue, alien morality, and a proposal that he literally cannot refuse, all while making sure Neera doesn’t come to the conclusion that he’s worth more to her dead than alive.

Part first contact story, part dark comedy, and part bizarre love triangle, The Fourth Consort asks an important how far would you go to survive? And more importantly, how many drinks would you need to go there?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: My god, what a place Author Ashton's head is. A ruthless, greedy giant snail, a human diplomat of murky ethics, a race of only vaguely comprehensible planetary natives so protocol-obsessed that it can be lethal to say "hello" in the wrong way...who also just so happen to have murderously invaded Earth in Dalton's lifetime. Oh, and Dalton's kinda coerced as a condition of not being killed to become the consort of their ruler. The fourth consort...and let's not get into why he's fourth.

Dalton's a Swiss-Army knife of a guy. He studied engineering...most practical people in the world, engineers...he was a soldier/POW in the invasion, a tech bro, and now works for a Galaxy-wide org that needs him as a first-contact specialist. You can see how this trajectory launched. Now that he's out doing the stuff he was hired by the Unity for, it's kind of a rude awakening. It always is when your principles and your training all get engaged with the messy, disorganzed systemless world. (That engineering background becoming even more valuable in these circs.)

What happens when the Great Awakening comes? When you are forced by events to re-evaluate everything that underpins your view of the world? You question yourself first, but assuming you're pretty well-educated, that answers only a fraction of your new questions. Permaybehaps you're not on the side of Right and Reason after all?

Poor Dalton's doing this questioning among people who will eat his flesh...his spirit's probably not very nourishing just at that moment locked as it is in crisis. His situation is rife with possibilities for own goals, and unsurprisingly there are a few. The thrust of the story, though, is the act of questioning the reality of your assumptions in the face of countervailing evidence. Dalton, using copious amounts of sarcasm and not a little facetiousness, has the courage to do this. It helps him, and us, that he's worked his whole adulthood troubleshooting systems. Better training for analysis I can't conjure.

The role of honor and duty is large in the story. Largely, it must be said, in its absence when most required. Dalton's got trouble on every side because of this absence among those meant to have his back. It resembles our own hypercapitalist world in this way. Dalton's troubles, I will say, are external; the struggling he does is, too, so I never felt I was with him in his sea of woe. I'm an observer of the results, not a participant in the process.

This is not a knock. The fact is I'm not here for that story, I'm here for a fun action-romp that takes me over some very interesting terrain. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing Dalton navigate the choppy waters of Reality in a skiff formed of principles (his) and held together by pressures (the Unity's). The story does this job very well indeed, though with rather less characterization of side characters than I prefer (hence a missing half-star) Getting us through this plot, however, militated against the time needed being spent that way. That said, I was aware of wanting to spend more time with the second and third consorts and less with his fellow Unity operative. The other missing half-star comes from Dalton's attitude of..."kindness and acceptance" sounds better than "craven lickspittle sycophancy" doesn't it...for a character who does NOT deserve it. I get why Author Ashton made that choice but I do not agree with it to the point of getting frothingly furious at the way it plays out. I shouted at my Kindle from 97% on.

On balance, which I confess I lost along the way, I was amused and entertained by our hypercapitalist snail (as a former veggie gardener I'm here to tell you a better metaphor for the kind of greedy shit who runs an economy solely for personal gain there has never been), by the second and third consorts, and the rest of the cast...telling that I can't remember their names, eh what? (Wait, "Breaker" was one, I think.)

I devoutly hope Author Ashton's name is familiar to you by now from the film of his book Mickey7 (link to my review of it above). I thought that story was terrific. I think this story is, too, with minor reservations that do not vitiate the pleasures I found in the read.

MICKEY7, cloning of a mind and body into an "expendable"

MICKEY7
EDWARD ASHTON
St. Martin's Press
$27.99 hardcover, available now

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

Now a major motion picture from Oscar-winner Bong Joon Ho (Parasite) starring Robert Pattinson and Steven Yeun (as a bad guy!)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Martian meets Dark Matter in Edward Ashton's high concept science fiction thriller, in which Mickey7, an "expendable," refuses to let his replacement clone Mickey8 take his place.

Dying isn’t any fun…but at least it’s a living.

Mickey7 is an Expendable: a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonize the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there’s a mission that’s too dangerous—even suicidal—the crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal…and why it was the only colonial position unfilled when he took it.

On a fairly routine scouting mission, Mickey7 goes missing and is presumed dead. By the time he returns to the colony base, surprisingly helped back by native life, Mickey7’s fate has been sealed. There’s a new clone, Mickey8, reporting for Expendable duties. The idea of duplicate Expendables is universally loathed, and if caught, they will likely be thrown into the recycler for protein.

Mickey7 must keep his double a secret from the rest of the colony. Meanwhile, life on Niflheim is getting worse. The atmosphere is unsuitable for humans, food is in short supply, and terraforming is going poorly. The native species are growing curious about their new neighbors, and that curiosity has Commander Marshall very afraid. Ultimately, the survival of both lifeforms will come down to Mickey7.

That is, if he can just keep from dying for good.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Well, what can I say. I liked THE END OF ORDINARY well enough...inventive use of science, interesting personal stakes, but curiously flat. I wanted to read this book because I loved the science premise (remember Doctor Who's Gangers? My favorite slave race, narrowly displacing the Ood). Also because, well, look at the title of this blog and tell me why I might be interested in the story.

I was particularly taken by Mickey7's job on Niflheim, the planet where he...um...where the action takes place. Oh dear...the Spoiler Stasi will be after me...look, I'm kind of hamstrung here by the endless whinging of the spoilerphobes. So, let's just say, if the possibility of knowing something about a read will utterly devastate your pleasure in it, go somewhere else.

Mickey Barnes chose life as an expendable because, frankly, it was the best way to get on a colony ship away from Earth. This particular colony ship has religious nuts on it, however, and as is always the way with those sort of people, they've decided their imaginary friend doesn't like...really, hates, though for poorly explored reasons...expendables. They're abominations. After all, I thought to myself, once you're dead, their big bully in the...wait, they're on a a spaceship, where the hell is their gawd in such immense skies? how's she keeping tabs on 'em, some sort of spiritual Ring or Alexa?...anyway, your eternal torments are supposed to begin with death (unless, that is, you're one of Them, and even then it's not 100% guaranteed you'll get the post-mortem goodies). Mickey7, whose previous six deaths were pretty horrific, is still up for doing his job now they're on the ice planet Niflheim. Problem is he's gone and fallen into a crevasse. No one's going to bother rescuing an expendable. That's sort of the point of them...he'll be reconstituted into Mickey8, the cycle will continue.

Mickey7's luck is that he survives and makes his way back to the colony, somehow thinking they won't have reconstituted Mickey8. He's handed the religious nut in charge the lever he needs to bludgeon the colony into following his hate-filled plan for the colony to be expendable free. After all, their resources are strained to the limit and, even though expendables get less to eat and fewer material benefits than the religious nuts, they really can't afford another mouth to feed.

But someone please explain to me again how religion is a force for good and compassion in the world.

What results from this unprecedented situation is a kind of slamming-doors farce, with 7 and 8 agreeing to take on the task of splitting their Mickey-duties to both stay alive; needless to say, that fails. What made it fun to read, and the source of my four-star rating, is the sheer propulsive power of Author Ashton's use of Mickey7 as the first-person narrator. It was immediately clear to me that I was going to be investing in this character. His matter-of-factness was endearing to me, where a more emotionally fraught close third-person narration wouldn't have given me the impetus to keep reading.

The filmed version we can expect in, permaybehaps, 2024 is set to star Robert Pattinson and Steven Yeun. Brad Pitt's company is set to produce, and Bong Joon-ho is set to direct. IF, that is, David Zaslav's flensing knife spares the project now that Plan B Entertainment's new home Warner Brothers is owned by his philistine self. Star power isn't much to Discovery, they like cheap and flashy.

We'll always have the fun, funny, and very provocative-idea-laden book.

Science Fiction for your Kindle to beguile this #Booksgiving Eve

ESCAPING EXODUS
NICKY DRAYDEN (Escaping Exodus #1)
HarperVoyager
$10.99 on Kindle, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

Many thanks to the author and HarperVoyager for my ARC.

I know the author of this book for like fifteen years now. She's got a dry wit, a generous heart, and a deeply subversive soul. This is by way of explaining how I know that, in this twisty and turny story of siblings very much at odds with each other and very deeply enmeshed in each others' psyches, she's explained us to ourselves.

What happens when your intimate enemy, the charismatic and popular one to your quieter, more thorough self, challenges your position? As with all stories of intimate enemies, this is the beginning of the end, and the series of books that will follow depends on hooking you with this cataclysm. Like every blockbuster series in fantasy, Author Drayden sets the stakes high, limns the characters indelibly and economically, and gets you ready for an action-packed ride through a world you'd swear was real.

As book two, Symbiosis (non-affiliate Amazon link), expands the story of how love screws things up for everyone, becomes available on 23 February 2021, it's time to take advantage of this book's sale price to decide if you need to preorder the next. I'm pretty confident a lot of you will need to know how this plays out.

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THE END OF ORDINARY
EDWARD ASHTON
HarperVoyager
$8.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

Human beings hate people who don't look like themselves, don't pray like themselves, and don't eat like themselves. Imagine, then, what an *actual* difference, like a gene-manipulated extra strength or ability, would cause. You don't need to, Author Ashton has done the work for you. In this fast-paced book, I was eager to get to the next set-piece; but then realized that was what I was doing, waiting for the next Scene while being irked at the clueless-Dad-unworldly-Engineer interacting with people more generally capable than he is. Since it's a very good book to read at a moment in history when we need to take stock of how we cope with Otherness, I'd say any SF fan would do a lot worse than picking this up for #Booksgiving reading.

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WHEN GRAVITY FAILS
GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER (The Budayeen Cycle #1)
Open Road Media
$8.99 edbook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked awful, but I always look awful in the mirror. I keep myself going with the firm belief that my real face is much better looking.

That is a very trenchant sentence. That is exactly what you're signing up for when you get this book. A rarity now, in the 1980s this book was a unicorn for dealing with Muslim culture in any way, and using near-future SF to highlight the way whites are colonizing the world was still cutting-edge stuff. Digging deeper into themes of identity with transgender characters, refugees from dying Europe, and pharmacological solutions that become terrible problems, the book prefigures the 21st century's obsessions. Readers of transgressive fiction need to rediscover what amazed us in the 1980s because it will amaze and delight you, too.