Dalton Greaves is Earth’s ambassador to the cosmos. He’s also a bit of a schmuck.
He works for Unity, an alien confederation of species working to bring peace and harmony to the galaxy. Or something. They arrived on Earth decades ago, and he certainly hasn’t seen any of that benevolent prosperity they promised. Mostly they recruit unloved humans—like Dalton, publicly dumped at a bar in West Virginia for being a depressed, alcoholic layabout—and send them out on missions to find new species for Unity. If these frontliners don’t get eaten, shot, vaporized, stampeded, gored in a ritual duel, or poisoned by alien fungi, they get to come back with what’s only ever referred to as “fuck-you money.”
The problem standing in the way of his uber-wealthy return to Earth is that Unity has a competitor: the Assembly, another pan-species alien confederacy with far scarier troops and maybe a bit more commitment to that whole benevolence thing.
When Dalton’s Unity ship and an Assembly ship arrive at the same planet to contact a new alien species of “minarchs,” things get ugly. The pilots blow each other up in orbit, leaving two humans, Dalton and his companion Neera; an Assembly soldier nicknamed Breaker; and the planet’s representatives all standing awkwardly around. Well, what now? After a bit of posturing in which everyone involved threatens to kill one another, the minarchs graciously invite Dalton and Breaker to stay in their capital as honored guests… except it quickly becomes clear that they’re not so much “guests” as “political pawns.”
Part of that political gamesmanship involves Dalton becoming the consort of the minarch queen, First Among Equals. The fourth consort, as the title might have indicated—although there are only three at present, because First Among Equals tore the head off and devoured the First Consort.
When I first reached the point where First Among Equals requests (at spearpoint) that Dalton become her boytoy, I put the book down for a moment and asked myself, Am I ready to read about sex with insectoid aliens?
This is not a book about sex with aliens.
Maybe you feel relieved. Maybe you feel disappointed—sex with aliens is a long-standing and well-established genre. But there is no getting down, wet, and dirty with the creatures that look like “bastard child[ren] of a tarantula and a velociraptor.” And that’s an important thing to know about the book before you go in: that it’s not really a romance, but a standoff, and not love but politics that pulls Dalton in so many directions.
Buy the Book
The Fourth Consort
The Fourth Consort
Buy this book from:
Neera is ruthless and callous; her go-to suggestion is to kill Breaker and point laser rifles at the minarchs, so that Unity will see they’re doing a great job holding the planet for them and send Neera and Dalton home with their payouts. Breaker is serene but equally dangerous, with predatory reflexes and glistening claws, and he wants to make sure it’s the Assembly which allies with the minarchs. And First Among Equals is using Dalton as a tool—or as bait—to draw out the rebellious elements in her city and reaffirm her power after the upheaval caused by the arrival of the offworlders.
The most interesting, and the most enjoyable, part of this political drama is that Dalton really has no idea what’s going on. Unity didn’t bother researching the political structures of the minarchs, and the AI nanotech translator in his ear isn’t dealing well with either the Assembly language or the minarchs’ machinations. So he guesses. He fumbles. He accepts a blood debt for Breaker’s partner by complete accident. His default state after a conversation is hoping that human facial and body language doesn’t translate so nobody knows just how deep a hole he’s in.
The Fourth Consort felt almost like a counterpart to Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire. Both follow outsider characters who become embroiled in the schemes and power struggles of an alien culture, navigating the dangers, taboos, and idiosyncrasies of that culture, both in roles—consort and ambassador—that carry respect but little power. But Empire’s protagonist, Mahit Dzmare, is prepared for her assignment. She’s studied Texicalaanli culture as long as she can remember, she’s dreamed of seeing the capital’s spires, she’s fluent in the language and can quote the empire’s literature. Dalton is Just Some Guy.
Common characteristics of Just Some Guy™ include an “I’m just here to do my job”/“I’m just here to get paid” attitude, a seemingly unimportant role or task, and an unfortunate predilection to end up directly in the center of whatever plot is going down. Edward Ashton loves these types of protagonists. Mickey Barnes, from Mickey7, is an expendable and unheroic guy who stumbles into the plot on what should have been a routine mission. Anders Jensen, of Three Days in April, never asks to be caught in the middle of the plague that tears through Baltimore. Mal the rogue AI, of Mal Goes To War, doesn’t care one jot about the human war until he ends up in a human body. Dalton, then, isn’t a radical departure from Ashton’s usual style… but it’s a classic for a reason. He’s a protagonist who’s easy to follow and whose mistakes are (sometimes painfully) relatable.
One consequence of this protagonist, though, is that a lot of worldbuilding falls through the cracks. Unity and the Assembly are both big question marks—what do they actually do? Are they equally powerful, or outmatched? What are the goals of the giant snails running Unity, anyhow, and what’s going on in the rest of the galaxy? Ashton drops these tantalizing hints of a larger world, but there’s no one in the novel who seizes on them—and as The Fourth Consort is billed as a standalone, there likely will never be.
But all those are questions I came to after finishing the book; while reading, I was thoroughly entertained! The Fourth Consort is silly and bizarre in equal measure, with the sort of dry, dark humor that Ashton is so skilled at writing. It’s also a book that never loses its momentum, managing to pull the reader along in the maelstrom of Dalton getting in ever further over his head, even as it tackles questions of honor and survival, of when to make alliances and when to break them, and of what, if anything, makes humans special.
In the end, The Fourth Consort reminds us: If someone offers you a too-good-to-be-true job in outer space, you should probably read the fine print first.
The Fourth Consort is published by St. Martin’s Press.
