"The Infinite"

Ada Hoffmann is the author of the space opera novels The Outside and The Fallen, as well as dozens of speculative short stories and poems. They are an autistic self-advocate, an adjunct professor of computer science, a former semi-professional soprano, tabletop gaming enthusiast, and LARPer. They live in eastern Ontario.

They applied the Page 69 Test to their new novel, The Infinite, and reported the following:

The Infinite is the third book in a trilogy about AI Gods, cosmic horrors, and the humans who become embroiled in a conflict between them. The protagonist, and leader of the human’s side, is a scientist named Yasira. Page 69 features not Yasira, but an angel character, Elu, trying to deal with a newly acquired angel prisoner who is having strange, urgent medical symptoms:

“Sedative,” he snapped. He didn’t usually snap, even at the bots. Of course, the bots weren’t sentient enough to care what tone of voice he used. One of them picked up a syringe and efficiently filled it, and he had just enough time to hesitate – they’d barely begun examining this man; could they guess his body weight accurately enough to calculate the dosage correctly? Could they tell if he’d had modifications to his metabolism, allergies, anything that they ought to know before drugging him within an inch of his life? – and then the bot plunged the syringe into the angel’s arm and hesitation became pointless.

He stared down as the angel of the Keres started to relax, as his moans of despair became softer.

“Is there a problem, Elu?” said Akavi, who was still up at the front of the cockpit dealing with the controls.

This scene is part of an important subplot, but the way that it connects back to the larger plot won’t be fully clear until Elu has had a few more minutes with the prisoner and has been able to hear the shocking revelations he brings. So if a reader flipped to page 69 with no prior knowledge at all, they wouldn’t get the best sense of what the series is about, but they’d get a good sense of the writing style, the science fiction setting, and the sense of anxiety throughout.

Meanwhile, if this reader had already read The Outside (book one) and The Fallen (book two), then they would be familiar with Elu and Akavi and why we should care about them, and they’d get a good sense of the kinds of adventures and conflicts that these two characters are continuing to have.

Overall, I would say that the success of the page 69 test for this book is about medium!

Visit Ada Hoffmann's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Outside.

--Marshal Zeringue