The Page 69 Test: "Mal Goes to War"

Edward Ashton is the author of the novels Mal Goes to War, Antimatter Blues, Mickey7 (now a motion picture directed by Bong Joon-ho and starring Robert Pattinson),

Three Days in April, and The End of Ordinary. He lives in upstate New York in a cabin in the woods (not that Cabin in the Woods) with his wife, a nine pound killing machine named Maggie, and the world’s only purebred ratrantula, where he writes—mostly fiction, occasionally fact—under the watchful eyes of a giant woodpecker and a rotating cast of barred owls. In his free time, he enjoys cancer research, teaching quantum physics to sullen graduate students, and whittling.

Ashton applied the Page 69 Test to Mal Goes to War and reported the following:

The Page 69 Test is a little tough to apply to Mal Goes to War, for the simple reason that page 69 is the end of a chapter, and only contains a couple short paragraphs of text. So, I’m going to cheat just a bit and include a couple of paragraphs from page 68 to round things out:
With that accomplished, Mal has the opportunity to explore the sensory systems that are now available to him. First, he checks for a direct link to infospace. He doesn’t expect to find one, so he’s not particularly disappointed that none exists. That’s a minor issue. He’s in an aircraft now rather than a human skull, and he’s confident he can find a functioning tower before he runs out of power and crashes. The only actual data connection he finds is through a low-power directional transmitter. Presumably, this connects the drone to whoever had been controlling it prior to Mal’s arrival. He’s also receiving a steady stream of input from an array of onboard sensors, including a visible-wavelength camera mounted on his underside.

He taps that feed, and finds that he’s orbiting directly over a rusty white pickup truck. The bed is full of armed men. As he watches, it comes to a halt.

It comes to a halt in front of a house that he quickly recognizes as the Andreous’ home.

Mrs. Andreou is leaning out of an upstairs window, frantically waving a white pillowcase over her head.

“Kayleigh?” Mal sends. “Are you awake? If you are, please tell Asher that you are about to have visitors.”

There’s no response, of course. Kayleigh can only transmit using her mouth-hole. There’s no way for her to let him know whether she’s heard him or not. Someone is leaning out from the passenger-side window of the pickup, gesturing with one arm toward Mrs. Andreou. He turns his head then, appears to speak to the men in the back. Mal checks to see whether his new body carries any armaments, and is pleasantly surprised to see that in fact there is an air-to-surface missile strapped under each wing.

He is less pleasantly surprised to learn that, in his space-making, he’s deleted the control systems needed to launch them.

“Kayleigh?” Mal sends again. “If you can hear me, you may want to pick up your bat.”
If you were looking for a single page in this book to tell the reader what they’d be in for if they picked it up, you could do a lot worse than this. From this page we can glean that our protagonist isn’t human, that he’s an entity that moves from host to host, not much caring whether he’s currently inhabiting a human body or an armed drone or a network-enabled toaster. We also learn that he has friends, and that they’re trapped in the middle of an a war. They’re obviously in a bad spot at the moment, which also describes the bulk of the book.

The thing we’re missing from this section, though, is the rest of the cast. Mal Goes to War is science fiction, but like most of my work, it’s character-driven science fiction. The main thread of this book follows the efforts of a mismatched band of refugees as they try to find some modicum of safety in the midst of chaos, and much of the fun comes from the ways in which they bounce off of one another. Kayleigh is a genetically modified woman in the body of a child. Asher is Kayleigh’s prisoner-turned-maybe-friend. Pullman is a rich doofus with a set of cerebral implants that turn out to be a perfect vacation home for Mal after Pullman’s dog steals and eats the severed head that Mal had been hanging around in previously. They’re not anyone’s idea of the A-team, but when the world is coming apart at the seams, you take whatever friends you can find.

At the end of the day, I’d probably prefer a page with a bit more dialogue and maybe a laugh or two to this one. This is a funny book, and I’m not sure this page really conveys that. You don’t have to take my word for it, though—you can read the rest of the book and find out for yourself.