The Page 69 Test: "The Fourth Consort"

Monday, March 3, 2025

"The Fourth Consort"

Edward Ashton is the author of the novels The Fourth Consort, 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 The Fourth Consort and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Fourth Consort finds our protagonist, Dalton Greaves, contemplating a job offer he's just received from the representatives of Unity, an interstellar confederation dedicated to finding budding sentient life wherever it arises, and guiding it away from self-destruction and onto the path of peace and enlightenment.

That's what they told him, anyway. A quick internet search reveals that the few stories out there from people who have signed on with Unity and returned don't seem to have much to do with enlightenment. Seems like the humans Unity takes are mostly being used for either scut work or something that sounds suspiciously like plunder:
A man from the Netherlands claimed to have spent ten years doing equipment maintenance on an ammie ship without ever seeing the surface of a planet. A Korean woman said she'd been taken to an administrative center somewhere on a world with no moon and a fat red sun that never budged from its place on the southern horizon, where she provided cultural context to ammie researchers wading through ten thousand years of human literature looking for something worth replicating. Someone going by the handle Anger Man claimed to have participated in what sounded like a research study into the mechanics of human reproduction.

That one didn't sound so bad.
A reader browsing to page 69 would actually get a reasonably good idea of the setup of the book. The Fourth Consort is a twist on the old trope of humanity joining a benevolent galactic civilization. In particular, it wonders how that might play out if the civilization actually isn't actually all the benevolent--more than that, what if there is a benevolent civilization out there, but we've inadvertently signed on with a criminal gang? Because this page lays out Dalton's thinking as he considers Unity's offer, it gives a fair overview of the premise.

What we don't get at all from this page, however, is a feel for the characters, the tone, or any idea of the details of the plot. The Fourth Consort is heavy on snappy dialogue and interesting, conflicted characters, with a heavy dose of dark comedy. Because this page is really all about filling in the background, we don't get any of that here. We also don't learn much of anything about Dalton himself, and much of the focus of the book is on his journey up from a very grim place in small town West Virginia to a slightly less grim place in the cosmos.

Bottom line for me is that while you could do worse than this page if you were looking to determine what this book is all about, you could definitely do better. I might suggest pages 114-115 as better representatives. Bob and Randall are the real unsung heroes here.