From Mickey 7 to After the Fall: Edward Ashton on Dark Comedy & Power

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Gb5aogJK9P80Tm9RnT9xo?si=3WHKnNhkR6C65XsFbGOEng

About After the Fall

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?

After the Fall can be purchased at your local bookstore and on Amazon.

Unique take on Alien invasion and take over stories

Edward Ashton is one of the great science fiction writers of our time. He is up there with Martha Wells, Dan Simmons, and Scott Sigler. Ashton’s strengths in science fiction are that he knows how to research (making the science as acurate as it can be in fiction) and his focus on personal stories. He doesn’t cover the entire galaxy. I don’t need to know the entire political structure of the Grays in After the Fall, we get enough that inferring the society is enough.

After the Fall follows John, a human “pet” for one of the Grays (aliens who generations ago took over the Earth). We quickly learn that John’s Gray, Mortoc, is an opptimist. He is always ready for the next big thing. The only problem, the next big thing is wagered on John’s life. If they fail to start a bed and breakfast in a society that doesn’t value down time, John will be handed over to a particularly violent Gray. The story contains moments from through out John’s life as he witnessed awful murders at the hands of the Grays intermixed with John’s relationship with Mortoc.

The book is so well written. There is no point where I skimmed ahead. I didn’t think any character was superfluous. The story was tight and touched on everything I felt like I needed to make the world and story make sense. This is sometimes difficult when your science fiction book isn’t a Brandon Sanderson length behemoth. I applaud Edward Ashton and the work he has done here. The book is so freaking good.

Did you know that Edward Ashton is a working scientist? He studies cancer. (This tid bit doesn’t have anything to do with the book, I just thought it was fascinating.)