Books book reviews In the Planetary Doghouse: Edward Ashton’s After the Fall Edward Ashton’s latest explores human–alien social dynamics. By Sasha Bonkowsky | Published on February 25, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share I’ve read three of Edward Ashton’s books: Mickey7, The Fourth Consort, and now After the Fall. All three feature pathetic schmucks of men who find themselves subservient to a much larger alien. Not in a sexy way—these aren’t those kinds of books. No, Ashton is interested in exploring the political and social dynamics of human–alien interaction, and After the Fall is just the most explicit about it. Our protagonist John, you see, is an alien’s pet. He doesn’t think of himself that way. He’s a “bondsman,” or an “employee,” a human who works for a grey named Martok. He just doesn’t have any rights, and if he speaks out of turn or dares lie to a grey, he’ll get his head smashed in. Such is the sad state of all humans nowadays. After some apocalyptic catastrophe (‘the Fall’) a hundred years ago, the greys arrived in their colony ships and set up civilization in a small corner of the ruined Earth. Out of sheer magnanimity, they took in the remaining humans and created a system where the two species could live in harmony, so long as humans remember their great failure and don’t step out of line. That’s how the greys tell it, anyway, and John, crèche-born and raised, has no reason to doubt. Man, those humans, huh? The asymmetry of John’s relationship with Martok becomes clear when the grey—a wannabe “entrepreneur” with a string of failed businesses behind him—puts his bond up for collateral against an eye-watering loan. Martok has a vision. Humans might have been self-destructive and brutish, but they had an innovation the greys lack: leisure capacity! Martok hopes to turn an abandoned lakeside cabin into this Earth’s first full-service getaway resort, and if he fails, it’s John’s neck on the line. Along the way to the cabin, Martok picks up another bondsman, a twelve-year-old girl named Six with dangerous ideas about what humans used to be like (and who might just be his replacement), and John makes his own life worse by accidentally implying the incompetent Martok is really a mafia enforcer. Greys who can commit violence are highly valued because of a strange quirk in grey biology: When agitated or incensed, greys become absent, losing control of themselves and generally wreaking havoc. Only a rare few can go about killing or maiming without losing all rational faculty, and they’re hired out at exorbitant prices. Unfortunately, Martok is far too bumbling to be an enforcer, so John’s got to figure out another way to deal with the greys who get sent out to Martok’s fledgling resort accompanied by sinister requests for “minor correctives” or “full treatments.” A solution to his problems—or really, just another problem for our poor beleaguered man—presents itself when he encounters the feral humans who live in the woods. Up until this point, we’ve assumed John is a baseline human. Sure, he’s weak, he’s small enough relative to a grey that Martok can cuddle him against his chest, he’s intimidated by the tall pine trees of his new scenery—but that’s just how Ashton likes to write them. Isn’t it? But Dana and Tanner, the bow-slinging feral humans, are two feet taller than John at least, with both muscle and viciousness that he lacks. Turns out, John’s domesticated. Buy the Book After The Fall Edward Ashton Buy Book After The Fall Edward Ashton Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The most apt comparison—the one After the Fall is shot through with, including on the book’s cover—is that of wolves and dogs. The greys haven’t flattened out John’s nose like a pug yet, but maybe it’s only a matter of time. John and Dana are only a few generations removed from one another, but the greys’ biological acumen and breeding programs have already diverged them significantly. Bondsmen and ferals differ psychologically, too: The créche nursemaids condition bondsmen to be repulsed at the thought of hurting greys to ensure they don’t step out of line. I happened to be reading After the Fall at the same time my partner was reading Christopher Buehlman’s The Daughters’ War; that novel’s goblins prove just how evil they are by having human farms, populated by overlarge, unintelligent humans made for the harvest. The same for The Matrix, whose robot overlords are using humans as batteries, or The Twilight Zone way back in 1962 having humans raised for food. So it’s perhaps unique how sympathetically the greys are treated in After the Fall—imperfect but nuanced, with various political factions among them jockeying for power, and certainly not universal villains. If the story took place among the most powerful greys, or during the time of the mysterious Fall, that attitude might be different. But although Dana, Tanner, and Six have (unsurprisingly) a human-centric view of the Fall—the greys conquered Earth when their ships arrived, and the ferals are living out a heroic resistance on a planet rightfully theirs—the truth doesn’t seem so simple. And Martok is a nobody in grey society, far from the levers of power and comparatively kind to John; he certainly benefits from grey dominance, but it’s hard to blame him for it. Ashton likes situations like these, on the fringes of society where the rules bend—and, more specifically, where the sharp strictures of who we expect to hate break down. Mickey from Mickey7 is trained to kill the aliens that populate the frozen planet of Niflheim, but after surviving a freak encounter he learns maybe they don’t deserve to die; Dalton Greaves, stuck in the alien queen’s palace of The Fourth Consort with the enemy soldier Breaker, becomes friends with him and even shares Breaker’s grief over the death of his partner. The setup of After the Fall makes readers expect to hate the greys, to treat them as alien conquerors, but the precariousness of grey society and Martok’s genuine good nature slowly undermines that feeling. Now, to me, John and Martok’s relationship never rises to the level of found family or buddy-cop routine. No matter how good Martok is to John, or how much he might earnestly ask John for business advice, there’s simply too much of a power imbalance between them. Cheery feelings will only take you so far when one partner owns the other. But it doesn’t have to be those things. After the Fall is classic Ashton, comedic, bizarre, and thoughtful in equal measure, poking at complicated questions of humanity and our own relationships with one another at the same time it cheers on John’s compounding bad decisions that keep the novel rolling. The most important takeaway? In the end, human pets are probably more trouble than they’re worth.[end-mark] After the Fall is published by St. Martin’s Press.Read an excerpt. The post In the Planetary Doghouse: Edward Ashton’s <i>After the Fall</i> appeared first on Reactor.