Book Review: Mickey7 by Edward Ashton
A technology that allows a person’s consciousness to be transferred to a printed organic body enables the use of Expandables: persons who are basically guinea pigs for dangerous tasks. When an expandable dies, a new version of him is printed and he’s as good as new, with all his previous memories that was uploaded from their previous version to ensure continuity. Obviously this brings up the Altered Carbon series by Richard Morgan, in which basically everyone that can afford it gets to live as long as they wish with newly produced bodies and consciousness uploads.
However, while the Altered Carbon series is a sort of gung-ho, militaristic hard sci-fi, and most people seem to have embraced this sort of immortality, Mickey7 is bleak, and all the cool technologies with Antimatter drives and interstellar travel, seem to pale in the zeitgeist of Mickey7 world’s characters who all seem depressive to different degrees. Expandables are also not everybody’s favorite characters even though they seem to save everyone else, even expensive drones, from dangerous, deadly tasks. However, the story is told almost entirely from Mickey7’s viewpoint, and being a quite depressive fellow himself who doesn’t seem to think he has any remarkable abilities, is the bleakness of the Mickey7 universe due to our POV’s personality?
When Mickey7: the novel starts, the expandable called Mickey Barnes is at his 7th iteration. The previous versions of him had being recycled in the course of various guinea pig and deadly tasks on behalf of the Drakker, an interstellar ship bringing over a hundred colonists from Midgard system to establish a beach-head on Niflheim, a planet deemed viable for terraforming and human habitation. Mickey7 is with his friend Berto and girlfriend Nasha on a mission to investigate a series of tunnels in which lives creepers, caterpillar-like creatures that inhabit the planet of Niflheim. These caterpillars have killed some colonists and Mickey6 (the previous version of Mickey7) and so when Mickey7 falls down a hole, Berto decides that going down there to save Mickey7 was too dangerous, and not worth it, since a new version of Mickey would just be pulled from the tank.
However, Mickey7 survives the tunnels, and when he gets back to the colonists dome, he finds that Berto has already had Mickey8 printed. So now Mickey7 and Mickey8 have to live on the resources allocated to the single Mickey, because they fear that if they are discovered as a multiple, the colony’s chief, Marshal, would have one of them recycled in order to preserve the very limited organic recourses of the colony.
Mickey7 is a non-linear novel. Stories of humanity’s successes and failures to establish colonies on interstellar planets are told. How the technology for printing new bodies and uploading consciousness was developed is also told in flashbacks. Meanwhile, Marshal is trying to figure out how dangerous the creepers are to the colony, which invariably means more expandable tasks for Mickey8, as far as he knows.
Mickey7 is an engaging novel. It brings forth questions about the ethics of printed humans and multiples in a way not explored by Altered Carbon, for instance. It explores interstellar planetary colonization and the opportunities and dangers that would entail. Despite Mickey7 seeming to regard the colony’s security personnel as goons, the characters have enough variety and depth to give the novel an interesting exploration of friendship, love, duty, sacrifice, inter-species communication, and survival. All these factors and facets of this novel make it a worthy read for anyone interested in space scifi and the adventures and odds of establishing colonies on barely known planetary systems.
Mickey7 has been adapted into a movie staring Robert Pattinson, and I look forward to seeing it. It would be interesting to see the world of Mickey7 brought to the wide screen.