Mickey7
A Novel
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4.0 • 49 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Now experience where the hit movie from Academy Award-winning director Bong Joon Ho, starring Robert Pattinson, started in Mickey7 (the inspiration for the film Mickey 17).
Dying isn’t any fun…but at least it’s a living.
Mickey Barnes is an Expendable: a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonize the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there’s a mission that’s too dangerous—even suicidal—the crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal…and why it was the only colonial position unfilled when he took it.
On a routine scouting mission, Mickey7 goes missing and is presumed dead. By the time he returns to the colony base, surprisingly helped back by native life, his fate has been sealed. There’s a new clone, Mickey8, reporting for Expendable duties, and there can only be one Expendable. If Mickey7 reports his survival to Command, one of them is going into the recycler. If he doesn’t and they’re caught, they both are.
Meanwhile, life on Niflheim is getting worse. The atmosphere is unsuitable for humans, food is in short supply, and terraforming is going poorly. The native species are growing curious about their new neighbors, and that curiosity has Commander Marshall very afraid. Ultimately, the survival of both lifeforms will come down to Mickey7.
That is, if he can just keep from dying for good.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Dying on the job is a scary prospect, but the hero of this quirky science-fiction novel has done it six times already. Mickey Barnes is an “Expendable,” a disposable worker on the colonial ice world of Niflheim—and he’s on his seventh regenerated body. Assigned heinous tasks like absorbing toxic radiation and exploring centipede-infested caves, Mickey is the living equivalent of a crash test dummy. But when he unexpectedly survives a fall into an icy crevasse only to discover that his crew has already uploaded his mind into yet another cloned body, things get complicated. Author Edward Ashton packs this science-fiction adventure with action, suspense, and an intriguing clone ménage à trois! Mickey is an amazing character who reflects on his bizarre situation with clever allusions to history, both real and fictional. Take a bold, hilarious adventure into the unknown with Mickey7.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ashton (The End of Ordinary) crafts a unique hero in amateur historian Mickey Barnes, the breezy narrator of this far-flung, far-future adventure. Fleeing his gambling debts, Mickey literally signs his life away for passage on the colony ship Drakkar. As an "Expendable," he's assigned to the ship's most "dangerous-to-suicidal" jobs. Whenever one of these gigs kills him, he's regenerated as a new version of himself. When Mickey7, the seventh of these regenerations, falls into a crevasse on icy Niflheim, his aviator friend Berto leaves him to die, prompting the regeneration process to begin. But Mickey7 survives, and now he and Mickey8 coexist, breaking a societal taboo. If the hungry crew discovers there's two of them, one or both may become food, since the agricultural system is failing and can't feed extra mouths. Mickey7's present day attempts to avoid the wrath of the mission commander and defuse an alien threat on Niflheim are interspersed with his memories of previous, mostly failed attempts at colonization. These flashbacks occasionally feel like interruptions to the probing exploration of what happens when one meets oneself, but they successfully broaden Ashton's imaginative perspective with multiple worlds. Sci-fi readers will be drawn in by the inventive premise and stick around for the plucky narrator.
