Mickey7 (Mickey 7 #1)

I blame Waterstones for this, I went there to pick up some Shakespeare books for my next “English classics catch up” reading session and walked by a shelf of “fundamental and essential sci-fi” books which featured Asimov, Blake Crouch and Andy Weir to only name the authors I’ve read before. So obviously when I saw Mickey7 by Edward Ashton sitting among them I thought that would be an easy 8/10+ read. The pitch seemed a bit derivative of the Murderbot series but hey those were fun too; I had never heard of Edward Ashton before but I wouldn’t call myself an expert either so if Waterstones calls it fundamental sci-fi, they must know better than me and hey it’s being made into a movie too the cover proclaimed proudly so it can’t be that bad surely.

It’s a tragedy that this is where I want to end the review.

Genuinely, I took no notes whilst reading Mickey7 because there’s nothing to say about it, it’s painfully derivative of many sci-fi tropes and stories and Edward Ashton brought absolutely nothing of him to it, it’s boring. I was passably entertained by the pseudo wittiness of the character as displayed by Murderbot, Mark Witney or Ryland Grace but every one of these characters had one thing in common: they were competent in at least one domain. Mickey is not particularly competent in anything, he’s a historian (and not a very good one judging by how clueless he is about “old Earth” history) which apparently is a worthless profession in the future and facing this complete lack of relevant skills and the threat of being tortured for owing a lot of money he’s gambled away for dubious reasons of boredom he signed up on being the “expendable” for a colonisation mission.

Being an expendable brings up the now (at least for me) entirely dead and beaten up horse of “copying a mind and pasting it into another body is not the same as cutting out a mind and moving it to another body”. The video game Soma explored that nightmare of an identity crisis very thoroughly and I found no other piece of media that dealt with that conundrum in a more interesting or in depth way. In fact just last week, the first episode of the seventh season of Black Mirror just brushes up against that subject before refusing to elaborate. In the world of Mickey7 an expendable is someone whose mind and body are backed up regularly (i.e. copied over) so that in the case of death a new body can be reconstructed and whatever the latest backup of the mind was is being pasted into that new body. This is being underhandedly marketed as “becoming immortal” but it honestly doesn’t take a genius to come to the conclusion that it has nothing in common with immortality. For one Mickey dies rather quickly, he’s just a regular dude after all. Secondly Mickey7 is not the original Mickey having lived through 7 deaths before his dying mind transferring to a new body, he is the seventh copy after the 6 previous Mickeys already died. In fact Mickey7 does not remember most of his deaths because he is not constantly backing his mind up. It’s meant to be some sort of character growth that Mickey7 figures out that he is not really immortal but how does anyone convince themselves of being immortal when clearly it is a case of copy paste, not cut and paste.

This is where Edward Ashton’s complete lack of proper world building comes in. The entire premise is half arsed by using some barely coherent Theseus ship metaphor (the whole concept of Theseus’ ship is based on a continuity in the ship’s existence, the paradox is voided if the ship gets entirely destroyed and rebuilt from scratch, again it does not take a great mind to figure that out). The world the story takes place in is also one where humanity has fled Earth to colonise as many systems as they can and now that it is solidly established on some new planets, it continues its galactic expansion. Few things that come into play: interstellar space travel implies dealing with the difficulty for humans to traverse light-years of distance as well as communication between systems if there is any communication at all and colonisation implies dealing with identifying viable planets and any possible terraforming efforts.

The way the travel is handled is that ships accelerate to light speed and that most of the colonisation effort is sent as embryos with only a skeleton crew to kickstart terraforming and growth of the embryos. Now here’s the issue: there’s never any mention of relativity in the entire book. Travelling at light speed has massive ramifications for the amount of time experienced by people who are not travelling at light speed, yet if a ship travels at light speed for 9 years it is essentially handled as if 9 years had passed for everyone around the universe… Adding on the issue, communication between systems is possible, not instantaneously as far as I can tell but the author also never specifies nor explains how this is possible but extensive information, logs and history is known of almost every other human colony out there including failed ones where everyone died. There’s even one instance of inter-system war with war ships and light speed weapons being sent across and yet no mention of how communication actually works in this world. Finally, the number of failed colonies is seemingly justified by how fundamentally incompetent scientists have become. Mickey and his crew were sent on a planet that was meant to be warm and pleasant and with oxygen in the air. They land and it’s a frozen hell scape with unbreathable atmosphere. By the end of the book it turns out that the sun has a rapidly variable output, something scientists observed over 30 years before sending Mickey’s expedition out. However, they determined that that wasn’t possible and assumed that something else like “space clouds” were the reason and then made the follow-up assumption that the sun was probably always outputting in its “high energy” mode and so that the weather on the planet should be warm and livable. Colonisation expeditions are not cheap, in fact they are so expensive that Mickey’s crew is refused the transport of personal belongings to save on fuel needed to accelerate and yet humanity is sending out these ships with scientists making decisions based on a “eh it’s probably fine” process. Food is also a critical resource, the book repeatedly, again and again hammers in the problem that everyone is starving because it’s too cold for agriculture and the hydroponics “for some reason” aren’t working either. Now that is definitely a problem but maybe it would not be as big a problem if they sent out expeditions with calorie dense sources of food like potatoes or MREs but instead they have a never ending supply of rabbit, clams and…tomatoes. Tomatoes are a catastrophe in terms of weight per calorie ratio, the book emphasises the importance of travelling light to save on fuel but then sends fucking tomatoes up instead of potatoes??? The scientists on Mickey’s crew are also for some reason obsessed with trying to get tomatoes to grow on a planet that’s been averaging negative 10 degrees C for the past 10 months… This is by far the dumbest, least thought out science fiction I have ever read, especially since it wants to play it as mostly straight hard science fiction, there is no hyperspace jump, no jedi, the most fantasy based aspect are the anti matter bombs at a stretch. I am genuinely baffled how this book got the acclaim it got and how it was found to be deserving of a movie adaptation when it has so many gaping plot holes. Fuck you Waterstones, this is not essential sci-fi in the slightest, it’s pathetic high school homework level writing.

The non-science fiction parts aren’t any better either with every character being awfully one dimensional and no two characters having any chemistry at all. Nadja and Mickey7/8 are together. Why? I don’t know either, they have sex a lot which apparently is enough to sustain a 7 year long relationship because they sure have nothing in common nor do they get up to anything else in their free time. Later on Mickey7 tries to get it on with Cat who betrays him 2 chapters later by revealing that he’s a “multiple” (i.e. Mickey7 and 8 are alive at the same time which is a big no no in this world because it would make the plot hole of Theseus’ ship too obvious or some other reason about a mad scientist making an army of himself, whatever you think is more logical) and we’re somehow meant to feel that betrayal when she’s had all of 2 in universe days to make an impact… Mickey8 eventually gets killed…oh no, I guess? I don’t know, he didn’t really have a personality anyway aside from being hungry.

What’s left? Oh right the creepers. To very quickly set the scene, the planet Mickey and his crew are on is host to creepers, an alien hivemind species that is not really getting along with humans. They kidnapped and dissected Mickey7’s predecessor and took his local communication device which somehow exclusively allows them to communicate with Mickey (I mean that device should be able to contact anyone but sure). Since they don’t really speak English, communication between Mickey and the creepers is rather limited but he uses that limited communication capability to negotiate a truce whilst him and Mickey8 were sent on a mission to suicide bomb the creepers with a bunch of space nukes strapped to their backs. Mickey7 goes back to camp and announces that the creepers kept one of the space nukes and that through the lovely threat of mutually assured destruction, humans and creepers shall now live in peace and Mickey is now the official ambassador and diplomat for humanity because only he can talk to them which Marschall (the leader and religious nut of the camp who hates Mickey with a passion) really doesn’t like but what can you do in the face of MAD? During this whole shtick Mickey goes on about how the creepers are an intelligent species, with a culture of their own and that they deserve life like humans do. Then it turns out he never gave them the space nuke because “hey you can’t trust these savage creatures” and that he hid the goddamn space nuke under a rock for like a straight year because that’s how you store devices capable of glassing half the planet. He also makes no additional attempts at establishing relationships with the creepers, no expansion of the language to facilitate communication between humans and creepers, no interaction regarding humans terraforming the damn planet, nothing that a diplomat or ambassador would do.. So not only is Mickey a duplicitous xenophobe, he’s also even more moronic than I thought and that’s where the book ends. It just ends, the anti matter nuke is still rusting away under a rock, Mickey is not any closer to doing anything useful as a diplomat but it’s all ok and nice and cute because he only did all this because he like really really loves Nadja.

It’s really just boring and shallow but entertaining enough if you really got nothing better but this book clearly also benefited from nepotism because “the guy who made Parasite” made his new movie about this book so even though it isn’t entirely fair to the author I’ll dock a point for that.