REVIEW: Mickey7 (book) by Edward Ashton

Mickey7 is science fiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Mickey7 is an Expendable, a disposable employee who's part of an expedition to travel to and colonize Niflheim, a planet deemed "probably habitable." Niflheim turns out to be a giant ball of ice with, in its somewhat more livable areas, dangerous native creatures. Without any better options, the human colonists try to make do, sending Mickey to do whichever tasks seem highly likely to result in death. 

One of those tasks results in Mickey7 (a Mickey who has previously died six times and been regrown in a tank and uploaded with his latest memory backup) injured and likely to be eaten by creepers. Although it's generally considered ideal to at least retrieve his body for the precious proteins and whatnot needed to regrow a new Mickey, Mickey7 is instead abandoned to die. Except he doesn't.

When he finally makes his way back to the colony, he learns that Mickey8 is already out of the tank. It's a big problem, 1) because the colony is already on starvation rations and can't afford to support an extra person and 2) because multiples are viewed as dangerous abominations. 

As the Mickeys try to hide that they're now more than one person, readers are gradually filled in on how Mickey ended up as an Expendable in the first place, what happened to his previous iterations, and what happened to other human attempts at space colonization and how that ties in with Mickey's current colony. There's also a question of whether Niflheim has a sentient native population, and what that will mean for the human colonists.

I haven't seen the movie based on this book yet, although I'm curious to see how this book was adapted, considering that there isn't really a lot to Mickey's own story - a large chunk of the book was devoted to giving readers a picture of what space colonization was like (desperate and, at least in the examples that most attracted Mickey's attention, likely to be fatal in any number of ways). There was also a lot about how hungry Mickey7 and Mickey8 were, enough to make me sympathetically hungry.

The overall tone could have been oppressively bleak, but somehow this was a surprisingly light and dryly humorous read despite Mickey7's situation and obsession with failed colonies.

When the first hints of a sentient alien population popped up, I was hopeful that Ashton would eventually explore that in a little more depth. Unfortunately, this part of the story was barely touched on before things wrapped up. I assume (hope) that the next book gets into it more.