Mickey7 is a book I chose to skip on its release particularly because of its popularity and hype. It had an interesting premise, but there were a few red flags that hinted to me that I would personally not like it. However, I ended up picking this one up because Bong Joon-Ho is set to direct a film adaptation, and if he is involved, I just have to read the source material. Not as a form of hype mind you, but to see what he sees and see the potential. What I found was that Mickey7, by Edward Ashton, has some interesting ideas, buried under mountains of tedium and littered with weird bits of comedy that seem to dominate these first person comedic narratives.
Mickey is an expendable. His mission is to die as many times as the colony needs doing whatever tasks are asked of him. Mickey7 is currently on the edge of death, about to pass into the next realm and bequeath his pain onto his next iteration, Mickey8. But he manages to make it back to his quarters safely, only to find Mickey8 already awake and ready to go. This isn’t supposed to happen, and neither he nor 8 are willing to throw themselves into the corpsehole. So they concoct a plan to divide up their daily calories and take turns solving the problems that arise on the colony of Nilfheim. Will one of them die before anyone important finds out?
Mickey7 has by far my favorite starting premise out of the many popular science fiction books told from the first person. Mickey himself is just your dumb guy average Joe trying to escape some gambling debts and choosing the worst way to get out of it. Ashton makes no allusions to him being secretly smarter, or more cunning and how he can get away with it. If anything, he’s a gambler with a great poker face when it counts. He’s just a guy, being a dude who has to do some agonizing things for science and humanity. Mickey has a clear voice, despite my inability to find anything he says worthwhile. He has weird anecdotes that have a clear message, but don’t have a solid foundation to prove the point. He’s the kind of guy you’d have a beer with, make some raucous jokes with, and spend the future telling stories of the insane things you two did together as kids. I don’t hate Mickey, despite his sometimes unrelenting boring nature.
The major issue with the book is that Mickey doesn’t really have all that much to do. Sure he goes out on patrols hunting for crawlers, and he tries to hide the fact that he has a duplicate but a lot of the book is spent just faffing about. He tries to make friends, he has a lover that has stuck with him since his third iteration. He fears losing said lover to Mickey8, and he stews about his long friendship with one of the pilots that “got him into this mess.” There is never any real fear that the Mickeys are going to get caught. 7 often gets into positions where he may die, but he’s surrounded by cannon fodder. All of the plot happens in the last ten percent of the book. It’s somewhat exciting, but the conclusion is also incredibly convenient. Nothing feels resolved on a narrative or character level.
The alternating chapters are filled with worldbuilding since Mickey is an amateur historian. He basically spends them recounting the stories of failed colonies. They are interesting insofar as Ashton really seems to have spent a lot of time thinking about a future where space colonies would have a dedicated Expendable. But they also just feel shoehorned in. They don’t really line up with the chapters that surround them. He doesn’t learn a lesson from recounting the history except for maybe once. Most of the time it just sharpens his resolve to make sure his colony doesn’t fail. And don’t get me wrong, I do love the history that Ashton creates, especially involving the one megalomaniacal tech billionaire. They are just cool stories though, not informative anecdotes for Mickey to work from.
The story also fails to really reckon with the problem of the expendable and what makes Mickey who he is. The ambiguity of his situation is hinted at, even partially explored by Mickey himself, but the book steers clear of the existential crisis that could ensue. There is no curiosity about the expendable’s situation. Most everyone around assumes, rightly so, that only the most desperate or dumb people would ever get involved as an expendable. I mean these folks have to die excruciating deaths just so people might have a chance at learning how to adapt and survive on a hostile planet. Taking weeks to months of drugs fighting an airborne pathogen that just does not like human life. It would have been so interesting to watch someone reckon with that devil’s bargain, living with the memory of their death over and over again. But Mickey barely even registers it. The text barely registers it. It feels like a huge missed opportunity to really dig into the exploitative nature of that kind of system so we can get some jokes about sex and immortality.
My disappointment stems from the lack of curiosity mostly. It’s an interesting premise that is oozing potential that is stitched into a barely cohesive story. It feels like the kind of story that should be about the plight of people in exploitative positions who can’t escape them, even in death. Instead, it’s about a big damn hero who stumbles into the right poker game against the worst players with the highest stakes.
Rating: Mickey7 – Maybe I’ll pick up the sequel after a few more of my own ego-deaths.
-Alex
