Mickey7

Mickey Barnes has the job of "expendable." He's sent into hazardous jobs with a high risk of dying, which he often does. Then his body is cloned and his brain is restored from a recent backup, and he's sent out to do something else dangerous. In order to put some tension in the story, Ashton has made it so having more than one multiple alive at the same time is illegal. In the backstory, it's because of a rich multiple who murdered an entire planet and used the biomass to create copies of himself. Oh, also the head of the colony thinks multiples are an abomination because clones have no soul.

That's what he's up against. What he's got going for him is one clone is left for dead but doesn't die. He and his next version (Mickey8) get to put their heads together to save the colony on a harsh planet and figure out how to keep the rest of the colony from knowing about them.

There's a bunch of little things that just don't quite mesh together super nicely, but the characters and plot are much fun.

This was a very engaging read that didn't break a lot of new ground, but did well with established sci-fi tropes. The protagonist was interesting, and there was a good, tight story.

I would say this was about 80% Murderbot and 20% Andy Weir. The core of the book was ideas I've seen used fairly frequently in sci-fi. There were some new ideas and world-building, but they weren't super well integrated in the story. Sometimes the narrator would just take a break from the action to spend a chapter talking about worldbuilding.

I didn't love the way the author wrote women. They were fickle and turned on people too easily. A lot of the book was about Mickey learning self-respect, but he never addressed how Nasha's teasing could read as cruelty. It also doesn't really reveal what Mickey 8's deal is. He seems different from Mickey 7 in ways that are never explained, although maybe that's just a way of saying the narrator is different when seen from the outside.

I'll read the sequel soon and am looking forward to the movie.

I figured going in I'd either love or hate this. The notion of being a disposable person with cloned versions of yourself waiting in tanks is familiar enough to me (such as the "troubleshooters", the player characters in the RPG Paranoia) that I've seen the possibilities for how surprisingly dull it can get.

Mickey7 did not fall into those traps. Through cleverly timed breaks for exposition and world building, mixed with just the right amount of gallows humor, I was never caught wishing the story would just move on already or felt the need to take breaks to escape the darkness.

In an interesting science fiction setting of humans trying to establish a beachhead colony on an inhospitable world, Mickey7 shows us how we can process trauma, how our past selves shape but do not define who we presently are. I see a movie is being made from it, and I fear it will lose a lot of what I love in the translation. I did pre-order the sequel book, though, and am looking forward to more of Mickey.