Mickey7 by Edward Ashton: review

4/5 stars on Goodreads

Mickey7 by Edward Ashton

Mickey7 is sci-fi set on a beachhead colony sent to terraform a planet somewhere in the universe in far future. It’s a dangerous project and for that they need someone to take all the almost-certain-death jobs that robots can’t do. Enter Mickey Barnes.

Mickey is an expendable. To escape debtors on the planet where he lives, he agrees to have his memories uploaded and his body scanned to make copies of it—and to die when necessary, usually in a painful and gruesome fashion. As the number after his name implies, he’s done this several times already.

It never gets easier to die.

A routine mission goes awry and unable to rescue him, Mickey7’s pilot leaves him to die. By the time Mickey7 manages to return to the base, they’ve already revived a new copy, Mickey8. The problem is, there can be only one. But instead of fighting to the death to see which version gets to live, they decide to keep the double a secret and stay both alive.

Immediately, they run into problems. The food is rationed, and they have to share it between them. One of them is injured and the other isn’t, which leads to some baffled encounters. And which of them gets to spend time with their girlfriend?

In a colony of a couple of hundred people, secrets never stay hidden for long. But Mickey7 has another one in his sleeve. He knows that the planet has sentient beings. Because he didn’t make it back to the base on his own.

This was a fun book. The plot was simple and not terribly high stakes. Most of the book was filled with Mickey7’s running commentary on everything: his previous life, the colonies that have failed before, and all his deaths.

What the book is about in the end is identity. Are you still the same person if you’re the seventh copy of your original self? Who has the greater right to your life, you or your future copies? And are you still human?

Not all questions are given definitive answers, but it’s well-written enough to keep the reader entertained. Mickey7 comes to a conclusion that satisfies him, and that leaves the reader in a good place too.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.