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.

Interessante Story die amüsant rübergebracht wird. Trotzdem macht man sich manchmal ernsthaftere Gedanken...wie wäre es wohl, wenn man an der Stelle des Protagonisten wäre?

Ich werde mich jetzt den zweiten Teil der Buchserie wagen und bin auf die Verfilmung mit dem Namen "Mickey 17" gespannt.

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.

If someone is completely disassembled, and then perfectly reassembled with all (or most) of the same memories, are they the same person?

Mickey7 isn't the first book to try these sorts of questions, but it does handle them in an entertaining and very accesible manner. I would have liked a bit more depth but for what it is, this book is an enjoyable thriller with several nods to some interesting concepts.

I thought this was a resoundingly fine book. It had a couple of interesting concepts but didn’t go anywhere particularly interesting with them. The characters weren’t terribly drawn but weren’t too interesting either. After the first couple chapters it felt very paint by numbers, nothing surprising happened, and short of a couple passing mentions of the Ship of Theseus the philosophical ideas were about as glossed over as the science behind the story. It felt like it was straddling different ideas, unsure weather to be a light hearted romp or a deeper exploration and never really landed on either. Plus the author / main character kept using a couple words over and over again that felt really out of place. The ending felt very abrupt with neither much in the way of setup or payoff. Note: I was given an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.