Mickey7

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.

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.