3.5 stars ( )

The Body Scout seems like it was specifically written for me. You see, I'm a sucker for both baseball and the cyberpunk genre and this novel is basically a cyberpunk novel about the murder of a New York Mets (I mean The Monsanto Mets) player in the near-distant future. (You see, in Michel's near-future New York, Big-Pharma runs the world and baseball). Sly, smart, weird, and fizzy, The Body Scout is scifi/noir tale following Kobo,who is a former baseball player turned scout investigating the murder of his best friend (adopted brother) JJ Sunz, the famed star of The Monsanto Mets, who dies suddenly in the middle of a game. Kobo is determined to find the killer and plunges into the world of genetically modified CEOS, Neanderthals, and back-alley modifications (not to mention weird, virtual realty orgies) to do so. Where it leads Kobo is somewhere he never dreamed possible, and the revelations that come to light, are in many ways shocking.

The novel is also a bit tender and touching.

The main question this novel asks, like the work of Philip K. Dick and the film maker, David Cronenberg, is : What does it mean to inhabit a body? The Body Scout raises fascinating questions about the nature of cloning. It also asks how far would we allow corporations to control us?

This book was a thrilling journey that featured strange, eye-popping tech. It's also a terrifying (but fun) look at where we could be headed.

Lincoln Michel is a talented author. I'll be anticipating his next novel with glee. ( )

Only read 50 pages of this book. Just don't like this type of humor. The book reads like a compilation of mediocre standup comedy routines arranged around a theme of solving a murder. Yawn. ( )

Michel, Lincoln. The Body Scout. Orbit, 2021.
It is July, so baseball books naturally keep popping up on my reading lists. Lincoln Michel’s The Body Scout is set in a not-so-distant future in which baseball used to be played by athletes with cybernetic parts but is now played by teams owned by pharmaceutical companies whose players are enhanced by drugs and other more exotic techniques. Players are recruited by body scouts, not for their athletic ability but for their upgrade potential. The plot is a noir mystery in which Kobo, a former player, whose mechanical arm is now out of fashion, is hired by the owner of the Monsanto Mets to investigate the murder of Kobo’s adopted brother, Zunz. Zunz was the biggest star in big-league “biopharm” baseball until he died mysteriously at home plate. It is a world in which body sculpting, transplant surgery, and gene editing have run amok. Some Russians have regenerated a tribe of Neanderthals. Medical debt is now collected by cyborg thugs who are quite willing to break the leg you just had replaced. The satire is broad, deep, and dark. Its version of New York reminds one of William Gibson’s east coast sprawl, except that most of what Gibson placed in an underworld, Michel moves to the corporate and government mainstream. Michel’s vision of the future of genetic engineering is not optimistic. A scorpion’s venom, he says, will kill you quickly, but capitalism will kill you slowly, then send you a bill. Biotech has not conquered morality. No matter how many improvements you manage to buy, he says, you can never win the body’s “race into the dirt.” In any era, baseball is an apt symbol of American culture, and Michel gives it an original, bizarrely funny future twist. Michel says he is not a baseball fan, and you do not need to be a baseball fan to enjoy his book. In fact, it may be better if you aren’t. 4 stars. ( )

Another bio-engineered cyborg filled dystopia, uber-urban NYC centered around body scout Kobo an ex-baseball cyborg, and his foster brother the bio-engineered JJ Zunz long term star of the Mets. Zunz's bion screen death leads Kobo, deeply in debt and newly unemployed, searches for what or who killed Zunz. The revelations are mostly of the expected sort and for a good guy Kobo is not only tainted, but pretty ineffective. The writing moved the plot right along, but the moves were either expected or arbitrary. ( )