Mickey7

Mickey Barnes is an Expendable. When a job looks near or most certainly suicidal, the spaceship crew turn to him to sacrifice himself. That's because they can reprint his body and reprogram his mind into that body, at least as many times as they have resources for. This has been Mickey's "life" since the ship set off from Midgard to colonize the ice planet of Niflheim. After 7 traumatizing deaths, the threat of a famine hanging over the ship, and the hostility of the local aliens (dubbed 'Creepers'), Mickey didn't have any hopes but to slowly freeze to death after falling down a tunnel deep in the planet's crust. But, survive he does, and returns to the ship to discover another version of him has already been printed out. With show more 'Multiples' being illegal, Mickey7 and Mickey8 have to figure out if they should hide, or shove the other one into the ReCycler while they sleep.

This book has everything I want from a scifi read: thought-provoking technology and a hard look at the changes it could make to our morals as well as our lives. It's a slow moving romp, deeply introspective, with characters that are at least memorable if not provocative. The talk of quantum physics and antimatter went way over my head (to be expected; the author is a professor on the subject at a college) but it didn't hinder me from enjoying the ride.

Note: Also, much better than the movie. Read this instead. show less

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Well, what can I say. I liked THE END OF ORDINARY well enough...inventive use of science, interesting personal stakes, but curiously flat. I wanted to read this book because I loved the science premise (remember Doctor Who's Gangers? My favorite slave race, narrowly displacing the Ood). Also because, well, look at the title of this blog and tell me why I might be interested in the story.

I was particularly taken by Mickey7's job on Niflheim, the planet where he...um...where the action takes place. Oh dear...the Spoiler Stasi will be after me...look, I'm kind of hamstrung here by the endless whinging of the spoilerphobes. So, let's just say, if the possibility of show more knowing something about a read will utterly devastate your pleasure in it, go somewhere else.

Mickey Barnes chose life as an expendable because, frankly, it was the best way to get on a colony ship away from Earth. This particular colony ship has religious nuts on it, however, and as is always the way with those sort of people, they've decided their imaginary friend doesn't like...really, hates, though for poorly explored reasons...expendables. They're abominations. After all, I thought to myself, once you're dead, their big bully in the...wait, they're on a a spaceship, where the hell is their gawd in such immense skies? how's she keeping tabs on 'em, some sort of spiritual Ring or Alexa?...anyway, your eternal torments are supposed to begin with death (unless, that is, you're one of Them, and even then it's not 100% guaranteed you'll get the post-mortem goodies). Mickey7, whose previous six deaths were pretty horrific, is still up for doing his job now they're on the ice planet Niflheim. Problem is he's gone and fallen into a crevasse. No one's going to bother rescuing an expendable. That's sort of the point of them...he'll be reconstituted into Mickey8, the cycle will continue.

Mickey7's luck is that he survives and makes his way back to the colony, somehow thinking they won't have reconstituted Mickey8. He's handed the religious nut in charge the lever he needs to bludgeon the colony into following his hate-filled plan for the colony to be expendable free. After all, their resources are strained to the limit and, even though expendables get less to eat and fewer material benefits than the religious nuts, they really can't afford another mouth to feed.

But someone please explain to me again how religion is a force for good and compassion in the world.

What results from this unprecedented situation is a kind of slamming-doors farce, with 7 and 8 agreeing to take on the task of splitting their Mickey-duties to both stay alive; needless to say, that fails. What made it fun to read, and the source of my four-star rating, is the sheer propulsive power of Author Ashton's use of Mickey7 as the first-person narrator. It was immediately clear to me that I was going to be investing in this character. His matter-of-factness was endearing to me, where a more emotionally fraught close third-person narration wouldn't have given me the impetus to keep reading.

The filmed version we can expect in, permaybehaps, 2024 is set to star Robert Pattinson and Steven Yeun. Brad Pitt's company is set to produce, and Bong Joon-ho is set to direct. IF, that is, David Zaslav's flensing knife spares the project now that Plan B Entertainment's new home Warner Brothers is owned by his philistine self. Star power isn't much to Discovery, they like cheap and flashy.

We'll always have the fun, funny, and very provocative-idea-laden book. show less

This novel follows Mickey, who is the "Expendable" on a mission settling a new planet. The Expendable is the crew member who is expected to perform the perilous tasks that are likely or certain to get him killed, with the knowledge that he can be printed to live again, imprinted with the memories from his last backup. It's a rough job, and he was the only applicant for it on this mission, but he needed to get off planet to outrun a gambling debt.

He has two good friends on the new planet, his girlfriend and an old friend who are both pilots, and they live him for dead on a mission in which he's fallen into a deep hole and is about to be dismembered by the "creepers", the planet's large, bug-like predators that have already taken a show more previous version of him. In a surprise turn, though, a large creeper saves him and sends him back to the camp, where Mickey 8 has already been printed. The Mickeys know that one or both of them will be incinerated if this is discovered, so they attempt to hide 7's existence, which is not easy in this small building with only a couple hundred people.

The book is light-hearted even though it's exploring some bigger themes (is a copy of Mickey the same as Mickey? Is it OK to exploit one crew member in this way? Is it just necessary for survival in a new colony that's balancing on a knife's edge?).

I enjoyed it- about to read the follow up. The book really moves along at a quick pace, though the characters aren't really drawn out much. show less

My reading lately has skewed heavily towards fantasy, and I desperately needed a good science fiction book for a change. I love fantasy, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes a girl just needs a good space story and some murderous aliens, you know what I mean?

I saw the trailer for the new movie coming out based on this book and thought ‘hmm, that doesn’t look too bad, let’s pick up the book.’ And I’m really glad I did! Poor Mickey Barnes signed up for a job as an Expendable without really looking at the fine print; he needed a way to get off-planet, and fast, so getting a berth on a colony ship to an uncolonized planet sounded great. Turns out Expendables get all the deadly, dangerous, suicidal jobs. But once you die, you’re show more just downloaded into a freshly printed body to do it again, cool right? Not so much, as Mickey discovers. There’s only one ironclad rule – no multiples, only one version of yourself at a time. When there’s a mixup and Mickey7 runs into Mickey8, well. It’s a bad day at the office.

This is a really great spin on an old idea, and I read the entire thing in two days because I couldn’t put it down. It’s got a great pace that keeps you moving and never lets you get bored, and has a fun narrator with a great, dry delivery. (Mickey that is; I didn’t listen to the audiobook so I can’t speak to the quality of that narration.) In reality you’d probably want to clone your experts, not the guy that does the scut work, right? It’s definitely not hard sci-fi, but it’s fun and entertaining, and that’s exactly what I was looking for.

A solid 4 stars for this and I’ll be picking up the sequel to see what trouble Mickey gets into next. show less

Mickey7 is an Expendable, a disposable employee who's part of an expedition to travel to and colonize Niflheim, a planet deemed "probably habitable." Niflheim turns out to be a giant ball of ice with, in its somewhat more livable areas, dangerous native creatures. Without any better options, the human colonists try to make do, sending Mickey to do whichever tasks seem highly likely to result in death.

One of those tasks results in Mickey7 (a Mickey who has previously died six times and been regrown in a tank and uploaded with his latest memory backup) injured and likely to be eaten by creepers. Although it's generally considered ideal to at least retrieve his body for the precious proteins and whatnot needed to regrow a new Mickey, show more Mickey7 is instead abandoned to die. Except he doesn't.

When he finally makes his way back to the colony, he learns that Mickey8 is already out of the tank. It's a big problem, 1) because the colony is already on starvation rations and can't afford to support an extra person and 2) because multiples are viewed as dangerous abominations.

As the Mickeys try to hide that they're now more than one person, readers are gradually filled in on how Mickey ended up as an Expendable in the first place, what happened to his previous iterations, and what happened to other human attempts at space colonization and how that ties in with Mickey's current colony. There's also a question of whether Niflheim has a sentient native population, and what that will mean for the human colonists.

I haven't seen the movie based on this book yet, although I'm curious to see how this book was adapted, considering that there isn't really a lot to Mickey's own story - a large chunk of the book was devoted to giving readers a picture of what space colonization was like (desperate and, at least in the examples that most attracted Mickey's attention, likely to be fatal in any number of ways). There was also a lot about how hungry Mickey7 and Mickey8 were, enough to make me sympathetically hungry.

The overall tone could have been oppressively bleak, but somehow this was a surprisingly light and dryly humorous read despite Mickey7's situation and obsession with failed colonies.

When the first hints of a sentient alien population popped up, I was hopeful that Ashton would eventually explore that in a little more depth. Unfortunately, this part of the story was barely touched on before things wrapped up. I assume (hope) that the next book gets into it more.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

Wow I did not expect to like that as much as I did. The main thing I want to say because I’ve been thinking it the whole book is I get major andy weir vibes. Which is probably why I enjoyed it so much because I love andy weir! But this was a lot of fun and surprisingly very heartfelt and introspective. You get this philosophical view on life and what it means to have a personality and a lot of other stuff I think I still need to think about for a bit. Watching the movie this weekend!! 

I picked this book up due to the upcoming movie adaptation (titled "Mickey17") piquing my interest. Mickey7 is a sci-fi novel where the main character, Mickey, works as what is called an "Expendable". He is the person who does the life-threatening or fatal tasks that regular humans can't do without risk of death. His consciousness is periodically backed up to the cloud and, when he "dies", is then downloaded into a new body. Mickey7 is the 7th iteration of the original Mickey. The story follows his struggle with loneliness, discrimination, and what it means to be "you". Oh, and there's also the issue that his next iteration, Mickey8, was authorized to be created while Mickey7 was still alive, taking arguing with yourself to a whole new show more level.

While I was intrigued by the premise, I never expected to enjoy the book as much as I did. The story grappled with some deep philosophical questions, such as the idea of the Ship of Theseus as applied to Mickey and his iterations. I love how much the book made me question my own reality. Then there's the humor. The whole novel is written with so much humor and wit that it keeps the difficult questions and philosophical dilemmas from feeling overwhelming. I flew through this book in a single day (which I admit, this was a book on the shorter side, so not that difficult to do). I highly recommend reading this if you enjoy sci-fi but not the complex space operas or want to read about crazy wars with aliens or anything that typical "hard sci-fi" tends to cover. show less