Mickey 7

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed the movie Mickey 17, which I found fairly intelligent. That movie is based on a book, Mickey 7, by Edward Ashton. The book turned out to be on Kindle Unlimited and didn’t look long, and I needed a break from some of the other stuff I was reading, so it fit the bill.

The book has the same general story as the movie, about a guy named Mickey, who to get away from a sadistic loan shark, signs up for an interstellar mission to colonize another planet. The only position he can get on the mission is as an “expendable”, someone whose mind and body are backed up so they can be “reprinted” after they die. Mickey’s job is to handle extremely dangerous or suicidal jobs, which involves dying repeatedly. In both the book and movie, the trip takes several years, and the planet ends up being an ice world, with an alien indigenous species known as “creepers”.

But there are a number of differences. The first is that the book takes place much further in the future. The movie is set in 2050, which is silly given the story and technology. The book takes place over a thousand years in the future. The home world of the characters, rather than Earth, is actually another well established colony. No one has heard from Earth in centuries, and it’s widely assumed the population there wiped each other out in antimatter wars.

The body printing technology in the movie is a very recent development. In the book it’s been around for several centuries, with the mind copying part being more recent, but still a couple of centuries old. In both stories, Mickey gets in trouble when he’s left for dead but when he survives and gets back, he discovers that a new version of himself has already been printed, resulting in him being a “multiple”, a taboo situation warranting permanent death.

The reason for the taboo against multiples is similar in both versions. The inventor of the technology turned out to be a psychopath. But what in the movie is a serial killer story, in the book is something far more disturbing and catastrophic. The inventor makes hundreds and then thousands of copies of himself, into an army killing others and using the material from their bodies to print new versions of himself, eventually taking over a whole planet, which has to be destroyed to prevent him spreading any further. So the taboo makes a lot more sense in the novel.

The book is also more clear on how the mind copying works. Mickey only remembers events from his last brain scan. There are efforts to scan him as close to death as possible so he learns from the experiences. Although a couple of times Mickey rebels and refuses to be scanned as he’s dying, sparing his later self from the trauma.

In both versions there’s a streak of absurdity and gallows humor throughout, but the movie seems to have amped it up. Marshall is more competent in the book than the buffoon of the movie, although he’s more of an outright asshole, and his wife isn’t a character.

The book doesn’t really condemn the body-printing technology the way the movie ultimately does. But that gets to my criticism of both versions. Orson Scott Card pointed out decades ago the issue with introducing a technology in a story that only seems to be used for plot purposes. He argued that good science fiction should explore all the ways that a technology might get used, or misused. Although one thing that’s become evident to me over the years is how often that advice is ignored, with well known examples like the Star Trek transporters, replicators, and similar technologies.

So I don’t want to be too hard on Ashton for not exploring all the ways the technology would get used by a civilization that had it. If the technology to backup people existed, the idea that it wouldn’t get widely used, at least by the elites, seems dubious. Certainly the taboo against multiples has a much better explanation in the book, but not limiting the use of the technology to expendables.

Of course, Ashton arranged things to tell the story he wanted to tell. And the book version does have a few interesting conversations around the Ship of Theseus and other interesting topics. In that sense, it’s a little more geeky than the movie. It’s just a hard-core sci-fi geek like me who wants it go much further.

But overall it’s a light, fun, and quick read. Ashton tells the story in first person present tense, which makes it read fast and effortless. Definitely worth checking out if it’s your type of story. I also see there’s a sequel, Antimatter Blues, which I might have to read at some point. But there’s a lot of other stuff in the queue first.