Mickey Barnes is an Expendible – the person on a colony spaceship who is used for those activities when a human is necessary, but knowing that he is likely to die.
For many that would be bad news, but Mickey has an ace up his sleeve in that if he dies – actually more a case of when, rather than if – his personality can be reloaded into a replacement body generated from Mickey’s original DNA, retaining all of his memories up to the point he was last recorded.
This process can seemingly be repeated indefinitely – in fact, we begin the story with “Mickey7” apparently about to die for the seventh time. Having fallen down into a deep cavern on an alien planet with a badly sprained wrist that makes his retrieval near-impossible, his pilot friend Berto Gomez regards him as being not worth the effort of retrieval because it would be easier just to reload him up. His second pilot girlfriend Nasha is more willing, but Mickey declines her offer as it would put her in danger.
The complication is when instead of dying Mickey is saved by a deadly alien centipede-like creature known as a Creeper which, instead of eating him, carries him back to home base and leaves him there.
Mickey goes to his room to find that, thinking he was dead, Mickey8 has already been revived and is there in the room. Both are rather surprised and whilst they try to work out a solution agree to live in tandem, in secret, for telling the authorities would lead to one of them being disposed of.
This secret would be difficult enough in a small colony without also having the base’s commander hating you and looking for any excuse to “put you down the corpse hole”. And how do you keep your fellow shift workers, your best friend and your girlfriend from guessing what’s happened?
The style, written in the first person, reminded me very much of Robert A Heinlein’s deceptively simple style. The author manages to balance the main character’s tone between snark and self-deprecation pleasingly well. Unlike Heinlein’s characters Mickey has more than a touch of derision and snark about him. He doesn’t see himself as a hero, more as someone with a healthy degree of self-preservation in a job that ironically is determined to kill him. Whilst such matters could be depressing, Ashton writes about such matters in such a jaunty way that it all seems quite rational whilst reading, something reminiscent of Robert Sheckley’s stories. At times the plot verges on satire, but Ashton is a clever enough writer to know not to push the absurdity too much, which keeps the plot almost realistic. The science fictional ideas are not particularly new – see also Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon series, for example – but they are used in such a way to be entertaining and engaging.
In short, I raced through this one and couldn’t put it down. It was a terrific read, easy to follow and deceptively engaging. Though Ashton is perhaps best known for his short stories to date, Mickey7 shows that he may be an author to watch.
Mickey7 by Edward Ashton
Published by Rebellion/Solaris, February 2022
ISBN: 978-1781089231
400 pages
Review by Mark Yon
