The Body Scout (Lincoln Michel)

The Body Scout
Lincoln Michel
Orbit
Fiction, Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: In a future where body upgrades, cybernetics, and other enhancements are commonplace (if expensive), scouting for major league baseball takes on whole new dimensions. The corporations treat their players as experiments, and it's all about who can collect the best scientists with the weakest morals, a job that requires some flexible morality itself. Kobo may not necessarily like who he's become, but it keeps the creditors off his back (more or less), and after decades of cyber enhancements and upgrades, he's in debt deeper than the lowest subterranean apartments of New York City. Besides, he still loves the game. When a pair of cloned Neanderthals working for the Monsanto Mets poach a scientist Kobo has been courting for his clients, the Yankees, he thinks it's just business as usual in his cutthroat line of work... but when his old friend and current Mets star J. J. Zunz calls him late at night out of the blue, sounding confused, he starts to realize something bigger's afoot - especially when Zunz collapses at his next game, blood streaming from every orifice. He and J. J. grew up together, two poor New York boys dreaming of baseball superstardom under smog-choked skies; they became brothers after Kobo's family died in an apartment collapse. Now, as Kobo sets out to investigate his death, he learns just how far apart the two grew over the years... and how twisted and amoral the great American pastime and modern life have become.

REVIEW: There's a reason dystopian sci-fi is so common these days; their futures, unfortunately, seem far more plausible than not. Here, Michel explores a gritty, violent, depressingly recognizable near future where corruption at all levels consistently wins out over morality and integrity, at least at the macro level. At the micro level, there's still a little (very little) wiggle room for even a jaded man like Kobo to attempt to pursue the truth and some form of justice... but what truth or justice could possibly exist in a dying world where every (patented and expensive) hope or breakthrough or cure comes saddled with at least a dozen negating drawbacks and costs for some future generation to reckon with? It's a well-realized world of complex and ever-shifting morality and points of contention, much like our own, and Kobo finds himself forced to ask uncomfortable questions about his life, his city, his friends and enemies, and even the sport that carried him out of one poverty only to land him neck-deep in another. For all the bleakness, though, the characters and setting are compelling and relatable, and while the ending (skirting spoilers) isn't the resounding, edifice-toppling revolution one might hope for given the rotten power structures driving everyone's lives and choices, it fits the tale and offers a slim possibility of a slightly better, if no less complicated, future. (I probably would've gotten more out of it if I were a baseball fan.)

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