Mickey7 (Edward Ashton)

Mickey7
The Mickey7 series, Book 1
Edward Ashton
St. Martin's Press
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
** (Bad)

DESCRIPTION: When Mickey signed on to the colony ship Drakkar, he knew he was going to die. He just didn't expect to die so many times before even making landfall on Niflheim. As the ship's Expendable, he is sent to do jobs that ordinary machines (and more valued crewmembers) can't... jobs where death is either a high probability or absolute certainty. Thanks to memory backups and regenerated bodies, his deaths are temporary, but still unnerving, as his current, seventh incarnation can heartily attest. Still, he needed to get off the world of Midgard in a hurry, and only the best and brightest got proper berths on the colony ship, so life (and death) as an Expendable was really his only option.
Back when he signed up, though, there were many things he didn't understand. Such as what it was like to be a veritable pariah among the colonists, seen as an abomination by fundamentalist Natalists (including, of course, the mission commander Marshall) or a kinky potential conquest by "ghost chasers" or simply an uncomfortable reminder of their own mortality. Or how it would actually feel to remember his own deaths in a new body... or, perhaps worse, witness videos of the deaths that previous iterations chose not to upload due to their horrific natures. Or even how inhospitable, borderline uninhabitable, the Drakkar's target planet Niflheim would turn out to be when they got there, a ball of ice and rock with an oxygen-poor atmosphere and some unknown contagion crippling their efforts to establish agriculture. But the one possibility he never would've considered in a million years would be returning from a mission to the icy frontier to discover another Mickey in his berth.
Turns out his so-called best friend, pilot Berto, logged him as deceased after Mickey7 fell down a chasm without bothering to confirm. But neither Berto nor Mickey7 counted on a "creeper", a native tunneling animal considered little more than a big dumb bug, helping him find his way to the surface... a development that could change the entire nature of the fledgling colony - unless they're killed for illegal duplication before they can tell anyone.

REVIEW: I was told, by the cover hype and numerous online reviews, that Mickey7 would be a fun and thought-provoking and fast-reading romp of a story. And I wanted to enjoy it. I wanted to laugh and (within my admittedly-limited capacity) think. I wanted to be entertained. But the only point on which this book succeeded, of all that hype, was that it read fast... and part of the reason it red fast was because it failed to engage me on most any level.
From the start, the premise is on shaky ground. The reader is told how only the best of the best of the absolute best have a chance to get on board the Drakkar, the boldest and most intelligent of all the colony world from which the ship originated... but, even excusing that Mickey is only an Expendable and therefore exempt from the presumably high bar of admission, every single person in the entire colony acts like an utter moron with the emotional maturity of a child, or at most a college frat boy (in the worst possible, most stereotypical Hollywood movie way). And I'm including the women in that assessment, here. These characters are supposed to be in their thirties at least, not young twenty-somethings fumbling their way from teenage years into adulthood. Not a one rises above expectations or shows much in the way of character dimension. The plot itself is thin, for all that it tries to flesh itself out (thanks to Mickey's interest in history, despite his inability to actually learn much from it, evidently) with backstory of humanity's failure-riddled efforts at interplanetary colonization that do little but show that we are the ultimate irredeemably invasive species and should have died off before sullying the galaxy with our toxic presence, along with the story of Mickey's journey of death and rebirth from 1 - the original - to 7 (and 8). While trying to conceal his unintentional duplication (and his discovery in the tunnels after he "died", which he is reluctant to share for vague reasons), both Mickeys show less sense than the average sitcom character... but, then, the rest of the colony is little more clever or the ruse would've been up inside of fifty pages. Things stumble and bumble along as I struggled to care about anyone, even a side character, before reaching a climax and a sort of conclusion. At no point along the way was I awed by insights into the nature and/or philosophy of cloning or immortality or alien worlds or the struggles of diaspora with humanity's inherently flawed and self-destructive nature, because I'd already read and watched far more interesting takes on those topics elsewhere... and far more amusing ones, despite the attempts at humor that failed to come within a light year of my funny bone. (At one point, the author basically quotes The Princess Bride, apparently on the theory that lines funny in one context will automatically be funny in another, and not simply remind me that far more enjoyable media exists and I could have spent my time on that instead.)
Theoretically, this is the first of a series of stories about the many-lived Mickey and the colony of Niflheim. Needless to say, I don't anticipate reading on. The title character may have multiple lifetimes to fritter away, but I only have the one.

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