Mickey7 by Edward Ashton

Format: e-Book

Length: 288 pages

Personal rating: 8/10

Thoughts:

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 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. (If you aren't familiar with the Ship of Theseus, here's the Wikipedia article that explains the concept.) 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.