Mickey7

I received a digital advance copy of Mickey7 via NetGalley. Mickey7 is scheduled for release on February 15, 2022.

Mickey7 is an expendable. He is assigned to a mission looking to inhabit a new (and unknown) world. His job as an expendable is simple. Take on dangerous tasks with the full expectation of dying during each of those tasks. His death doesn’t matter, as he will be regenerated when he dies, with all of his memories and personality intact. So far, he has died six times.

The trouble starts when he doesn’t die a seventh time, but his friend thinks he does and reports his death. This triggers the generation of a new Mickey, Mickey8, resulting in a duplicate situation. Duplicates are not tolerated, and has the potential to result in both Mickeys being fed into the recycler. At the same time, unexpected lifeforms are found on the planet. They are not friendly. Mickey7 is on a mission to keep both the Mickeys, and the rest of the human population, alive.

As the story progresses, we stay in Mickey7’s perspective. While struggling to keep the secret of two Mickeys, he begins to question if each iteration of Mickey is truly the same person. Is he existing in two bodies at the same time? They are experiencing their world in slightly different ways, does that make them different people? As a reader, I had the same questions. Unfortunately, we don’t get to know Mickey8 well enough to fully explore this question. Overall, the characters other than Mickey7 remain distant to us, rather than becoming fully developed.

While the premise of this story was interesting, it did not feel complete. There is some resolution to the question of multiple Mickeys, as well as to the relationship between humans and the other lifeforms on the planet, but these felt more like turns that were setting up the true conflict of the story. This made more sense when I read the author’s acknowledgments which said this story started as a novella. While the story had been expanded to the length of a novel, it still felt as if it were the introduction to a larger story.

Overall, Mickey7 was an interesting premise that I would have liked to see more fully explored. There are questions introduced here about personal identity and colonization that could potentially support a series of novels.