Movie/Book Review: Mickey 17

Credit: St. Martin’s Publishing Group

I recently read the book Mickey7 and thought to myself how it would make a great movie. I guess I was not alone since the movie was already in production.

It is the story of a crew member on a spacecraft who was literally dying to do his job. He performed the most dangerous tasks on the mission and when he died he would be reincarnated as the next version of himself. Hence, the term Mickey7 for the seventh iteration of his being.

So now it seems that Robert Pattinson wants to get in on the act, but this time as Mickey 17, who is therefore a little more experienced with death than the character in the book. The film cast also includes Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo.

Unfortunately, you will need to wait for the film, which was supposed to be released last month. The Hollywood strike caused it to move to January 2025, much like Dune: Part Two was bumped from has year to this year.

That’s okay. Now you have plenty of time to read the book. Here is the teaser:

Dying isn’t any fun…but at least it’s a living.

Mickey7 is an Expendable: a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonize the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there’s a mission that’s too dangerous—even suicidal—the crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact.

On a routine scouting mission, Mickey7 goes missing and is presumed dead. By the time he returns to the colony base, his fate has been sealed. There’s a new clone, Mickey8, reporting for Expendable duties. The idea of duplicate Expendables is universally loathed, and if caught, they face being recycled into protein to feed a hungry colony. Meanwhile, life on Niflheim is getting worse, and the native species are growing curious about their new neighbors, which has Commander Marshall very afraid. Ultimately, the survival of both lifeforms will come down to Mickey7.

That is, if he can just keep from dying for good.

Recommended Reading: Kim Stanley Robinson in The New Yorker

Source: Amazon.com.

The January 31st edition of The New Yorker has an article written by Joshua Rothman where he interviews Kim Stanley Robinson they hike through the Sierra mountains. The article,”Best-Case Scenario,” covers a lot of ground and has its ups and downs (sorry, I could not help myself). The Sierras offer a nice setting for experiencing the beauty of this strange planet while also scaring the reader about what may be lost as the hikers deal with the smoke of distant forest fires.

The two most prominent books discussed in the article are Mr. Stanley’s recent The Ministry for the Future and his 2015 novel Aurora, allowing the reader to appreciate both the uniqueness of this world as well as attempts by his characters to reach more distant worlds. I enjoyed reading both Aurora and Mr. Stanley’s Mars trilogy, but I should probably spend some time reading his works focusing on planet Earth. Mr. Stanley has made it clear that we need to preserve the one place in the universe that we know can host us. As he stated in BoingBoing back in 2015, “…there is no Planet B. Earth is our only home.”

With regard to expanding into our galaxy, in the same article he stated:

I’m not saying we shouldn’t go into space; we should. We should send people to the moon, and Mars, and the asteroids, and every place we can in the solar system, putting up stations and swapping humans in and out of them. This is not only a beautiful thing to do, but useful in helping us to design a long-term relationship with Earth itself. Space science is an Earth science. The solar system is our neighborhood. But the stars are too far away.

Mr. Stanley has spoken far and wide for some time about his novels, his views on space travel, and his concerns regarding our future. For more on all of this, you can try his Facebook page or this unofficial site. And you may want to check out some other articles in The New Yorker as well, such as this May 2021 piece, “Is Mars Ours?