Mickey7 by Edward Ashton

Published by St. Martin's Press on February 15, 2022

Mickey7 is the kind of book that science fiction readers don’t often see — an intelligent story of alien contact that suggests diplomacy is preferable to war. Edward Ashton assembles several familiar science fiction components (colonization of new worlds, storing consciousness and transferring it to an artificially created body, aliens that have a distributed intelligence) and assembles them into an entertaining story that seems fresh despite its familiarity.

The future Diaspora is a recurring theme in science fiction — the idea that humanity will develop the technology to colonize other planets and that (as history shows) plenty of people will be willing to risk danger for the chance to make a new life in a new place. In this version of the future, humans have little choice but to flee from Earth after nearly destroying the planet. Mickey7 takes a deeper-than-average dive into likely reality of colonization. It’s possible to identify planets in the Goldilocks zone that show evidence of having an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, but it’s impossible to know whether those planets will support human life, even after a hundred years of terraforming, until humans try to establish a colony. Occasionally colonies thrive. Usually colonists manage to get by or everyone dies.

The plot is fairly simple, with only a few significant characters and a straightforward storyline. In this case, simplicity is a virtue. Mickey got into some trouble and needed to get off a planet. He joined a colony ship in the only available position — as an expendable. His memories are downloaded and his DNA is recorded. When he dies — and that’s part of the job, because some jobs require human exposure to radiation or other deadly environments — a new body will be printed, his last-recorded memories will be uploaded to his new brain, and he’ll be good to go. Except for the dying part, which is usually quite unpleasant.

During one of his trips outside the dome, Mickey’s seventh incarnation falls down a hole and into a labyrinth of tunnels. His friend assumes that Mickey will soon be eaten by indigenous creatures called creepers. By the time Mickey makes his way out of the tunnels, Mickey8 has been printed. Having two versions in existence at the same time creates all sorts of problems with food rations, so at least one of them will have to go. When neither volunteers, they try to keep their dual existence a secret. That’s an entertaining premise for a story that explores the complications of two identical guys canoodling with two different women while each tries to make do on half the usual rations.

The story eventually leads to a confrontation between the Mickeys and their boss, as well as between the Mickeys and the indigenous life forms. The resolution suggests that creative people can solve problems without killing everyone in sight. I might recommend Mickey7 for that alone, but I also recommend it because the story as a whole is fun and the characters are likeable.

RECOMMENDED

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

Published by ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 15, 2022

Pure Colour is a patchwork of philosophical essays dressed up as a novel. Long passages consist of a character’s internal monologue. One chapter features of a character living inside a leaf discussing existence with her dead father. In another chapter, that character is living at the end of the world, the end of the first draft of humanity. The theme that binds the chapters is the character’s understanding of human existence as a first draft and the expectation that God or the gods will do better next time.

Mira is the narrator and one of the novel’s two characters unless you count her dead father. The other character is Annie, who might or might not have loved Mira at some point. Mira believes she was “sent into the world” to answer the question, “What is the distance of love?” Pure Colour left me pondering the distance that readers should stand apart from books that ask incomprehensible questions.

When she isn’t writing nonsense, Sheila Heti proves her capacity to express intelligent thoughts in vivid prose. The second part of Pure Colour is a meditation on death and loss, on whether death is loss or something else. When Mira’s father dies, she feels his soul entering her body, an experience that motivates her to consider the nature of life and death. She realizes that she failed to understand the important things — connecting, touching, seeing — while her father was still alive. Those thoughts are expressed in prose that is precise, elegant, and compelling. The story becomes less meaningful after Mira enters the leaf, which leads to a long contemplation of the nature of human existence and love and television. Mira apparently needs to be a leaf in the first draft of humanity to understand her place in the universe, which for most people would be a real bummer. On the other hand, existing as a leaf might be peaceful until the fires and beetles arrive.

Among other tidbits of wisdom, Mira tells us that viruses are “a swarm of invading gods” and that “what’s so exhausting about being ill is that you have been invaded by gods. They are using your body to watch someone near you to see what humans are like in this draft of the world, so they can make them better in the next one.” Rude of us, I suppose, to try so hard to kill the gods that invade our body, but it’s them or us so I’m still taking my god-destroying medications.

Mira also talks about how birds are like artists and cannot be expected to love well because they apply their love to a surface, unlike bears that “join with other creatures much more directly” (presumably by eating them). Mira is undecided about fish. Her observations relate back to earlier musings about differences between birds and bears and fish and the art they will create in the second draft of life, none of which made the slightest bit of sense to me. Mira also explains why God doesn’t want people to fix the first draft of the world so he makes fixers tired. I wonder if God makes reviewers tired when they try to explain books they don’t understand.

In the age of postmodernism, novels no longer need plots. Perhaps we have entered the age of post-postmodernism, in which writers are free to string scattered thoughts together and call it a novel. I appreciated some of Mira’s thoughts, including her suggestion that children are never who parents expect them to be, and “must not be” because that is “how the world changes, how values and criticisms evolve.” She riffs on that thought for several paragraphs without adding value before she decides to be a leaf again, but only for a moment, thanks to Annie who keeps pulling her out of her leafiness. Heti’s prose and some of her thoughts have sufficient strength to earn my recommendation, but only for readers who prefer lush prose and abstract ideas to traditional plots. I think Pure Colour would have worked better as a book of essays but disguising the book as a novel at least induced me (and probably others) to read it.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors

Published by Bloomsbury on February 8, 2022

Cleopatra and Frankenstein is a New York City domestic drama. Boy meets girl, girl shags boy’s best friend, boy marries girl, boy thinks about shagging someone new, girl shags boy’s best friend again, boy dyes his graying chest hair after losing girl, and so on. I won’t spoil the ending, not that it is difficult to predict. All of that happens in the context of a New York City novel — boy and girl rag about New York while living with the certainty that every other American city is worse — and an older man, younger woman relationship. So yes, you’ve read this book before. Fortunately, Coco Mellors crafts an enjoyable story, even if she can’t make it fresh.

Frank and Cleo have recently married. Frank is in his forties, Jewish on his father’s side and Catholic on his mother’s, a New Yorker who started his own advertising agency. Cleo is a British artist in her twenties. Her student visa was about to expire when she married Frank. The marriage was convenient for Cleo but they love each other, despite being less than perfectly matched. Cleo is bothered by Frank’s alpha-male competitiveness, by his drinking, by his desire to live for the purpose of accumulating stories about his life. Frank is bothered by Cleo’s unceasing demands for attention and by her efforts to change him. Both suffer from a constant need to prove to the world that they are interesting, worthy of notice, perhaps worthy of love.

Nineteen-year-old Zoe is Frank’s half-sister. Frank believes she was the product of “a last ditch effort to create a shared interest with [his mother’s] second husband.” Zoe is an actor. Strangers do not believe they are siblings because Frank looks like a “vaguely Jewish” white guy and Zoe is dark and breathtaking. Zoe is broke but financially dependent on Frank for rent and tuition, although she’d like to find a way to be self-sufficient without actually making an effort that would get in the way of nightly partying and random hookups.

Cleo’s father is Peter, a man so wrapped up in his new family that he barely recalls he has a daughter. Cleo lost her mother to suicide after her divorce from Peter. Cleo’s stepmother is Miriam, who teaches workshops on healing the inner child. During a lunch at Grand Central Station’s Oyster Bar, it becomes clear that Cleo’s relationship with Peter and Miriam needs healing. It’s easy to understand why Cleo is such a mess.

Frank’s best friends are Santiago (a Peruvian chef whose wife apparently died from a heroin overdose) and Anders (a Scandinavian former model who quit working for Frank to take over the art department of a women’s fashion magazine). Whether they are good friends or the sort of people who betray each other or both is a question that adds to the domestic drama. Cleo’s best friend (before meeting Frank) is Quentin, who broke up with Johnny and sporadically dates Alex. Every woman in a modern domestic drama needs a gay friend and confidant; Quentin fills that role.

After a third of the story has been told, Eleanor Rosenthal appears. Eleanor is in her late thirties. After getting fired as a screenwriter in LA, she moved to New York to live with her mother (her father is in a home for people with Alzheimer’s). Eleanor took a temp job as a copywriter in New York at Frank’s agency. She sits next to an editor named Myke, who tells her about Frank’s hot young British wife. Eleanor googles Cleo because Eleanor is insecure. Seeing Cleo’s picture doesn’t improve her confidence.

Coco Mellors takes her deepest dive into Eleanor. Or perhaps, not being obsessed with New Yorkiness, Eleanor’s personality is less superficial than the other characters. Her insecurity is almost endearing. Eleanor deals with feelings of loss, unfulfilled desires, and an inability to decide which desires she really wants to fulfill. A late chapter devoted to Eleanor provides the novel’s funniest moments. Her mother offers the book’s greatest insight: The space between the words “so what” holds the key to “a free and happy life.”

Cleo and Frank offer ordinary insights into why relationships fail. They blame each other for their faults. Frank uses Cleo as an excuse for his drinking. Cleo uses Frank as an excuse for her self-harm. Each blames the other for being self-pitying and in that regard, they each have a point. They are about equally self-centered. Ultimately, each wants the other to be someone else, although each knew exactly what they were getting when they chose to marry. Cleo resents that “the onus is on her to fix” Frank but it’s not. The onus is on her to accept Frank or to encourage his better tendencies, not to change him into the person she wants him to be. Just as the onus is on Frank to listen to Cleo rather than putting words in her mouth. The story offers typical insights into the inability of self-centered people to sustain relationships.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein checks all the boxes of a New York domestic drama, from Quentin’s desire to be a female to marital infidelity to alcohol and drug abuse to unresolved resentment of parents living and dead to unlovable characters moaning that no one loves them to friends who are collected as accessories. And, of course, New Yorkers making fun of LA. Like many New Yorkers, the characters seem to think that living in New York is enough to make them superior to other Americans. To her credit, however, Mellors makes it clear that leaving New York behind is the best thing that could happen to Cleo.

A chapter that recounts Frank and Eleanor’s “getting to know each other” period is filled with amusing sentences. I particularly enjoyed “We go to an Irish bar around the corner that smells of salted nuts and disappointment.” The characters trade the kind of witty dialog that is effortless to imaginary people.They are never inarticulate, never at a loss for words. In uglier times, Frank and Cleo scream at each other in scenes that might make a reader cringe. They left me feeling exhausted, as if I had been in the fight. It is a tribute to Mellors that her prose drew me so intimately into the story.

A reader’s reaction to a domestic drama may depend on whether the reader relates to, or at least cheers for, any of the significant characters. I liked Eleanor and eventually developed a reader’s fondness for Frank and Cleo, perhaps because they are both on the road to overcoming their selfish tendencies as the novel nears its end. Still, the characters are all walking clichés. A “talk it all out” chapter at the end is predictable, as is the ending. Mellors contributes nothing new to the stale genre of New York domestic drama. Fans of the genre will probably love Cleopatra and Frankenstein. Despite the familiar story. I’m recommending it for Mellors’ prose and her ability to make tiresome characters interesting.

RECOMMENDED

51 by Patrick O'Leary

Published by Tachyon Publications on February 8, 2022

Patrick O’Leary has a day job. At one point, he worked for Steve Jobs. Prior to 51, his most recent novel was published almost twenty years ago. His first two, Door Number Three and The Gift, are wildly imaginative, although The Gift is more fantasy than science fiction. O’Leary says it took him sixteen years to write 51 (and even longer to write The Gift). He’s produced some short fiction in the interim, but not all that much. O’Leary is deservedly proud that Harlan Ellison called him science fiction’s J.D. Salinger.

Speaking of imaginative. Remember the imaginary friend you had when you were a little kid? You probably can’t remember any details about your friend, but the friend was real. Every imaginary friend (IF) is real. We imagine them into existence. They make us forget them as we grow older, yet they exist for the sole purpose of having people believe in them. They exist because children need them. They provide comfort, inspiration, love. They help children fight their fears when they are most vulnerable. They disappear when we no longer need them. Or they did before things changed. For the last several decades, our IFs have continued to exist, invisibly, living in closets, long after we forget them. That’s a clever premise.

It’s not just IFs we forget. Forgetting is one of the novel’s themes. We forget the Native American tribes that were wiped out to expand white America. We forget the slave labor that built white America. We forget the bombs that have been dropped, the wild animals that have been caged, the democracies that have been toppled, the species we made extinct. Our IFs are invisible because so much is invisible that we can’t see what we’ve become — or so one of the IFs tells a character named Nuke.

Alcoholism is another prominent theme, related to the theme of memory and its loss. Alcoholics often drink to forget. To forget how to feel pain. To endure a personal tragedy that friends have barely noticed until “not one of your friends, colleagues, or drinking buddies can recognize the man you’ve become.”

The IFs aren’t in the closet during most of the novel’s time frame (mid-1950s to 2019). They’re in Area 51, where they’re washed and stored and become the subject of experiments. Winston Koop begins working at the base in 1972 and quickly spots an equation on a blackboard, an equation that accidentally made a door to a place called “the Anywhere.” Scientists don’t know how to close the door. Koop is one of the few who understands the equation. He’s also one of the few who can retain a memory of the IFs he sees at the base. To Koop they look like kids in nightgowns. To others they look like white cats. Their true form is something different. They are masters of camouflage.

The door and the atom bomb have something to do with why IFs no longer fade out of existence when the children who imagine them grow up. Now everyone sees them but nearly everyone instantly forgets seeing them. At Area 51, they help the defense establishment create advanced weaponry. In exchange, one of their number (nicknamed The Pope) is put in charge of the portal and allowed to set a certain number of IFs free each year.

Koop’s job eventually evolves. He learns how to make others forget. He’s responsible for security, for making sure that nobody with knowledge of Area 51 remembers. Sometimes they need to die to make that happen.

The narrator, Adam “Nuke” Pagnucco, was a college friend of Koop. Nuke was the best man at Koop’s wedding. Nuke has forgotten the wedding. He’s forgotten Koop. The forgetting was Koop’s doing. Nuke starts to remember him after a chance encounter in 2018. At that point they are both 73, “long past our denials and excuses.” Koop fills Nuke in on forgotten details before enlisting him in a mission — to close the door. And there’s your plot, although it makes multiple detours on a nonlinear path before it finally zeroes on its destination.

In addition to its creative exploration of intriguing themes, 51 is notable for its unpredictable moments. Some are funny (the Pope’s interactions with American presidents are priceless). Others are poignant. All are surprising and a few are downright weird. They give the plot an offbeat, unbalanced, ever-changing rhythm. The story is a bit more muddled and a bit less amazing than Door Number Three, but it is similar in its complex structure. Both novels probably merit a second reading to fully understand their meaning.

The appearance of 51 gives me hope that O’Leary will retire from his day job (if he hasn’t already) and pull other projects off the shelf, or create new ones, without making us wait another twenty years for a finished product. O’Leary has a story-telling perspective that is uniquely his own. I’m grateful that he shared that perspective again in 51.

RECOMMENDED

Dark Horse by Gregg Hurwitz

Published by Minotaur Books on February 8, 2022

The 7th Orphan X novel offers what fans of the series expect: action; spats between Evan Smoak and his teenage ward Joey; more action; introspective moments as Smoak tries to understand himself; more action; philosophical moments as Smoak tries to help others understand themselves; and, of course, a whole lot of action.

The plot is far-fetched. That isn’t unusual for Orphan X novels. In Dark Horse, Evan returns to his Nowhere Man gig, helping people who can’t help themselves.

A cartel leader in southern Texas named Aragón Urrea wants Evan to retrieve his daughter Anjelina, who was kidnapped by a rival cartel leader in Mexico. One might think that Urrea would be more than capable of helping himself and wouldn’t qualify for Evan’s services. Urrea has funding and manpower to attack his rival, although a frontal assault would probably not work out well for Anjelina. He decides he’d rather send one guy, apparently having heard through the grapevine that Evan is a superhero.

Evan agrees to take the job if, at least to some degree, Urrea will change his evil ways. Urrea reluctantly agrees because nothing is more important to him than his daughter, at least until later developments cause him to question his parental loyalty. At that point, Evan helps the cartel boss get back in touch with his root love of his daughter. Those scenes a bit hokey but they advance the plot so the hokeyness is forgivable. Because Urrea is only “sort of” a cartel leader, not like the evil cartel leader in Mexico who traffics in young women and feeds his enemies to a lion, the reader can “sort of” get behind Urrea, or at least not despise him.

The portrayal of Urrea as a gangster with a heart (at least when it comes to family) is forced, but it leads to an interesting discussion of the relative morality of drug dealing. Urrea profits from feeding addiction, but so do the Sacklers. Urrea’s mother points out that Urrea, as a good crime boss, at least uses some of his profits to support needy families who are loyal to him. I appreciate that point of view. Evan isn’t into moral relativism but he listens. In fact, he spends a good bit of the novel learning to listen, particularly when the petulant Joey demands that he respect her ability to make mature decisions. The continuing effort to develop Evan’s character helps the reader maintain an interst in Evan.

Evan’s ability to infiltrate the Mexican cartel and his immediate bonding with (and ability to manipulate) the cartel boss strained my willingness to suspend disbelief. I did so only because the novel works so well as an action story. Evan’s ability to wipe out a couple of dozen bad guys also strains credibility, but that’s the nature of the modern thriller. The story is entertaining and, in the end, that’s all that counts.

There is a Romeo and Juliet feel to the story (more than that I won’t say for fear of spoiling it). Apart from the main plot, the story advances Evan’s “sort of” relationship with his neighbor Mia and her son Peter while adding a bit of drama regarding Mia’s uncertain future. The story also advances Joey’s desire to be independent, a desire that clashes with Evan’s protective nature. All of that gives the book (and the series) enough substance to elevate it to the upper tier of thrillers that feature action heroes.

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