Mickey7 and Antimatter Blues (St. Martin’s Press,
February 15, 2022 and March 14, 2023). Cover design by Ervin Serrano

Truth to tell, I missed Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7 last year, despite all the breathless praise heaped on it (NPR listed it as one of the Best Books of 2022, calling it “A wildly entertaining mix of action and big ideas peppered with humor and a bizarre love story”). It was our very own Brandon Crilly who tuned me in to the coolness of Mickey7 with his mid-2022 Roundup, in which he wrote:

Gods this was a fun read. Ashton begins with protagonist Mickey stuck at the bottom of a pit and certain he’s going to die, since he’s the Expendable and his colony will just regenerate him. Except things take various turns from there, due to the threat of alien attack, the idiosyncrasies of the colonists, or the bizarre experience of being the seventh iteration of yourself. If you’ve ever spent nights thinking Okay, but the transporter really kills folks and then duplicates them, right, this is most definitely a book for you.

And now the sequel Antimatter Blues, which arrived this week from St. Martin’s Press, is being called “A nonstop SF adventure from beginning to end” (Library Journal).

[Click the images to slip yourself a Mickey.]

Back covers for Mickey7 and Antimatter Blues 

Mickey7 was released in paperback from St. Martin’s Griffin last month. It is being adapted into a major motion picture by Academy Award-winning director Bong Joon-Ho (The Host, Snowpiercer, Parasite), starring Robert Pattinson, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. It is scheduled to be released by Warner Bros. on March 29, 2024.

Here’s an excerpt from that starred review by Marlene Harris at Library Journal.

Mickey Barnes, once the colony’s Expendable Mickey7, retired from service on a lie. Now that the beleaguered colony is running out of fuel, he’s stuck making that lie good, only to discover that the antimatter bomb he carefully hid under a rock pile was found by the native inhabitants and traded to their enemies — in the hopes said enemies would either leave them alone or blow themselves up. Which puts Mickey back in the expendable seat, leading a band of equally misfit crew members on a trek to either find the power source, start a war, or tell another really, really big lie. Or possibly all of the above…

VERDICT A nonstop SF adventure from beginning to end.

Read the whole thing here.

Here’s the complete details:

Mickey7 (304 pages, $27.99 in hardcover, $17.99 paperback, $11.99 digital, February 15, 2022)
Antimatter Blues (304 pages, $27.99 in hardcover, $14.99 digital, March 14, 2023)

Both books were published by St. Martin’s press, with covers by Ervin Serrano.

See all our recent coverage of the best new SF and fantasy series here.