Film Review: Mickey 17

The human being in the age of its mechanical reproducibility

I've already written on this blog about the questions, both abstract and practical, that emerge when you get a science-fictional gizmo that lets you cheat death. Instead, let's talk about sauce.

In the disturbingly familiar future of the film Mickey 17, a filthy rich creep leads a space colonization project whose day-to-day operations are more like those of a cult of his repulsive personality, complete with a tyrannical workplace and an unsurprising hyperfocus on eugenics (any resemblance to real life, etc.). This grimy exudate of the worst traits of the 1% has a wife to match, whose hobby is to invent sauce recipes. That, and a blatant lack of humanity, make up her entire personality. And I couldn't help but notice that the interests of this couple are complementary: he (figuratively) grinds his spaceship crew into pulp and has one special crew member to (literally) grind into pulp and xerox out a new copy every so often, while she (literally) consumes pulp, which (figuratively) completes the picture of a system where human beings are goods for the elite to consume.

This connected field of themes comes as no surprise from Bong Joon-ho, the director who made Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite, and is of a kind with the ongoing wave of South Korean critique of economic inequality via science fiction. With Mickey 17 we get more than the usual humanist protest against the cheapening of life as a result of easy reanimation; we're placed before an entire symbolic landscape where worker exploitation reflects settler colonialism reflects eugenics reflects the aesthetization of politics reflects Great Man Theory reflects corporatocracy reflects self-mythologizing reflects doomsday cultism reflects the fetishization of violence reflects sublimated sexual repression reflects the incapacity for empathy that defines your standard-issue authoritarian regime. In the colony ship where Mickey 17 is set, the founding of a new society outside Earth jurisdiction and around the whims of one lone (both figurative and literal) father of a future humankind becomes a pitch-perfect satire of how small and ridiculous every self-proclaimed savior really is.

Notably, this character's first action in the movie is to ban sex among crew members under the excuse that the ship's limited caloric budget shouldn't be wasted. The hypocrisy is made manifest not only in the banquets this leader enjoys privately, but in the considerable expense of resources involved in periodically remaking his test subject, the titular Mickey, whose job description is to be subjected to every form of biohazard the new planet has to offer so the ship doctors can learn how to keep the crew safe—and how to kill everything else. Because Mickey's body and memories have been scanned and made replicable, his human rights are for all purposes void. His death is trivial, ergo his life has no value. For the advancement of science, he can (in fact, he contractually must) be killed and killed and killed, as if his employer were in a state of war with him. A war that turns out to be the logical extension of necropolitics by other means.

Mickey remembers all his deaths, by test crash and by alien virus and by poison gas and by space radiation and by furnace and by gunshot. He remembers every gruesome detail. This ought to be a horror story, but Bong knows what he's doing when he frames those scenes as comedy. He knows we won't fear for Mickey, so we can afford to ignore the moral atrocity we're watching. And to highlight the game he's playing with us, he adds a secondary villain to the story, a voyeurist whose kink is to watch people die—and to make movies about it. This character helps Bong make his case that our amusement makes us complicit.

(In an odd instance of synchronicity, this month we also have the release of Novocaine, another movie about a character intentionally designed for us to laugh at his torture without feeling guilt.)

When essayist Walter Benjamin wrote about the mechanical reproducibility of works of art, he singled out cinema as a form of art that isn't meant to be experienced in its original form: when we enter the theater, we're always watching a mass-produced copy. The material uniqueness of the recording made by the director's very hands is beside the question. That first recording may as well be destroyed as soon as a copy exists. And even that first recording is itself a copy of the actors' real movements and words.

So what I suspect Bong is doing when he pairs the reproducibility of human life with the inherently reproducible medium of cinema is reflect on how dreadfully easy it could be to reduce a person to a source of fun. This is no small matter: when the boss of the ship forbids sex, while maintaining his own banquets and his endlessly killable test subject, he's essentially telling his crew: you don't exist for your own fun, only for mine. Authoritarian rationing of fun goes hand in hand with dehumanization. Benjamin wrote that art's response to the age of machines was the movement known as art for art's sake. Perhaps, in a world where human life is mechanically reproducible, the appropriate response would be life for life's sake. In other words, fun.

That's why it matters that Mickey 17 is a fun movie to watch. The act of watching has key significance to its plot: the doctors watch Mickey to learn how he dies; the secondary villain enjoys his macabre videos of prolonged executions; the inventor of human replication only got caught for his secret crimes because he had a witness. More importantly, the megalomaniac at the center of the colonization mission is very aware of the importance of managing his image. The two possible futures open before him are linked to the two characters who spend the film's runtime filming him: the lackey, who curates a narrative of this man as a visionary hero; and the whistleblower, who secretly collects the visual proof that will expose his crimes. Both record the same events but assign them opposite valences. And we, who are watching the same events as them, are given the version intended for laughs.

At one key plot moment, one of Mickey's old friends explains that the voyeurist will kill him unless he sends a video of Mickey's next death. Would Mickey be willing to turn his death into a performance? The betrayal implied in that request is applicable to the entire movie: when you have someone in Mickey's situation, the worst thing you can do to him isn't even to keep killing and reviving him; it's to make a spectacle of his suffering. It doesn't take too big a stretch of imagination to realize that such profanation is exactly the movie we've paid a ticket to watch. This explains why it's important, in the final moments of the confrontation between the spaceship crew and an intelligent alien species, that the aliens demand to see one human die in retribution for the death of one of their own. And the character who ends up volunteering for that sacrifice illustrates the basic dignity that Mickey has so far been denied, the basic dignity we could all aspire to: a death that means something.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: The Sleepless by Victor Manibo

An intriguing thought experiment that turns more complicated than it needs to be

In the 2040s, a worldwide plague of insomnia has made around two billion people permanently Sleepless. After a confusing period of panic and uncertainty, the economy has adjusted: those who are Sleepless rent smaller apartments with no bedroom, work three or four shifts without resting, or use the extra hours to learn new hobbies. No one is sure how the plague started (some speculate that artificial coffee may be the culprit), but the rate of contagion seems to have plateaued, and for the moment, things seem manageable. Some people sleep, and some don't. Some businesses are open for extra hours, and some cities spend more on lighting.

And that would be the end of it, were it not for the extremist clandestine militias that claim Sleeplessness is a superior stage of human evolution, and the other extremist clandestine militias that want to limit the civil rights of the Sleepless, and the shady corporations that want to create a tireless workforce, and the secret assassins that have been kidnapping top neurology researchers, and the biohacker labs trying to induce artificial Sleeplessness, and the other biohacker labs trying to cure Sleeplessness, and the tech bro billionaires trying to benefit from the controversy either way, and the news broadcasters struggling to maintain some independence in the middle of so many unpredictable changing winds.

This plot is dense, folks. Try not to doze off.

Our protagonist, investigative journalist Jamie Vega, has become Sleepless on purpose, to avoid the nightmares he's been having since a close friend died. But when he finds his boss dead at the office, just before they were supposed to publish an exposé on a corrupt politician, all his suppressed emotions resurface, and he's quickly embroiled in a web of conspiracies and betrayals and double agendas that converge on him as the prime target of multiple factions in a secret war with global stakes.

The novel opens as your standard detective mystery, with consecutive scenes of interrogating and revisiting previous locations to gather clues, but as our protagonist gets closer to the truth, the action escalates drastically. The final third of the book breezes by like a breakneck spy thriller that unfortunately hits the brakes too abruptly for an extended discussion scene where all the secrets are painstakingly explained to the reader. There is more action after this, but the momentum has been ruined, and then the denouement is a bit too long. But this clunky pacing is a necessary evil: there's just too much information that the reader needs to receive in order to fully comprehend the mammoth conspiracy that the author has concocted, so the bulk of the book is spent in page after page of backstory or dialogue.

The page count devoted to explaining the intricate machinations of our antagonists detracts from what would have been really interesting in this novel, which is to address the human-level implications of its premise. We get only scattered descriptions of what normal life looks like when people no longer need to sleep. There's some mention of the ethical risks of 24/7 work and the environmental threat of 24/7 consumption, but the narrative is focused mostly on our protagonist's chase against time to solve the mystery of who killed his boss, and we don't get enough opportunities to experience his world with him.

This is a regrettable combination of setting and theme: we take it for granted that sleep is an essential part of human nature, and the consequences of such a radical alteration of our biology could have been explored in much more compelling ways than in a corporate/political crime thriller. When the villain's full plan is revealed, it feels like the plot has lost sight of its theme and has turned into a typical Big Bad Company story. The central mystery turns out to hinge on the outcome of a corporate board vote, which is a massively unsatisfying reward for all the adrenaline we've spent in getting there.

To its credit, The Sleepless introduces a unique concept that on its own merits makes the reading worthwhile. But the way its premise is developed takes after too many familiar detective tropes, as if the writer is having more fun with the police procedural structure than with the psychological repercussions that a story like this demands. This is undeniably a fun adventure, but it shouldn't have needed to be one. The vertiginous experience of Sleeplessness itself would have made for a powerful hook; the hidden mics and poison bottles feel rather like an unwelcome distraction.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for achieving the difficult writing feat of describing the sensation of anomalous forgetfulness from a first-person perspective.

Penalties: −2 for endless scenes of exposition.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Manibo, Victor. The Sleepless [Erewhon, 2022].

Interview: Eeleen Lee, author of Liquid Crystal Nightingale

In Eeleen Lee's debut novel Liquid Crystal Nightingale, escape and justice are only for the rich. Pleo is a survivor, and she dreams of a better life. When she's framed for murder, will her dreams rescue her?  A far-future murder mystery wrapped up in colonization, classism, and intrigue, think Iain M. Banks meets Battle Angel Alita, with a dash of biopunk and a splash of impending alien invasions.

This may  be Lee's first full length novel, but she's been in the international publishing world for years.  She's edited fiction and anthologies, written comedy sketches, and her short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies in the U.K, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia, such as Asian Monsters from Fox Spirit Books, and Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction.

If you're looking for some great space opera reading recommendations along with a dose of humor, check our Eeleen's twitter feed, she's at @EeleenLee.  She was nice enough to chat with me about Liquid Crystal Nightingale, how the novel got started as a writing exercise, her short story collection 13 Moons, and more!

While doing research for this interview, I learned that Eeleen is a fellow Dune fan!  I think we'll both cry if the if the Sandworms don't meet our expectations.

Liquid Crystal Nightingale is out now from Rebellion Publishing, available in paperback and e-book.

Let's get to the interview!


NOAF: The narrative structure of Liquid Crystal Nightingale offers multiple points of view, including Pleo's, Marsh's, and the Dumortier's. How did you develop their different views of the world? When at least two of them were in the same place at the same time, how did you know whose point of view to use for that scene?

Eeleen Lee: I approached it like staging and blocking a scene- and the scene is done on green screen, which is a useful metaphor for writing because you're inventing what's outside and inside the characters. Firstly, make full use of the setting in each chapter- if the reader feels immersed in the time and place they will be more inclined to believe what the writer is depicting. Secondly, the characters, like real people, move through and interact with their environment on many levels: physically, emotionally and socially. Hence, I selected which character POVs would best reflect and set off the physical, emotional and social/individual life of a scene.

NOAF: What scenes and/or characters were your favorite to write?

EL: I enjoyed writing the two investigators, Dumortier and Nadira. There's a tendency to depict law enforcement in science fiction as mostly corrupt, inept and overwhelmed. I wanted to move away from that- it's much more effective and powerful to show a force that's efficient, highly competent and yet, still overwhelmed and vulnerable.

NOAF: What inspired you to write Liquid Crystal Nightingale? How different is the finished product from your original concepts?

EL: The novel began as a simple exercise years ago: write about a few fictional cities, in the style of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. As soon as I started writing about a city that looked like a cat's eye from space I couldn't stop at a few paragraphs. The style and tone were initially very literary, reminiscent of Primo Levi's The Periodic Table and the layered stories of Jorges Luis Borges.

NOAF: You mentioned on your twitter feed that you are pretty sure the new Dune movie will become a favorite movie adaptation. I am a fellow Dune fan, and also very excited for this movie! Do you have a favorite character or scene from the original novel or series? What do you most hope they'll get right in the movie?

EL: I hope the filmmakers get the sandworms right, with today's VFX technology there's no excuse not to. And I always thought Princess Irulan is given short shrift but ultimately she's the historian so she has the last laugh, in a sense.

NOAF: Who are some of your favorite writers? Why is their work meaningful to you?

EL: Yoon Ha-Lee, William Gibson, Alastair Reynolds, Ann Leckie, China Mieville and James SA Corey. Everything about their milieus and worldbuilding leaps off the pages.

NOAF:Your short story collection 13 Moons offers up supernatural stories of the darkness that lies just beneath the every day. Your short fiction has been published in a number of anthologies. In your short fiction, are there themes and concepts you find yourself returning to?

EL: A very good question because no one has asked me this before! Now that I look back on my short stories I can see some recurring themes such as: karma, the concept of no good deed going unpunished and coming of age.

NOAF: You edited one of the volumes of KL: Noir. How did you did get involved with this series of crime fiction, and is editing anthologies something you'd like to do more of?

EL: I was asked to get involved by my publisher and it's something I enjoy doing because it's rather exciting to guide other writers' visions.

NOAF: What’s next for you?

EL: I'm working on a military science fiction novel now.

NOAF: Thanks so much Eeleen! Can't wait to chat with you after the Dune movie comes out!

Microreview [Book]: Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden

Strap in, Nerds: it's time for LESBIANS IN SPACE WHALES

Nicky Drayden is a favourite of ours around these parts, given her track record of delivering wild and weird forays into science fiction and fantasy (often simultaneously). Now, in Escaping Exodus, we get a take on space opera that feels totally Nicky Drayden, while also being very different from both her previous novels. As you'd expect, its a novel of unexpected twists and sudden escalations, with some ridiculous-in-the-best way worldbuilding and characters who are far from blameless in the disasters unfolding around them. It's probably the only story you'll read this year which squeezes in both a stuffy, politically intricate coming-out ball and a plot-relevant episode of tasteful alien void sex (yes, there are tentacles) without ever making one or the other feel out of place. It is, in short, a trip. Expect no less.

Escaping Exodus follows Seske, a member of the ruling elite who is destined to take over the beast's matriarchal society, and her friend Adalla, a beastworker whose family perform the manual labour required to keep their spaceship running. And when I say spaceship, I mean "gigantic, ineffable space beast with enough room for a human-sized city inside its body", because that's what this society are building their home in. Its supposed to be a new model, after the death of their old beast: an apparently regular occurrence which requires the transportation of their homes and people, and the meticulous recreation of the city layout and structures they've build over centuries. However, things start going wrong more quickly than anticipated after the move, and Seske and Adalla find themselves taking different paths to the same realisation about how unsustainable and damaging their way of life has become - and how few options they have to genuinely change it. For Seske, this means trying to prove once and for all to her Matris that it is she, and not her Matris' very very taboo second daughter, who has what it takes to take over as leader and to find some appropriate spouses to go with it. For Adalla, living up to her Ama's expectations as a heartworker - one of the most prestigious but dangerous of tasks for a beastworker - would be challenge enough, without adding in the complication of a young, mute worker who inexplicably has her father's eyes. Seeking out a friendship with the Grisette leads to secrets about the Beast's maintenance which Adalla finds it impossible to overlook, and takes her into the less privileged side of Beastworker life.

Societally, Escaping Exodus offers a matriarchal and matrilineal system, upheld by the tradition of "motherlines" and a complex system of marriage that gives Ursula K. Le Guin's four-person Sedoretu a serious run for its money, and further divided between a ruling "Contour" class and everyone else. That a system in which marriage is between six women, three men and a single child would create an exponential decline on a cubic scale doesn't really get addressed, but it adds to the overall feeling of a decaying society trying to maintain some semblance of itself while potentially engineering its own downfall. (I should note that trans people exist in Escaping Exodus, but they are in a society that's prejudiced against men and highly fixated on appropriate social roles - so be warned for some blunt prejudice from characters when it comes up). Like a lot of stories that open on a world of alien injustices, one of the most constant niggles in Escaping Exodus' plot is the fact that both Seske and Adalla, despite being dissatisfied in different ways, are fundamentally ignorant of the exploitation that allows their society to function, but are very quick to get upset when it gets conveniently pointed out. To be fair, both have some pretty significant events to act as turning points, which staves off some of the worst of the character whiplash. There's also secondary characters like Doka, a match made during Seske's super fun coming out ball experience, who feel injustice in different ways again to Seske and Adalla and seek to rectify what seems most urgent to their own experiences, making the world of Escaping Exodus feel richer in the process.

For a lot of the book, its this richness of worldbuilding that proves the main draw of Escaping Exodus, with a plot that, despite its twists, doesn't have a lot of clear forward direction. Both Seske and Adalla vacilate between worrying about their own personal dilemmas and becoming preoccupied with the wider fate of the ship, and it takes about two thirds of the plot for both of them to stop effectively being sightseers and to start really stepping up as protagonists. In another book, that would be a complete dealbreaker, but the layers of worldbuilding and of societal exploration that Escaping Exodus heaps on reduced it to a minor issue. From the bioengineered weirdness that is the Beast ship, to the anthropological nuances of the human culture with its intricate hair braiding and complex marriage taboos, from the unexpected symbiotic relationships people form with the Beast's various gut denizens to details about how privacy and continuity become markers of privilege, there's There's just too much to take in, and after all despite their relatively privileged positions, it makes sense that these two young adults aren't immediately in control of the events around them, which after all have taken quite some time to get to the point of crisis they are now at.

Once that final third kicks in, however, things go from bad to worse to "I don't even know if this is going to work out or not but, hey, go for it" in quick succession. There's the release of huge amounts of new knowledge, of the ship's origins and current situation; there's trips out into space and back again using some pretty unconventional means, there's the whole alien sex thing mentioned above (I know you've been waiting to find out where that slots in, and... really, you just have to read it). It's at this point that things go from feeling weird but deliberate, to kind of messy, and its probably going to be up to the individual reader how much of that messiness is a feature and how much is a bug. As with Drayden's previous novel, Temper, its a bit disappointing to see a few satisfying plot strands disappear without trace, and there's glimpses of plotting that in different hands could have been an entire trilogy (but then, I said that last time). It also becomes a story that hinges on forgiveness, in all its unpredictable forms, and some plotlines and conflicts are dropped simply because one or both parties decide that it's no longer worth maintaining them. It leads up to a conclusion that feels about as satisfying as anything could, in the circumstances; this isn't a story that's been set up to have an easy answer, but it brings Seske and Adalla full circle to confronting their relationship to each other, and to the position of increased responsibility they now bear to the world, in all its goopy living weirdness, around them.

Escaping Exodus isn't a book that will work for everyone, but if you've found yourself enjoying previous works from Drayden, or wanting more space biopunk along the lines of Kameron Hurley's The Stars are Legion, or with feelings about Homestuck Act 6 that are still with you to this day, this is one to check out. On a personal level, I adored Escaping Exodus, and for all its odd choices and occasional unevenness it had me gripped from start to finish. Seske and Adalla's story is unlike anything I've ever read, and as an intricate look at a very different culture, it does everything it needs to be a roaring success.

The Math:

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 Intricate worldbuilding in the stomach of a giant tentacled space beast; +1 teenage protagonists who rise above their plot-mandated naivete to head up an interesting cast of characters

Penalties: -1 An accelerated, messy final third which is likely to disappoint those who want things neatly tied up

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Drayden, Nicky. Escaping Exodus (Harper Voyager, 2019)