I hadn't planned to read the audio edition, though. But for some reason, that's the version my public library bought despite owning only the ebook version of Mickey7, so, since beggars can't be choosers and I'm a beggar since retirement, audio it was this time.
Except now I have a new audio narration pet peeve: when a (first person) narrator aims for callow and casual but the only note he really achieves is every sentence that isn't another character's dialog ends in what I can only describe as a verbal shrug. Like when a parent tries to warn a kid not to come crying to them if they ignore the warning and suffer mild to moderate consequences? Except it's every single sentence, and usually nobody could have predicted the consequences of a thing so nobody could have warned about a thing and the consequences are usually way beyond mild to moderate -- often they are severe to near-fatal, i.e. the kind after which it is never appropriate to say anything remotely like "I told you so" especially since usually no, in fact, you didn't. It makes the narrator character, Mickey, who is already not the most sympathetic or reliable of these, sound like he is constantly abdicating responsibility for every single thing that happens. This could be excused as an audio narrating choice when it's a thing for which responsibility might be assigned, like having lied to your partner or lost an important resource or, you know, actually did tell you so, but this tone is even used when describing perfectly mundane things like crossing a room or biting into a protein bar. Over eight or so hours of a really great story, this goes from being annoying and occasionally misleading to my finally wanting to send narrator John Pirhalla* back to high school speech class. And flunk him on principle the first time so he has to take it twice.
As for Pirhalla's co-narrator, who's really more of a guest voice but that's not really officially a thing, Katherine Chin, she is fine. I can't say more than that, though, because of a weird choice the producers made to have Pirhalla voice everybody's dialogue, including the female characters', including Mickey's beloved, Nasha, who is actually so important she's basically a co-protagonist... in the bog-standard "raise your pitch above your normal speaking level, add lots more vaguely "feminine" breathiness and give most of your lines a flirty tone" style that way too many male narrators use for female or enby characters. Why do they have Chin at all, then? Only to play Nasha when her dialogue comes over the radio. Um, whut.
Anyway, the book is good enough to make up for all of that. I'm a big fan of the book. I recommend it to everybody who likes science fiction. But I'll urge anybody who decides to read to to do so in digital format or in good old fashioned print.*
Well, except for one kind of neat thing about the audio versus other formats: in the book, we come to know a non-human character called Speaker, who not only learned human language wholly from years of eavesdropping on radio conversations between Mickey and his best friend, Berto, but has also exactly duplicated Berto's voice and speech patterns; if they heard but couldn't see the one speaking, nobody could ever tell Speaker and Berto apart until it became a matter of each character's unique perspective or experiences being communicated, i.e., the voice said something that only Speaker or Berto could or would say. Berto is a daredevil pilot who talks like Buzz Lightyear. Speaker is a constructed representative of a vast hive mind and its body, like all of its kind, is a vaguely insectoid/trilobite-ish form. So imagine a Buzz Lightyear and a giant pill bug who also talks like Buzz Lightyear on a desperate mission together. It's amusing in audio book format in a way print could never match. If that sounds like fun to you and you think I'm being overly sensitive (I mean, I've coached high school speech teams to state championships a few times so I've made a lot of kids pay attention to details like this, so yes, I am more sensitive than most when it comes to vocal narrative) to the Verbal Shrug issue, hey, sample it and see.
Our story picks up two years after Mickey Barnes, seventh of his name, resigned his job as the "Expendable" for humanity's beachhead colony on an icy frost clod of a planet called Nefilheim. A mission's Expendable is a person with no particular skill set of the kind that would ordinarily merit a spot on a mission but is simply willing to do all the dangerous/fatal tasks that need doing on that mission. If an Expendable dies in the line of duty, a new clone of that person is quickly grown in a vat and imprinted with the previous clone's memories and personality from up to the moment the prior clone last submitted to Upload. The memories might thus include the prior's experience of dying from, say, being the first to try eating vegetation or meat from a new planet, or being attacked by a new creature, or exposure to radiation while making emergency repairs to the kind of thing that emits radiation.
Mickey 7 explored the consequences of an Expendable actually surviving a supposed death but only making it back home after he, presumed dead by the rest of the crew, had already been replaced by his clone. In the process, Mickey discovered that an alien monster (that happens to be what everyone thinks killed him) is actually sentient. And in his dealings with the monster species that I don't want to get too specific about, one important thing that I can't help spoiling happens: he left a very powerful antimatter bomb in their possession. Or at least told his commanding officer that he did.
As Antimatter Blues gets going, Mickey's colony finds itself sorely in need of getting that bomb back, not to use as a weapon or to blow anything up, but to drain of its antimatter for fuel to keep the colony going through a projected planetary winter that could very well render the whole colony extinct. And we find out /are reminded what Mickey really did with the bomb, which becomes a McGuffin in a vastly entertaining plot that involves renewing relations with the alien Creepers, whose vast underground labyrinth of a habitat is very near the humans' dome, meeting another population of Creepers who are even weirder and scarier than humanity's neighbors, and getting inextricably and irrevocably involved in inter-population politics as they race to recover humanity's only hope for survival. In the process we get to know Berto and Nasha a lot better than we did last novel. Nasha especially gets a chance to become a more important character in her own right, starting with a pretty grim and close look at what it has been like for her to watch her boyfriend die of various hazards seven times. Amusingly, she gets referred to as "The Nasha" by the Creepers, whose perspective on her, remember, has been formed by supposedly private conversations between her boyfriend Mickey and her fellow pilot, Berto, both of whom affect an exaggerated fear of/respect for Nasha at all times. In other words, the Creepers think that Nasha is pretty much the biggest badass ever, and she comes pretty close to proving them right.
Mickey, also, gets to show a bit more general heroism as he is all but shoved into command of the mission, since it's his fault the antimatter is out of human control. He makes a hell of an ambassador to an alien race, but his unique experiences as a former Expendable give him an equally unique perspective on what it means to be an individual, a concept he has great difficulty explaining to the two flavors of hive mind with which he has to negotiate.
But of course it's the Creeper called Speaker who steals the show this time around, weirdly charismatic, stern, occasionally baffled by us weirdo humans and very, very committed to his Nest's survival. It's the Speaker's presence in this second book that really makes it an even better read than its predecessor and makes me hope for a few more Mickey7 novels to come. Mickey and the Creepers. I mean, come on!
**I have a terrible, terrible time with paperbacks, especially trade paperbacks, because I can't physically handle or manipulate these for more than about 15 minutes per day without searing physical pain and inability to get pretty much anything else done that day. I have a category on most social reading sites I call "On Dead Tree Despite The Pain" into which I put books that I found worth that annoyance and discomfort to read and finish. Guys, I would have read Antimatter Blues in a mass market paperback if I had to. In fact, I seriously considered DNFing the audio book (no sunk cost except a tiny bit of my tax dollars) and waiting for a cheap used paperback to wash up at Alibris or my local used bookstore. But I really got into the story so I forged on through.
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