Book #1 in The Hardest Reading Challenge I’ll Ever Do
Challenges Complete:
- A-Z Challenge (A)
- Spell Your Full Name (E for Edward in author’s first name)
- The Genre Challenge (Science FictionI
- The Rainbow Challenge (Blue)
My first book completed for my MASSIVE reading challenge came from my Science Fiction/Fantasy Book Club as its secondary pick for the month of July. (I’ll talk about our primary pick in a future post.)
Antimatter Blues is the second book in Edward Ashton’s Mickey7 duology(?). I’ll note that he calls it a Mickey7 Novel, so I do think the door is open for another book if Ashton finds inspiration from that universe.
Mickey is a member of a crew that set off to colonize a new planet that they call Niflheim. While most of the crew members are there for specialized roles and purposes, Mickey doesn’t have any special skills, other than a useless knowledge of history.
So, he’s there as the crew’s Expendable, which means that he gets to handle all the dangerous and life-threatening jobs, because they can upload his most recent memory and then resurrect him from a vat of slurry. It’s as icky as it sounds, but don’t worry. The book is hilarious and tons of fun.
I don’t want to give much else away, because it will ruin the first book if you haven’t read it. With that said, Mickey and the rest of the crew encounter the planet’s natural inhabitants, which they call Creepers. In order for the human colonizers to survive, they have to find a way to make a deal with them… quite literally.
Mickey is a fun narrator, and Ashton injects plenty of humor into a story that could have been as serious as Aliens had he chosen to go that way.
I recommend this series as a breezy, easy read.
Next Up: The Final Empire (Mistborn), by Brandon Sanderson
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