This is the sequel to Mickey7 which I read earlier this year, but this time, I showed enough restraint to read a couple of other books before attempting it. If I really enjoy a book, I sometimes dive straight into the follow-up, and that usually doesn’t end well.
Not this time, and I’d like to think that’s perhaps one reason why I enjoyed Antimatter Blues even more than the first book.
Set a few years after the colonists’ arrival on Niflheim, Mickey’s life has settled into what could laughingly described as normalcy: he’s resigned his position as the colony’s expendable – meaning he no longer has to sacrifice himself by fixing the antimatter reactor or carrying bombs into the lair of the indigenous insectoid population; he’s settled into a long-term relationship with a pilot; and he’s managed to land a part-time role cleaning out the rabbit pens (aside from dying when ordered to, Mickey isn’t really qualified to do anything else). But then he starts to notice something rather odd: he occasionally spots other copies of him near the antimatter reaction chamber. It appears that new versions of him are being run off, and whoever is making them isn’t even polite enough to wait for him to die first. …
Let’s get right to it: this is a brilliant sequel to an extremely good book. Ashton has lost none of the humour of the original (in fact, it was even funnier), and his signature economy of words hasn’t diminished. His portrayal of the insectoid tribes was a masterclass in character portrayal. They come across as both dangerous, but also vulnerable simply because they don’t understand the concept of lying. Of course, once they meet humans, they pick it up pretty quickly.
The environment gets a lot of love: Niflheim is described as harsh, deadly, but also unusually beautiful. You do get a real sense of place throughout the whole story (the loss of warmth with the seasonal change; the claustrophobia in the insectoid tunnels) which you rarely get in science fiction these days. And in the same tight space, we also get treated to the less-than-perfect technology that has allowed for colonisation (with the occasional disaster along the way) and the bioengineering that makes for the hapless Mickey’s resurrections.
It doesn’t feel like a particularly long book, which I put down to the superb pacing: not so fast that there’s no time for the characters to change and grow; not so slow that you find it getting a bit monotonous in places. Every action and scene has its purpose in moving the story along.
And then to top it all off, an entertaining, but sadly poignant ending.
Definitely worth a read.