If you’re a Douglas Adams person, a Jasper Fforde person, a Terry Pratchett person — this is your dystopian novel.
Mickey7 by Edward Ashton is set on the surface of a new planet, where humanity is doing what humanity does — pushing into somewhere it probably shouldn’t, for reasons that feel less noble the closer you look.
The premise is simple and immediately compelling: Mickey is an Expendable, meaning when he dies on a dangerous mission, he gets reprinted. The colony gets a fresh Mickey with all his memories intact. The problem is that sometimes Mickey doesn’t actually die, and now there are two of him, which is very much against the rules.
The humor is dry and the philosophical questions are real, but Ashton never lets the book get too serious about any of it. He’s asking genuinely interesting things — if your clone remembers everything you do, are you two people or one? At what point does a copy become a human being with autonomy and rights? Is it unethical to push your clone into the waste reclaimer after he sleeps with your girlfriend?
Ashton asks these questions in the same tone you’d use to complain about your protein ration slop, and it had me in stitches for the whole read.
This book also goes there in ways a lot of authors wouldn’t. If you had a clone of yourself, would you sleep with them? Ashton doesn’t shy away from the question and the resulting scene is genuinely funny rather than weird — and that’s a seriously hard needle to thread.
The worldbuilding has a lot of the same texture as the best colony fiction — rabbits show up as a practical colony resource, there are fascinating glimpses of other expeditions that didn’t go well, and the habitat feels lived-in and real.
Mickey 7 is book one in a duology (book two is Antimatter Blues) and as good as it is, book two might even be better. That is a seriously rare feat, and all the more reason to dive into this series head first.
If Wool is the introspective, quietly devastating end of the colony fiction spectrum, Mickey7 is the other end — sharp, funny, and more interested in what it means to be a person than in making you cry about it. They’re both on my permanent recommendation list and they scratch completely different itches.
Mickey7 was turned into a major motion picture featuring Robert Pattinson in 2025. Find out where I rank the movie in my definitive list of dystopian book-to-screen adaptations.
Looking for even more dystopian book recommendations to fill up your shelf? Check out the Ultimate Dystopian Reader Guide, packed with 45 of my favorite books, categorized by the type of dystopia you want to read about.