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A review by rsinclair6536
The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel
3.0
This story of a baseball scout on the hunt for his brother’s killer in a dystopian future New York City is endlessly creative. There’s new forms of transportation, home gadgets, clothing, and (especially) biological developments – both plant and animal. The ways in which the human body is now augmented, reframed, remixed, enhanced, and otherwise juiced up are the central concern – especially super enhanced baseball players. Michel’s knives are out for the sins of big pharma, big baseball, and big government, and they seem ever more nefarious as the hunt goes on.
It’s that endlessly creative part that was the problem for me. My wife tells me that when she was a child she liked to pretend that Daniel Boone was her friend. She entertained him and herself by telling him about various modern conveniences and how they worked. The Body Scout reminded me of her game. Every page brings something newfangled, its description strategically lagging by a couple of graphs or even pages so we can wonder what zootech, astroclones, a Bleedr machine, an eraser (a narcotic cigarette), and dozens of other new things are just long enough to enjoy having whatever we haven’t figured out explained. It gets old, and plot, character, and point of it all suffer for the game. Even the tough guy, detectiveish, noir posturing of Kobo, the body scout, gets lost in tomorrow’s wizardry. The Body Scout is not so much a baseball book either. The game serves mostly as a convenient marker for the ills of body and mind-altering substances and appliances – here run amok in the hands of the rich and powerful. If you hate big pharma, all day-every day, this is for you.
It’s that endlessly creative part that was the problem for me. My wife tells me that when she was a child she liked to pretend that Daniel Boone was her friend. She entertained him and herself by telling him about various modern conveniences and how they worked. The Body Scout reminded me of her game. Every page brings something newfangled, its description strategically lagging by a couple of graphs or even pages so we can wonder what zootech, astroclones, a Bleedr machine, an eraser (a narcotic cigarette), and dozens of other new things are just long enough to enjoy having whatever we haven’t figured out explained. It gets old, and plot, character, and point of it all suffer for the game. Even the tough guy, detectiveish, noir posturing of Kobo, the body scout, gets lost in tomorrow’s wizardry. The Body Scout is not so much a baseball book either. The game serves mostly as a convenient marker for the ills of body and mind-altering substances and appliances – here run amok in the hands of the rich and powerful. If you hate big pharma, all day-every day, this is for you.