quotidianwriter 's review for:

The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel

5.0

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“But that’s the rub of modern life. We build better livers, and someone concocts stronger booze. We get sun treatments, then our chemicals burn up the ozone even more. Cure one disease, and another pops up. The pitcher juices up his throw, and the batter juices up his swing. On and on it goes.”

Kobo is a baseball scout—and former baseball star—who’s obsessed with body upgrades, so much so that he goes into impossible debt to get the latest limbs and organs. But when his famous brother literally explodes while playing for the Monsanto Mets, Kobo is hired by the team’s owner to find out who killed him and get his medical debt paid off in the bargain.

It’s a wild journey across a grungy, ugly cyberpunk future that corporations and the wealthy present as a utopia (wait a minute, that sounds a bit close to home…). In a near-future United States, we see how climate change has wreaked havoc and widened class divides. Capitalism rots the core of every industry, especially with the corporatization of baseball teams by bio-upgrade companies striving to sell their next product to the eager public. Every new technology manages to further corrupt the wealthy and squash the poor.

The whole book is a gallery of the grotesque with vivid descriptions of living sculptures made of real flesh, strange lab-created animals, and sex that doesn’t involve one’s own body parts. Really, it’s sci-fi blended with body horror, which aligns with the novel’s exploration of how we live in our bodies and how our bodies could become the next “luxury product.” As one of the characters says:

“We’re all trapped in these forms, aren’t we? Our minds get poured into them without anyone even asking us. We grow and live in them, and yet in many ways they are as incomprehensible to us as the cosmos.”

Kobo is a standard noir protagonist with his pessimistic viewpoint and wry first-person voice, but what differentiates him is his obsession with body upgrades that lend an interesting depth to his character. He’s complicit in the system and addicted to its promises of fulfillment while still being frustrated with it, a feeling most of us know all too well. I loved Dolores as a secondary character who goes beyond just a supporting role/love interest and the Mouth as an over-the-top (but, uh, rather familiar) corporate idiot. All of the secondary characters have agency and want to accomplish their own goals beyond those of the protagonist.

On a plot level, The Body Scout is a well-written homage to pulpy noir detective novels. It plays with the usual plot beats, character archetypes, and twists that you’d see in a murder mystery, just in an even darker futuristic setting (sci-fi and noir are bedfellows, after all, as Blade Runner shows). Sometimes the author is a little too in love with the world-building details, but I still found those asides entertaining, and you can tell he had fun creating and anticipating how every aspect of society might change. I especially appreciated representation of different gender identities and able-bodiedness, since those aspects aren’t often addressed in science fiction when it comes to new technologies.

Like any noir novel worth its salt, the story provides social critique that’s relevant to our current lifestyles. The characters’ indifferent acceptance of the way the world works—where everyone is driven by profit—was painfully familiar. I fear that there is no happy future for humanity, and that as in the novel, we will leave environmental disasters to be a problem for the next generation, and the systemic culprits of crimes will always get off scot-free. In that sense, the story’s ending is depressing to think about but ultimately realistic, and there’s validation in finding that honesty in fiction. The nihilism of the final image worked perfectly.

I requested the ARC of this book from NetGalley because I’m a big fan of Lincoln Michel’s writing newsletter Counter Craft. I was happy to find that The Body Scout embodies (sorrynotsorry) the literary/genre blend he often writes about in his essays. This novel is carefully constructed on both a plot and line level, and I hope to read more from Michel in the future.