Mickey 17 has an important reminder: Murder mysteries are better with clones

Mickey 17 is a dark comedy, not a murder mystery — despite one serial killer flashback. But it made me think fondly about one of the best sci-fi novels of the past decade: Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes. 

Based on Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7, Bong Joon Ho’s new film Mickey 17 (which tosses in some extra Mickeys for montage purposes) follows the titular Mickey, who takes on the one job in which cloning technology is deemed legal to use: for an expendable worker on a galaxy-crossing colony starship. Every time Mickey dies, his employers clone a new body and upload his most recent memory backup into it, granting him a horrible immortality in exchange for his unending labor. 

Six Wakes also takes place in a world where cloning and backup brains are commonplace, where shady billionaires fund space colonies, and where disadvantaged clones crew long-haul space cruisers. But instead of a dark, anticapitalist comedy, Six Wakes is a dark, anticapitalist murder mystery, where every character might be the killer and not even know it. 

The murderous elements of both stories are intricately linked with their overall world-building — in Mickey 17, a string of serial murders is the reason that human cloning and brain-uploading was outlawed, after a world-renowned cloning expert duplicated himself so that he could commit murders and establish a public alibi at the same time. 

In Six Wakes, cloning and memory uploads are a widespread method of extending the human lifespan. The cloned crew of former criminals on the starship Dormire — which carries thousands of cryogenically frozen colonists — will live and die of natural causes many times aboard the ship during the long journey to its destination, and each time they’ll have their memories uploaded into a fresh clone. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to go. 

The action begins 25 years into the trip, when the whole crew unexpectedly wakes up in a fresh batch of clone bodies. None of them can remember anything that’s happened in the past 25 years, and the ship is drifting off course. 

From this setup, Six Wakes turns into a tight little murder mystery where any one of its characters might be the saboteur who attempted to ruin the mission and kill thousands, and the killer might not even know it. 

Like Mickey 17’s serial killer subplot, Six Wakes’ solution is, without getting too spoilery, also intimately linked with the history of how cloning/memory editing prompted stringent legislation for its control on Earth, which Lafferty tantalizingly unpacks over the course of the book. 

Mickey7, Mickey 17, and Six Wakes are all great meditations on cloning as a metaphor for immortality, exploitation, and labor — each one treating the subject according to its creator’s own interests and choice of focus. So if you’re looking for more of that good thing, you could do a lot worse than to check out Six Wakes, which was nominated for the hat trick of science fiction lit awards (the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick Award) in the year after it was published. 

Now that Mickey 17 has shown you the comedic potential in using cloning to get away with murder, you should check out its whodunit potential in Six Wakes.