The Body Scout

June 14, 2021
Michel’s brisk, entertaining debut weaves familiar cyberpunk tropes through a gritty, near-future world of corporate greed and pro baseball. As young boys growing up in the bleak underground warrens of a New York City partly submerged due to climate change, Kobo and his best friend, JJ Zunz, dreamed of playing ball in the big leagues. Kobo washed out of the now-defunct Cyber League and became a talent scout for the pros, though the sport is now controlled by Big Pharma, whose cutting-edge drug blends fuel the top players. Zunz, on the other hand, had the skills and luck to become a star hitter for the Monsanto Mets—until he drops dead on the field during a playoff game. Was it poison or a careless overdose? Kobo’s determined to find the truth, and his investigation plunges him deep into a web of corporate politics, intrigue, and cutthroat shenanigans. The plot moves fast and features well-wrought if expected worldbuilding details, including floating billboards, advanced drug and gene therapies, cybernetic rebuilds, obnoxious and über-wealthy CEOs, and ecological collapse. Readers won’t need to be baseball fans to enjoy this gripping ride.

July 15, 2021
In a future where body hackers and bio-genetic juicers are at cross purposes, a brother mourning his baseball-playing sibling tries to even the odds. Take the real-life biohacking aesthetics in self-described "future-y reporter" Kara Platoni's We Have the Technology (2015) and the plethora of books about the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR (an acronym for extreme gene-modification technologies too complicated to explain in short order) and apply them to a weird and hopefully not prescient techno-thriller and you have a cocktail that's one part William Gibson, one part Cory Doctorow, and a dash of generic but propulsive future noir. Our narrator, Kobo, is pretty much a bionic man with implants, new organs, and lots of cybernetic upgrades, none of which mean that much for his job as a scout for whatever Major League Baseball has morphed into. Living in the shadow of his adopted brother, JJ Zunz, the superjuiced star slugger for the "Monsanto Mets," Kobo is doing his best. "Baseball was a nasty business," he admits. "I told myself all the usual things. How it would be some other asshole doing the job if it wasn't me." When his brother dies on the field of some mysterious engineered illness, Kobo turns detective, diving into the dark ends of this future landscape to find a little truth. Like most cyberpunk that evolved over the past decades, it's weird and sometimes gross and endlessly fascinating. In Michel's version of the future, Neanderthals have been resurrected, cloning is routine, and playing a private dick gains all kinds of unwanted attention for Kobo, not least from Dereck T. Mouth, the malevolent owner of the Mets. Did we mention that Kobo owes millions in debt for his miraculous modifications to his medical-loan company, which badly wants its money back? It's a dizzying world but catnip for cyberpunk fans. How do you navigate a world in which everyone is altered? In this scenario, everyone and everything might be Chekhov's gun. Everybody duck. A fun-to-read addition to the cyberpunk canon.

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September 1, 2021
Baseball player J. J. Zunz drops dead--murdered, apparently, during a game. At almost exactly the same moment, Zunz's brother Kobo, a baseball scout, is muscled out of a big acquisition; soon after, he's fired from the team. Suspecting his brother's murder has something to do with the game, Kobo goes to great and potentially self-destructive lengths to find out who's responsible. Having a baseball scout as an amateur sleuth makes the novel interesting; its near-future setting makes it special. Kobo lives in a world in which baseball teams are named for their corporate owners (the Monsanto Mets; the California Human Potential Growth Corp Dodgers); where most automobile traffic is now airborne; where cloned Neanderthals are, if not commonplace, at least unremarkable; and where most people have augmented their bodies either with biopharmaceuticals or cybernetics. Author Michel, a noted short-story writer (he's won a Pushcart Prize), makes his long-form debut here, and a spectacularly successful debut it is. Great entertainment for any reader on the mystery/science-fiction spectrum.

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