Lincoln Michel

"Kobo has some problems. His cybernetics are a decade out of date, he's got a pair of twin sister loan sharks knocking on his door, and his work scouting for a baseball league run by pharmaceutical companies is about to go belly-up. Things couldn't get much worse. Then his childhood best friend--Monsanto Mets slugger J.J. Zunz--is murdered at home plate. Determined to find the killer, Kobo plunges into the dark corners and glittering cloud condos of a world ravaged by climate change and repeat pandemics, and where genetic editing and advanced drugs mean you can have any body you want--as long as you can afford it. But even among the philosophical Neanderthals, zootech weapons, and genetically modified CEOs, there's a curveball he never could have called"--

A Novel

The Body Scout

Ryan LaFerney

The Body Scout seems like it was specifically written for me. You see, I'm a sucker for both baseball and the cyberpunk genre and this novel is basically a cyberpunk novel about the murder of a New York Mets (I mean The Monsanto Mets) player in the near-distant future. (You see, in Michel's near-future New York, Big-Pharma runs the world and baseball). Sly, smart, weird, and fizzy, The Body Scout is scifi/noir tale following Kobo,who is a former baseball player turned scout investigating the murder of his best friend (adopted brother) JJ Sunz, the famed star of The Monsanto Mets, who dies suddenly in the middle of a game. Kobo is determined to find the killer and plunges into the world of genetically modified CEOS, Neanderthals, and back-alley modifications (not to mention weird, virtual realty orgies) to do so. Where it leads Kobo is somewhere he never dreamed possible, and the revelations that come to light, are in many ways shocking. 

The novel is also a bit tender and touching.

The main question this novel asks, like the work of Philip K. Dick and the film maker, David Cronenberg, is : What does it mean to inhabit a body? The Body Scout raises fascinating questions about the nature of cloning. It also asks how far would we allow corporations to control us? 

This book was a thrilling journey that featured strange, eye-popping tech. It's also a terrifying (but fun) look at where we could be headed. 

Lincoln Michel is a talented author. I'll be anticipating his next novel with glee.

Fraser Simons

Kobo, down on his luck, scout for the Yankees baseball team—a mega corporation in competition with every other team—is having A Day. While scouting a talented scientist, a pair of Neanderthals working for the Mets, spike his drink, nab his mark, and to top it all off, he’s just seen his brother die live on television. He stuck a homer for the Mets, collapsed, and leaks grey matter, blood, and biotechnological juice on the field. To top it off, a pair of women working as muscle for the corporation that handles his medical loan to continue his addiction in upgrading his cybernetics and are also his landlord, pay him a very physical visit. And, oh yeah, he’s fired because he lost his mark.

It’s pretty noir. Kobo isn’t exceptional or competent. He’s an Everyman, once a cyber boy ball player, before “oilers” like him—cybernetically enhanced people—were thrown off of teams in a move to biochemical enhancement. A return to a “natural” state of play again. He’s a middling scout. But he’s alone, trapped in nostalgia. Probably forever in debt until he’s dead.

Then the Mets come calling, via the Neanderthal’s who robbed him of his prize, with an offer of essential becoming a P.I for them focusing on how and why his brother was ostensibly murdered. 

Neanderthals, by the way, is a biotechnology byproduct of scientists who used DNA located in fossils (ala Jurassic Park) to recreate pseudo Neanderthals, as they’re still born paired from a sapien egg and are completely outside of the time where they actually existed. 

He rekindles an old flame, Dolores, a scout for a completely different team, the Sphinxes, for help locating a lead, a ball player in that teams stable. He is also being tailed by a mysterious girl child, who looks familiar, but can’t figure out how or why.

It’s a mystery that takes him all over the setting, interacting with a lot of different factions. Dolling out bite-sized worldbuilding as it becomes available. We also learn about Kobo’s past, both with Delores and his cyborg pitching days, his childhood with his brother, and more. 

Craft-wise, this is a bit above commercial fiction, and I think that’s on purpose. It’s accessible prose, not as much jargon as you’d typically find in a cyberpunk-biopunk affair, more inclusive, and subversive of genre. Rather than using orientalist aesthetics, it evokes a distinctly western lens with baseball as a game, but also as a brand and ethos of American culture. Its relevant to post-capitalistic concerns and a launching pad to discuss class stratification and loss of agency via advertising and the inevitability of new technologies being co-opted by capitalistic forces that colonize the body. Often without consideration of long term effects at any level. It’s also got a noir cadence but vacillated often between pretty gonzo plot beats and the more serious. Dialogue wise, it’s always learning toward natural and less serious, as Kobo is just not a serious person, usually. 

There’s some twists and turns, but if you go in expecting an (updated) cyberpunk book with noir trappings, you’re going to get those tropes and plot beats. It’s not unpredictable and it doesn’t imagine a solarpunk intersection with technology or the agency of a small group of individuals against post-capitalism and corporations. But it does have a lot to communicate otherwise, and it does what it wants to do, even when it’s pretty odd, quite well.

The Body Scout A Novel

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