The Body Scout
First edition, 2021
The Body Scout is Lincoln Michel's debut novel, published by Orbit in 2021. Set in a near-future New York where pharmaceutical corporations have taken over professional baseball, the story follows Kobo, a down-and-out scout who makes a living signing talent for teams with names like the Monsanto Mets and the NutriBod Yankees. When his brother Zunz, a star slugger, dies on the field in front of a live crowd from what appears to be a biotech assassination, Kobo sets out to find who killed him.
The novel works as a hardboiled noir procedural dropped into a body-modification dystopia. The world Michel builds is both satirical and coherent. It is a society where physical upgrades are bought on credit, debt collectors break your replacement limbs, and corporate loyalty is enforced through proprietary biology. Almost every character Kobo encounters has been modified in some way, and the question of what a person actually is once enough parts have been swapped out runs beneath the mystery plot without ever turning into a philosophy lecture. Michel keeps the pace tight and the voice dry, and the baseball setting gives the corporate dystopia a very specific and absurd texture that distinguishes the book from more generic biopunk territory.
Michel is also the founder of Funhouse, a literary magazine, and brings a writer's precision to what could easily have been a pulpy exercise. The world-building is dense but worn lightly, and Kobo is a genuinely engaging narrator, self-destructive and funny in about equal measure.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. New York: Orbit, 2021. ISBN: 9780316628723. #11111.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
The novel works as a hardboiled noir procedural dropped into a body-modification dystopia. The world Michel builds is both satirical and coherent. It is a society where physical upgrades are bought on credit, debt collectors break your replacement limbs, and corporate loyalty is enforced through proprietary biology. Almost every character Kobo encounters has been modified in some way, and the question of what a person actually is once enough parts have been swapped out runs beneath the mystery plot without ever turning into a philosophy lecture. Michel keeps the pace tight and the voice dry, and the baseball setting gives the corporate dystopia a very specific and absurd texture that distinguishes the book from more generic biopunk territory.
Michel is also the founder of Funhouse, a literary magazine, and brings a writer's precision to what could easily have been a pulpy exercise. The world-building is dense but worn lightly, and Kobo is a genuinely engaging narrator, self-destructive and funny in about equal measure.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. New York: Orbit, 2021. ISBN: 9780316628723. #11111.
Fine in fine dust jacket.