We absolutely loved Edward Ashton’s Mickey7 here at SciFiNow, saying it “packs in the peril but still leaves you with the warm and fuzzies” in our four-star review. And we’re not the only ones, with the novel being picked up to soon be a motion picture by Academy Award-winning director Bong Joon-Ho, called Mickey 17, starring Robert Pattinson and out on 17 March (watch the teaser here).

Now, Ashton is back with a follow-up to Mickey7 with Antimatter Blues and we’re delighted to reveal the cover above!

Check out the official synopsis for Antimatter Blues…

Surviving isn’t living, even for an Expendable.

Mickey7’s antimatter gambit paid off. He’s out of the Expendable game and doing whatever else he can to help support the threatened colony on the ice world Niflheim. But the colony now desperately needs the one thing he doesn’t want to give them: the antimatter in the bomb he claimed the alien creepers have.

Without it, the colony won’t survive the coming years. With it, the colony leader can finally get rid of Mickey7 for good.

But the planet’s indigenous races have their own plans for Mickey7 and the human colony. They want the colony resources, all of them, and they won’t stop until they’ve devoured every last scrap.

“I’ve always been interested in the teletransport paradox, which is really the central conceit of Mickey7,” Ashton told us when we asked him last year about first getting the idea for the novel. “Even as a kid watching Star Trek, I can remember thinking that these people had to be out of their minds to get into the transporter. It seemed pretty obvious to me that it wasn’t actually transporting anyone. It was just dissolving them on one end, and then making a fresh copy on the other. That might be fine for an outside observer, but the person who got dissolved was gone, replaced on the other end by a perfect replicant.

“Right around the time my first novel came out, I wrote a short story on the topic called “Backup” (which you can find here).

“A year or so later, when the idea was still bugging me, I started in on Mickey7.”