While this world seems very interesting, there's also a whole lot more baseball than I anticipated. I made it about 30-50 pages in and tried to return on multiple occasions, but the baseball of it all just fully takes me out of its target audience and I struggle to build enough interest/enthusiasm to return to it.

I am sorry for the inconvenience but I don’t have the time to read this anymore and have lost interest in the concept. I believe that it would benefit your book more if I did not skim your book and write a rushed review. Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience.

I love sci-fi with elements of biology and fighting corporations. This is exactly what you'd expect. I do think the baseball connection was a little over my head but otherwise fun.

I really enjoyed this story for the most part. I'm not that great at following world-building stories but this one was easy to get into and had really great character development. I am not a huge sports fan and the baseball stuff sometimes went over my head and was bit overkill for my taste - but in general, I enjoyed the story, the murder investigation, and although it was definitely out of my comfort zone (I don't read a ton of Sci Fi) I would definitely see myself picking up this author again!

Body Scout, The by Lincoln Michel
09/21/2021|Orbit Books
Here’s a science fiction mystery you can read while watching the boys of summer wrap up another season. Kobo is a baseball scout, though he’d been in a slump lately. He’s also addicted to body mod upgrades and deeply in debt to a loan company with aggressive collectors. It’s bad enough when a pair of lab-grown Neanderthals steal his latest prospect out from under him, but when his best friend and Yankees phenom dies mysteriously at-bat. The slugger’s family took Kobo in after the death of his parents, and now he’s determined to uncover the truth behind his friend’s demise. In a world of body mods and drug tweaked sports competitions, heroes aren’t just born, they’re remade, but just how far teams will go for the win will surprise even the jaded Kobo. Recommended.

4.5 stars.

I am not typically one for a sports kind of novel, but apparently if you mix it with some sci-fi, some mystery, and just a touch of thriller, I'm all in. The Body Scout was a gritty and intriguing read from the get go. It took me a little bit of time to understand the basics of the world-building in this dystopian focusing on body modification and genetic alteration, but once I was buckled in, the ride was a solid one.

Michel's writing is something you would expect in a dark crime novel, a kind of "just the facts, ma'am" approach, but with a nice atmospheric rounding. The world is fantastically constructed and clear, easily having me believe the possibilities of this futuristic world. There is no dawdling in the plot and every scene makes sense to the continuation of the story. The characters are diverse and interesting, with the message of a world where everyone is out for themselves and a buck painted incredibly clearly.

There is a lot of baseball in here, but it worked for me all the same. The mystery, the scheming, and the business/medical/political intrigue took over enough that it really didn't matter that there was a central sports focus. That being said, true baseball fans will definitely get even more satisfaction out of this read. I enjoyed the societal commentary and how the entire economic system has taken over all aspects of life. Sponsorships have run amok. Instead of just the stadiums being named after companies, they have purchased entire teams. These big money players run the world and control day-to-day life. Everything feels like a big commercial. It's grim, but a very appropriate extrapolation of how things could easily progress.

I really had a good time with my read. I could definitely do with more from this world or just more from Michel in general. I enjoyed the writing style and the construction.

* Disclaimer: I received a copy of this novel from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. *

This book kept me on my toes. The premise is so interesting, once I got into the rhythm of the writing, I could not put the book down.

The Body Scout was highly entertaining! Once I started, I had a hard time putting it down. The writing is more straightforward and this goes a long way in driving the narrative forward. For a dystopian world, the world-building was surprisingly strong and a highlight of the book. While the science-fiction themes are nothing new, they are presented with humor and "twists" in the narrative that adds to the enjoyment!

A cyberpunk noir & sports drama walk into a bar..

This was such an original, plausible vision of the near future. I loved the level of detail (particularly around the engineered animals) & the clever genre blending. The noir aspects were charmingly reminiscent of a black & white film, but the book buzzed with the too bright lights of a neon sign in a robotic world. I loved it!

Thank you so much Netgalley & Orbit Books for this eArc!

I absolutely love near future and social SciFi. It’s a genre I don’t read enough of, and it’s one that, if done well, will really leave me thinking some deep thoughts for a long time after I read the book. I adore the genre. I really do. So, the other day when I was flitting through Netgalley to see if anyone had anything on the offer that looked interesting, I saw this book and jumped on it.

I will be honest, though. I almost bounced off this book pretty hard when I just started reading it. The reason being, there’s a lot of baseball, and I think baseball is about as interesting as watching paint dry (I’m sorry, don’t throw things at me) so yeah. However, I have a feeling my threshold for interest in sports is abnormally low, so don’t let that deter you. Just be aware. If you don’t like reading about sports, aspects of this book might be something you need to power through.

That being said, the plot quickly takes off and things get moving in a whole bunch of different directions. At times, the worldbuilding was a bit overwhelming, and I think some readers could get a bit lost in the rapid fire details, but I actually liked that aspect of the book. I loved how much thought and attention the author put into just about every aspect of the world, the evolving culture, the relationships and more. This is a book that obviously took a lot of careful thought to write, and that paid off with a fascinating story set in a world that is similar enough to ours to be believable. It did the thing I love these sorts of books for: It made me think.

In this near-future world, body modifications are the hot thing. The body you are born with is more a suggestion than anything else, and people pay good money to modify and upgrade themselves. They go in debt for body modifications. They hire people to hunt for the right body modification. Sometimes modifications become outdated. It’s a whole thriving, wild industry and it’s the core of this book.

Baseball comes into this because while the game is the same as the we know now, the players have changed. They’ve modified their bodies for improved performance, and our protagonist, Kobo, has his finger on the pulse on the modification market. He gets called by his professional athlete brother, who is a bit out of sorts, seems off, and Kobo isn’t that surprised. Sometimes this sort of thing can happen with mods. However, Kobo is surprised when his brother ends up dead. The League hires him to investigate his brother’s death, and we go down a Who Done It rabbit hole that had some impressive twists and turns.

The plot is pretty relentless. It doesn’t take much time to get to the mystery at the center of this book, and then it takes even less time to realize that not everything is as it seems. In this future vision of our world, evolution is guided by humans, and there’s a lot of deep, dark secrets into just how things are progressing on that front. So while Kobo’s investigation is interesting, it was really the world itself that almost gripped me more than anything else, and the social and personal problems that ensued from a future where humanity is so dramatically focused on modifications for personal improvement.

The Body Scout is pretty relentlessly paced. There’s never really any downtime, which reminded me a lot of some noir books I’ve read, where no one really has time to rest. It’s constantly one thing, then another, then another. Things are just constantly moving, which keeps it interesting, but perhaps I would have longed for some quiet moments occasionally. Some pauses in the motion to give both Kobo and the reader time to breathe and really digest the story a bit more.

Kobo was a character that I instantly liked. He’s flawed, self-absorbed, and focused on surgeries and modifying his own body with very little regard to the debt he finds himself in. However, as the book progresses, Kobo grows and evolves. He’s not the same man at the end as he was at the beginning. He starts to feel some empathy. He starts to look at the world a bit differently. Still flawed to his core, I found his personal arc, how the events he was enmeshed in changed him, to be rather fascinating and extremely well done.

I will say, baseball stays a theme throughout this book, and I did detach from that part of it because… baseball… but that’s my personal flavor and that’s not the author’s problem. I will also say that this was an absolutely wonderful debut offering. It was wild, and unexpected, with some of the best near-future worldbuilding I’ve seen in a long time. The plot was intricate, and the author’s attention to detail truly floored me. So, if you’re a fan of near-future SciFi, and you don’t mind baseball, you’ll probably want to check this one out.

I love the book. I love the book! I recommend this if you love having fun, I do not recommend this if you hate having fun, and I think whether you like baseball or not is ultimately not really a contributing factor to whether or not you'll like it. I do have some "ok but how come _____" follow-up questions about some of the ending, but the fact is I had such a good time so it doesn't really matter.

Lincoln Michel's The Body Scout is a fun take on SF - running through the story through the lens of sports and body modification/replacement, Michel's story presents interesting mirrors to modern society's take on athleticism and culture. The world feels authentically fleshed out, with tracks able to be drawn from modern takes to their extreme conclusions in this not-too-distant future. Definitely a unique voice, and one worth reading.

I love science fiction, especially body-mod science fiction, and this one does not disappoint. From the detective angle to the suspense of Kobo dealing with loan sharks and discovering family secrets, the book hooks you. The tech and scientific aspect of it all make what would be a normal thriller something more magical and otherworldly and I absolutely love it.

The Body Scout is a cyberpunk-type fantasy horror story set in a near-future dystopian New York, where body modifications and genetic material mutation techniques are very prevalent among humans. The centre of all this is a baseball game backed by pharmaceutical companies.

The author has created a world too similar to ours, steeped with corruption and that favours capitalism. The writing is sharp, witty and sarcastic at places that contributes to keeping the reader’s attention! Yes its a weird story, but its brilliantly good.

Thank you Orbit books for the e-arc via Netgalley.

Overall, this was a good read. However, there were times where it felt like something was lacking. The overall premise was something new that I had not yet encountered in my years of reading. It brought a new dynamic to sci-fi and medical advancements that change the way we live our lives. However, I would have liked

What a ride. All the near future suspects are here. Climate change, athletes at the end of their game, the conflict that exsists when you start taking stock of your life and all it has given you. Given a chance to right one last wrong sets this errant hero on a road few return from unharmed. Happy reading

Last month I read The Body Scout by Lincoln Michel while on vacation thanks to @orbitbooks_us - while I went in anticipating the neo-noir, cyberpunk-esque, capitalist future sci-fi I was promised (and was given!), the book had a lot of surprising elements I wasn't expecting.

The Body Scout follows Kobo, a washed-up cybernetic baseball star turned baseball scout, as he's hired to investigate the death of his adopted brother and baseball star JJ Zunz. With loan sharks, spies, and an environmental terrorist group on his tail, Kobo finds himself going down path after unexpected path.

Sometimes I crave a book that delivers on that old school (and male dominated) gritty urban fantasy/cyberpunk/mystery vibe with a jaded, washed-up, teetering into anti-hero, MC and The Body Scout gave me all of that, while also delivering nuance in regards to wealth, climate change, gender, sexuality, and racial politics.

This isn't something I've seen mentioned in other reviews, but the MC is queer! There is an on-page reference to his past relationship with a nonbinary character (who uses they/them pronouns).

I had a lot of fun reading this book. There is action, sleuthing, interesting worldbuilding, nuance when it comes to recognizing and analyzing privilege in a variety of different scales, all the genre trappings (loan sharks; a washed-up, old fashioned MC), and a surprising amount of emotional groundwork with regards to family.

Despite the action, the plot did drag at some points for me. Kobo isn't a particularly well-versed investigator, so the investigation never feels very rewarding. The less related things he uncovers and the subplots they open up are more interesting than the main investigative plot. Kobo does get carried along by events outside his control for a lot of the story; however, I do feel like that fits within his characterization and it makes his more active choices have a bigger emotional payoff.

It might not be a book for everyone, but it satiated a nostalgic craving for me, while also delivering on some of my favourite things to see in modern SFF.

Really good mix of near future sci fi, noir detective stuff, and baseball. Really liked,
Michel’s extrapolations of what sports might look like in the future with modified athletes, cybernetics and the like. Different and enjoyable. Highly recommend.

What an odd read. Certainly delightful even if you're not a typical sci-fi fan. This is not a world where you will submerge in completely and lose yourself, but definitely a way to unwind if you want an interesting premise without too much of a hook.

This was quite an entertaining read, though not quite fitting into one genre. It has pieces
of a futuristic science fiction thriller with satire, humor, and political themes underlying throughout. The author has smoothly Incorporated such current issues as gender dispariy, racism, pollution, the medical revolution, xenophobia, and other inequities. This futuristic America clearly embodies central themes and concerns from present times exaggerated for effect.

Highly recommend, entertaining with central themes that reverberate in this day and time!