FROM SIMULACRA TO HYPERREALITY: REPRINTED IDENTITY IN EDWARD ASHTON'S MICKEY7

Abstract

This study examined how repeated human regeneration in Edward Ashton's Mickey7 (2022) constructs simulacra and produces hyperreality. Rather than treating hyperreality only as a virtual or media effect, the study focused on a material-technological regime in which a person is repeatedly printed, supplied with backed-up memories, and institutionally recognized as the continuation of an earlier self. A qualitative interpretive method and close textual analysis were applied to thirteen narrative passages concerning mortality, regeneration, memory backup, duplicate bodies, and the Expendable system. Jean Baudrillard's successive phases of the image and concept of hyperreality provided the main analytical framework, supported by posthuman accounts of informational identity. The findings showed a progressive displacement of the biological referent. Pain and fear initially preserved a residual sense of embodied reality. Regeneration then masked the discontinuity created by death. Memory data subsequently became the model that authorized personal continuity; and the simultaneous existence of Mickey7 and Mickey8 finally made originality operationally irrelevant. Hyperreality emerged not because the clone merely resembled the original, but because the colony's technical and administrative systems treated reproducibility as the normal condition of personhood. The novel therefore represents identity as a self-sustaining simulation in which memory, designation, and institutional recognition become more decisive than bodily continuity.