Like many professionals, Edward Ashton feels seen by the Apple TV+ series “Severance.” The concept of two separate selves — one for work and one for home — resonates with him.
“I’m a different person when I’m at work,” Ashton said.
By day, the Webster resident and University of Rochester graduate is the senior director for medical and scientific affairs for ICON Plc, specializing in oncology imaging. He’s helped work on a drug that has aided in boosting durable remission rates of pediatric brain cancer.
But when he’s not at research conferences or in meetings, he’s writing character-driven science fiction deeply rooted in his own education. Ashton’s novels indeed feel right at home next to the drama of “Severance” — or, say, the sci-fi-tinged Hollywood work of Oscar-winning director Bong Joon Ho.
In fact, one of Ashton’s novels, “Mickey7,” has become Bong’s follow-up to his acclaimed film “Parasite,” which took home the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020. Helmed by A-list stars like Robert Pattinson and Mark Ruffalo, financed by a $118 million budget and backed by a major distributor (Warner Bros. Pictures), Bong’s version, “Mickey 17,” released Mar. 7, is already one of 2025’s major releases.
It’s quite the profile boost for Ashton, who wrote the novel in his spare time. Considering most properties that get optioned by major studios never even get made, he feels lucky that his did — let alone made by a talent like Bong.
Ashton sees in the South Korean filmmaker a kindred creative spirit.
“One of the reasons I think that he was drawn to my super obscure book,” Ashton said, “was because we have similar interests in things like class conflict. We both have kind of the same vision when it comes to how we like to mix humor in with things that are actually kind of horrifying.”
The film preserves the 2022 novel’s premise of protagonist Mickey Barnes, a so-called “expendable” who does dangerous grunt work for the higher-ups on a colonizing space mission. Dying is just part of the job. Thanks to technological advancements, a new Mickey comes “out of the tank” to replace the previous iteration with all his memories intact.
“Mickey7” became “Mickey 17,” Ashton said, largely because Bong wanted a longer death montage. “Having seen the film now, it’s a fun bit. [Mickey] is dying every 10 seconds on screen.”
Ashton sets up one of the book’s central questions with the Ship of Theseus thought experiment from classical history. If every individual part of the craft is eventually replaced, is it the same vessel? And if Mickey dies and re-emerges as a completely new body, is the original Mickey lost forever?
The novel’s Mickey is a bright historian who opts into the expendable program to escape a sizable gambling debt. Bong, who adapted Ashton’s screenplay, made a few notable character adjustments, embodied by Pattinson in a darkly comedic turn.
“I wanted to make him more working class, a bit dumber, a bit more adorable, more unfortunate, nice and also just too nice for his own good,” the writer-director told POC Culture earlier this year.
Ashton, for his part, was cool with any and all changes, including the title tweak and the switching of some character names. He said he appreciated Bong’s probes into the book, which the filmmaker presented on a two-hour video call where he asked Ashton, among other queries, what he felt the heart of the book was.
“I told him, it’s chapter 19,” Ashton said, referencing the backstory of Mickey’s relationship with his girlfriend, Nasha. “[Bong] said, ‘I promise you, I will put that in my film.’”
Bong invited Ashton to visit the set of the film, largely made in Warner Bros.’s Leavesden studio in England. The director also named a town in the film after Ashton and even gave him a specially made badge for the fictional locale’s police department.
“He didn’t have to do any of that. He probably went to a lot of trouble to get this and he did it just to be kind to me,” Ashton said.
All told, Ashton has published six books, including a sequel to “Mickey7” titled “Antimatter Blues,” in 2023. Macmillan published his latest, “The Fourth Consort,” in late February.
His day job still requires his main focus, though. That breakthrough in treating pediatric brain cancer has already helped hundreds of children, he said, and will continue to save more.
“There’ll be thousands and tens of thousands who will live because of that work,” Ashton said. “I can’t let this stuff I do on the side interfere with that, right? That’s really meaningful.”
Patrick Hosken is CITY’s arts reporter. He can be reached at patrick@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
