Alumnus Edward Ashton’s sci-fi novel Mickey7 gets a Hollywood glow-up with Bong Joon-ho’s film Mickey 17.
How does a man who grew up in southern West Virginia and carved out a noteworthy career as a cancer researcher suddenly find himself surrounded by movie stars on the red carpet of the world premiere of a feature film based on his science fiction novel?
“The whole thing is so incredibly implausible that I cannot rule out the possibility that I’m actually in an intensive care unit right now, hooked up to a morphine drip, and they’re about to pull the plug,” says Edward Ashton ’96 (PhD).
Ashton, an MRI expert by day and novelist by night, recently published his sixth book, The Fourth Consort (Macmillan), and a previous novel of his has been adapted into the motion picture Mickey 17, directed by Bong Joon-ho and starring Robert Pattinson. The film hit theaters on March 7.
Ashton’s stranger-than-fiction path has been forged through a workmanlike approach, a willingness to embrace happy coincidences, and a tenacious commitment to pursue his passions even when they don’t neatly align.
An author’s origin story
Ashton says he began writing fiction at the age of six and wrote his first novel by hand on 200 pages of lined notebook paper when he was 12. “The only person that’s actually read it was my father, who told me it was hackneyed and derivative, and that I should really learn how to write if I wanted to be an author and not bother with this kind of stuff.”
Undeterred, he continued to hone his writing skills and, by the age of 20, sold his first professional piece. He has been publishing more or less ever since.
But while he loved writing, he didn’t consider it a viable career path. Instead, engineering seemed the practical way to build a happy, stable life.
Ashton went on to study electrical and electronics engineering at Loyola University Maryland, where he excelled academically and kept physically active on the swim team. He was mulling graduate school options when he happened upon a flyer posted in a hallway promoting the University of Rochester.
“It had a picture of the Eastman Quad covered in snow,” says Ashton. “I thought, ‘Huh, it’s really pretty. I’ve lived in the South my whole life where we don’t get a lot of snow, so that would be a nice change.’ I tore off the little strip at the bottom and sent in my application.”
Ashton brought with him a National Science Foundation fellowship and received a Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship awarded by the University of Rochester.
He knew nothing about medical imaging at the time but took a class taught by Kevin Parker, the William F. May Professor of Engineering at the University’s Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences. Parker soon invited him to join his lab.
“He was the same as he is today—dynamic, engaging, and quick on his feet,” says Parker. “He told me very early on that one of his favorite hobbies was writing, and I thought that was rare for a person pursuing a tech PhD, but I didn’t know the depth of it at that point.”
During his graduate studies at Rochester, Ashton also took classes in creative writing on the side. Faculty from the department saw his potential and tried to pry him away from engineering to become a writer.
“On the Eastman Quad one day, a professor very dramatically tried to convince me to drop out of the PhD program and go to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop because he felt that would be a much better use of my time,” says Ashton.
While Ashton was flattered, he stuck to his plan. In 1995, he wrapped up his PhD in electrical and computer engineering, married the love of his life, Jennifer ’10W (PhD), and began a career as a research engineer with the US Naval Research Laboratory, producing software for remote targeting and overhead surveillance.
From start-up scientist to senior executive
After a few years, Ashton’s former advisor reached out for help.
“We recruited him back to Rochester because we were starting this company out of the University, which was doing a lot of very advanced medical imaging,” says Parker. “Ed and the work he did for his thesis were a spot-on fit, so we hired him as employee number one.”
The start-up, named VirtualScopics, was founded in 2000 and specialized in making medical imaging analysis tools to help clinical researchers speed up the drug development process. Ashton served as the chief scientific officer, and the company quickly became a success. He says that when they went public in 2005, the company had grown to about 40 employees and was earning about $3 million annually.
In 2016, VirtualScopics was sold to the 16,000-employee company BioTelemetry, where Ashton became vice president for oncology imaging. The company was acquired twice more before becoming part of ICON PLC, which currently employs 44,000 people.
Today, Ashton is ICON’s senior director for oncology imaging, where he remains as active as ever, albeit as a “smaller fish in a much bigger pond,” he says.
Writing redux
Ashton continued to publish short fiction on the web during the early stages of his medical imaging career. But when he and Jennifer had the first of three daughters, he took a break from writing that lasted about 12 years.
As his daughters became older and more independent, Jennifer encouraged him to start writing again.
“I hated that he was spending all his free time playing computer games,” she says. “I told him he can tinker as much as he wants with writing, and I won’t complain. Go put this great talent you have to use.”
He started fitting in writing whenever he could. If he had a free 15 minutes, he would try to knock out 300 or 400 words. If he put a roast in the oven, he would work to pen another 800 words during the 45 minutes it cooked.
“Everybody’s got their little superpowers, and mine is that I’m able to switch gears really quickly,” says Ashton. “I wrote my first book mostly with a sandwich in one hand while I was at lunch at work. I sit and write with the TV on in the living room while my wife’s watching a movie. I’m able to tune things out, pick up and drop things really quickly, and those skills have served me really well in this space.”
His persistence paid off. In 2015, HarperCollins published his debut novel, Three Days in April, a thriller set in a dystopian near-future Baltimore. The novel received favorable reviews, and when Ashton sent a copy to his former advisor, Parker was stunned, finally grasping the depth of Ashton’s writing abilities.
“I was like, ‘Holy mackerel, this is first-rate modern science fiction,’” says Parker.
HarperCollins released Ashton’s follow-up novel, The End of Ordinary, in 2017, and Ashton then began writing the book that would propel him to previously unthinkable heights—Mickey7.
Mickey reborn
Mickey7 tells the story of a space colonist named Mickey Barnes on an icy alien world in the distant future. Mickey and his fellow colonists are struggling to make life sustainable on the planet, threatened by the ominous specter of the native lifeforms known as “creepers.” Barnes has the ignoble duty of serving as the colony’s “expendable,” performing the riskiest jobs. Each time he dies, a new clone is “printed” with the previous Mickey’s memories largely intact.
“It looks at philosophical questions about what we are as humans and what consciousness means,” says Ashton. “One of the central questions of the book is about the teletransport paradox, a philosophical problem that people have been chewing over since at least 1750: If you are able to completely copy your mind into an exact duplicate of your body, would that be you or a completely separate person?”
Ashton’s novel probes these heady questions using nods to Norse mythology, a wry sense of humor, and deep scientific expertise (his medical imaging background is on full display from page one, with a reference to photon counting). But he believes his fully fleshed characters and faculty with words are what set his work apart.
“I think what distinguishes a book like Mickey7 from a lot of science fiction is that at the end of the day—and this is true of all my books—it’s about people,” says Ashton.
His character-driven story got the attention of some very influential figures in Hollywood. Before he even had a publication contract, Ashton’s agent—whom he calls a “dark wizard”—sent a PDF of the book to Plan B Entertainment, the production company run by Brad Pitt, DeDe Gardner, and Jeremy Kleiner. Plan B optioned the rights to the book and set out to identify the right people to bring the story from page to screen.
Ashton recalls, “Jeremy told me later that when he saw the book, he said, ‘Bong [Joon-ho] has to be the man to write this. He’s the only one who could really do this justice.’”
Bong was hot off the success of the 2019 black comedy thriller Parasite, which won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. Intrigued, Bong brought in star Robert Pattinson—known for his roles in the Twilight and Batman franchises—and the project snowballed from there.
Ashton was stunned and remains well aware of how unlikely his journey has been.
“An extremely obscure writer at the time with an unpublished book got an option, got it picked up, and had the most famous director in the world attached to it—and then it actually got turned into a film,” says Ashton. “It’s incredible.”
Author meets auteur
When Bong officially became attached to the movie, he set up an intense two-hour Zoom meeting to pick Ashton’s brain about all the details of the book. Ashton jokes that Bong put more thought into the novel than the author himself.
“He got to the point of asking, ‘How do the creepers reproduce?’” says Ashton. “That had never crossed my mind. So, I stared at him blankly for a minute, joked, ‘Well, when a mommy creeper and a daddy creeper love each other very much… ’ and then we hashed it out.”
Despite relinquishing all creative control to the plot of the movie, Ashton is honored by the care Bong displayed in adapting the novel. Ashton was particularly struck by one of Bong’s questions.
“He said, ‘I want you to tell me what the heart and soul of this book is, the one thing that we must add in the movie, and I promise you that I will put it in there,’” says Ashton. “He absolutely did not have to do that. I thought about it for two seconds, and I said chapter 19, which highlights the relationship between Mickey and Nasha. He said, ‘I’m so glad you said that. I cried when I read that chapter.’”
Bong then set out to bring the rich characters and world of the novel to the big screen. With his distinct directorial voice, he has added his own twists to the story—most obviously the title, which references the number of times Mickey has been resurrected in the novel and the book.
Bong invited Ashton and his wife to the set in London during filming. According to Ashton, it was surreal meeting Bong in person and hanging out with actors like Pattinson as they brought his story to life.
Ashton followed mostly from a distance as promotional posters, teasers, and trailers rolled out during the movie’s marketing push. Then on February 13, the Ashtons got their moment on the red carpet alongside the director and cast for the world premiere of Mickey 17 in Leicester Square in central London.
On the social media platform X, Ashton summarized the incredible night with equal parts earnest appreciation and dry humor: “This was an experience I will never forget, no matter how many times they clone me.”
This was an experience I will never forget, no matter how many times they clone me. https://t.co/y5BEdJKdax
— Edward Ashton (@edashtonwriting) February 15, 2025
The multifaceted future
Ashton says his newfound Hollywood level of success won’t change much about his personal lifestyle. He and Jennifer relocated to a quiet cabin in Webster, New York, a suburb of Rochester, during the pandemic. They now have ample room to hike, and he can fiddle with hobbies like harvesting maple syrup and building decks.
He also continues to write at a frenetic place. Macmillan published Mickey7 in 2022, and since then Ashton has authored a book annually: Antimatter Blues, the sequel to Mickey7, was released in 2023, followed up with two more standalone sci-fi novels—Mal Goes to War in 2024 and The Fourth Consort, which hit shelves on February 25 of this year.
As Ashton and his agent negotiate a new book deal, he plans to casually crank out a few novellas while he’s not under contract.
All the while, Ashton is as busy as ever at advancing cancer imaging technology at ICON. And he even manages to stay connected with his alma mater, annually serving as a guest lecturer for Parker’s medical imaging systems course for the past 20 years. Professor Sarah Higley from the Department of English has also invited Ashton to speak to her speculative fiction class in the fall.
“He’s busy running a section of a company and writing his books, but he still enjoys lecturing to students and is very generous with his time,” says Parker. “It’s very advanced and challenging material for the students, but he has an engaging lecture style and it’s an enormous benefit to them.”
When asked how he was able to master such different skills and achieve success at such a high level, Ashton is humble.
“We all contain multitudes,” says Ashton, riffing on the Walt Whitman poem “Song of Myself.” “We’re not just left brain or right brain; we all have the same brains and a creative side. We all have these abilities, and the more of those abilities you develop, the more productive your life is going to be and the happier life is going to be. So, don’t let yourself get forced down one particular pathway to the exclusion of the other stuff you enjoy.”
A version of this story appears in the spring 2025 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the University of Rochester.
