Thirteen
by Richard K. Morgan
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Book Reviews of Thirteen
Book Review: More action from Richard K. Morgan
Summary: 4 Stars
I finished my latest seminar on Sunday, which meant that for the next two or so weeks, I'll be completely free from academic readings until it all starts up again. I used the first day of my new found freedom to get around to finally finish one of the books that I've been picking away at for the last month and a half, Thirteen, by Richard K. Morgan.
Morgan is one of the best Science Fiction writers of the decade, and has consistently churned out fantastic works. My favorite book of his thus far has been his debut novel, Altered Carbon. His latest, Thirteen (Or Black Man, if you're overseas), is an interesting, complicated and thought-provoking read.
Thirteen follows some of Morgan's style that has been seen in some of his other works - indeed, this novel could easily take place in Takeshi Kovac's world, just an earlier, more recognizable version. There are elements common to both - a tough main character bred to fight, Carls Marsalis, a vast conspiracy, some harsh violence and sex thrown in for good measure. This is science fiction grown out of an adolescence fantasy - it came into adulthood with plenty of problems and it's not for kids, that's for sure.
Thirteen follows Marsalis as he's recruited by an international governmental organization, COLIN, to track down a renegade killer who escaped from a crashing inter-solar space ship after killing and eating the crew, and while on the ground, is picking off people, seemingly at random. Marsalis is tasked with this because the investigators believe that the killer is the same type of person as Marsalis - a Variant Thirteen, a genetically modified human, bred to be the baseline human, with all of the aggression and resourcefulness as our ancestors might have been twenty-thousand years ago before agriculture tamed us. Along the course of the book, a massive governmental and corporate conspiracy is uncovered, with far-reaching implications for all of the characters.
This was a facinating, although somewhat dense read. Morgan's writing makes me slow down and take things in far more slowly, and I suspect that I'll be thinking about everything over the next couple of days just to finish processing it. Like his other books, this one is complicated, which makes it all the more satisfying to read - very seldom now do I come across good SciFi that really makes me sit back and think to put the pieces together - oftentimes, it's far more simplistic and clear cut.
One of the more interesting points of the book was the near-future that it portrayed - clearly a result of the last eight or so years of American politics. In this future, the United States has split into several parts, the Rim (West Coast), The Confederated Republic aka Jesusland (The South) and the northeast, all taken with regional stereotypes and expounded upon. Jesusland, incidentally, takes its name from an internet diagram of the US after President George Bush's reelection in 2004 of the South as its own country, with the United States as Canada. It's not an unreasonable assumption to make, and its certainly a grim prediction, taken to extremes.
The original title of the book, Black Man, is a big portion of the book's plot, dealing with discrimination on an entirely new level - one's genetics. In this world, even though there are fairly good levels of equality, the color of one's skin has fallen away to one's genetics, where variants are the ones who have a whole new level of discrimination - to the point where they're not allowed to breed, are killed or persecuted for who they are and generally have a miserable life because the rest of the population doesn't like them. It's a chilling topic, and an interesting one at a time when there is much change heralded around the country, where the recent election is seen as proof-positive (to some extent this might be true, but it's only a start) that racial equality has been archived.
This is science fiction at its best. While there are some of the other usual standbys here - artificial intelligence, space ships, colonies on Mars, these are merely details to the larger story that folds in numerous excellent characters, motivations and a story on top of that. Morgan has crafted a fantastic story here that doesn't rely on gimmicks or require the reader to suspend their disbelief in any extended fashion - the story here is not only believable, but terrifying in the fact that it is guided by a future that could be. It is for this reason that Morgan is one of this generation's finest writers, and Thirteen, while slightly overlong and at times, a little too similar to his other books, is a good example of his abilities as a storyteller.
(Originally Posted to my blog)
Book Review: mediocre thriller
Summary: 2 Stars
There used to be a time when I was able to read trough eight hundred page book, in a single day, never caring about the techniques used, clichés employed and other elements novel is consisted of. There used to be a time when story itself could be able to influence me so muchso that I couldn't let go of the book. As time went by, experience accumulated, bitching ability developed and SF&F worlds described on numerous pages somehow lost their magic. I began to see behind the barriers of word, started to look upon structure, see it's repetition, it's ideology, and with that started to resent many of the books which just repeated dominant pattern without single idea of there own. Thoughts of improving the genre, of developing one's own imagination within the boundaries of certain discourse where soo far away to some of the writers, so that reading became constant search for interesting voices in calamity of sounds.
I have first heard of Richard Morgan in some back-alley chat about Woken furies" when the author was characcterised as a overly-simplistic, machoistic, violent type without any relevant idead in the world of SF, or literature as such. I couldn't side with this kind of talk, especially since I haven't read the mentioned book, so I decided to to pick the Black man", praised somhere as astonishing or something else in a same sense. After finishing it, I could understand forementioned people.
That kind of negative talk seems as too much of a negative-hype, wihtout any arguments that would lie in background and hold it's place. But, one will need only half of the book to find the arguments for himself.
Black man" feels like those movies we all watched in some periods of our lives. There' a good guy, there's a bad guy, there's some kind of an evil plot which is a threat for society, there is shootingm ar chases and all kinds of similar thing which you don't need me to tell you about. Maybe this sounds appealing to some, but when it's written on more than 600 pages it feels like four hour long Dolph Lundgren movie.
World of Richard Morgan's Black man" is familiar mixture of near future variation of modernity, with complex society dominated by massive corporations and capitalistic economy. In a world of constant struggle, opressed clases and dominant poverty, everything is a battle - battle for existence. This setting offered much potential (though it's SF potential is rather low, it feels more like some kind of alternate history, future(?)) which is wasted too much with constant running around, long and banal (comic book from 60's) converstaions and strange put gnomin know-it-all sentences in a mouths of military and covert-ops professionals. Maybe it's a thing of a genre, and maybe ot's just a bad writing.
SF offers much more than Black man", and one could make a giant mistake of judging the whole genre by this book. When confronted with works of Delany, or Simmons or myriad of others, Morgan could only hide itiself and offer it's literature to those people who just want quick read on a plane flight, something to consume and forget as soon as possible. For others, who are looking for literature in books (and this may sound almost weird) - there is only one advice. Look somwhere else.
Book Review: Carl Marsalis: dark, gritty and violent protagonist
Summary: 5 Stars
Morgan certainly has his own style of writing, a style that I absolutely love. I, for some reason, hesitated on reading Thirteen, unsure whether I would like it. I don't think I will ever doubt Morgan again.
Thirteen is an interesting concept, almost like a prelude to the Kovacs novels (which are another 200 years in the future from Thirteen), which doesn't detract from the book. Set a hundred years in the future from today, we see the technologically advanced world and the conundrum of genetic engineering. The first few chapters were action packed right from the beginning as we see Carl, a genetically engineered human called a Thirteen. Then the pace died down as the story shifted, giving more a setup for the plot, which also made the book slightly uninteresting as we did not get to see much of the Thirteens.
Wow does the pace pick back up, leaving you with a gritty, dark and violent hero in Carl Marsalis. You feel the toughness, the scary demeanor of a Thirteen. You feel as though you are living in the world Morgan created, able to imagine a vibrant picture of what Morgan is painting.
Only two slight drawbacks. The first is something found in all of Morgan's books, which is a tendency to be a bit gratuitous with his sex scenes, and sometimes entirely unnecessary. This doesn't bother me too much, because I have come to expect it. The second was towards the end Morgan fell into the trap of a B rate movie, where you get to the end and the killer or bad guy then steps in and explains exactly what happened and how it happened, as though the reader couldn't grasp what was happening. This isn't that bad, and there are a lot of nuances that re above and beyond what was explained, but still. I wish the story would have explained it better than having one character sit down and explain it.
Both issues are minor and don't really take away from how well Morgan writes and the images he paints. Just as Kovacs was a great character and could easily be written into three books, so can the concept of a Thirteen be written into several more books. I hope Morgan does. I whole heartedly recommend this book and author.
5 stars.
Book Review: Show me, don't tell me
Summary: 3 Stars
Very exciting premise here - in the not so distant future America has split along conservative and liberal lines into 2 separate countries and genetic experimentation has created a race of "super men" called 13's (genetic variation #13) who have either been locked up or exiled to the Mars colony. These guys are genetic throwbacks to the caveman and serious alpha males that used to run the tribes and groups of stone aged hunters. They were created to fight in wars but afterwards, were killed, locked up, or exiled.
Our protagonist (Carl) is a 13 who is licensed to track down rogue 13's and either capture or kill if need be. He is brought in to hunt down a particularly nasty 13 who escaped from mars, feasting off the frozen bodies off his shipmates on the months long haul from Mars to Earth. Yeah, wow, gritty. Morgan's strength is envisioning a world that is very very derived of our own - showing how technology can and will be abused.
But, then about half way thru the book, it stops cold. And as Carl and crew track down the vile 13, we suffer thru chapter after chapter of political and social rhetoric. I really don't like when authors stop the plot cold and start lecturing to me the details of a made of the social & political structure of a world set in the future. I could literally have skipped the middle 1/3 of the book to no effect. Some editor here was really asleep on the job.
I have read all of Morgan's books and this one just got too far off base. My advice, less preaching and more action and story. If I want to contemplate the social structure of emerging religious & political factions I'll click over to "that" section of Amazon and find something, thanks.
I'll give it a solid 3 as it starts strong & end strong.
Book Review: Amazing intro to Morgan's works, but not the best.
Summary: 4 Stars
Let me preface this by saying that 'Thirteen' was the first work by Richard K. Morgan that I had ever read.
That being said, the only work by Morgan that I have not read is 'Market Forces'. I own all of his other books and have enjoyed them all.
Now, onto the review. I find 'Thirteen' to be a culmination of Morgan's scifi works. 'Altered Carbon' is very much a detective-noir type book. 'Broken Angels' is very much a war story. 'Woken Furies' is very much an antihero tale about a war-torn veteran trying to make sense of reality. 'Thirteen' was, to me, a successful culmination of these three elements. This book combines the previously mentioned aspects of his earlier works very adroitly. The book lacks some of the poignantly heart-wrenching, gut-churningness he channels in his earlier books, yet balances them in a way that outclasses any one of his previous works. Any one of the Takeshi Kovachs books is inferior in my opinion, yet as a whole they are superior to his later work in 'Thirteen'. Yet 'Thirteen' is a more holistic work than any of his earlier books if viewed alone.
In my opinion, this may make 'Thirteen' his culminating work so far. Who can tell if his fantasy series will be better. Certainly 'The Steel Remains' shows how much he has grown as an author, yet it is such a departure from his earlier works it is hard to compare it to the rest. Needless to say, I will anticipate his next works with great anticipation, yet if one were to read his earlier works first, one will gain an exponential appreciation for his newer books. I believe he has nowhere to go but up.
BUCK