Thirteen
by Richard K. Morgan
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Book Reviews of Thirteen
Book Review: Your Unlucky Number
Summary: 1 Stars
The Government has genetically engineered Carl to be a black man. As if this weren't bad enough, they also made him a Thirteen, which means he is always a little cranky. In combat, this extra crankiness is a huge advantage.
Carl tries his best not to be cranky, but everyone he meets goes on a forty-five page rant on how their lives are actually much worse than Carl's. If it is a woman, Carl has sex with her, but it only shuts her up for a paragraph or two before she is back to bitching.
Carl has a license to kill, but since he is the good guy he tries not to use it unless he is in a pinch. Mostly he opts to just disfigure and paralyze people so they can spend the rest of their lives regretting having crossed him.
In the future, from Indianapolis to Rio de Janeiro is about twenty minutes (though often flights are overbooked and Carl has to kill someone to get a seat), so Carl hops around the globe confronting old acquaintances demanding they confess everything about the interplanetary conspiracy or else. Carl disfigures and paralyzes them but still they always refuse to confess. No matter, because Carl learns more from what they don't say than what he would learn if they had confessed everything.
Eventually enough people refuse to confess for Carl to figure it all out. He confronts the interplanetary conspirators and gives them a chance to mend their ways, but they don't, which makes Carl extra cranky.
Book Review: Cheap crap
Summary: 1 Stars
I am a voracious reader of SF and tend not to be overly critical. I read a couple of the Kovacs novels by this author and found them to be "OK" (but not great). This one here though is so bad that I even overcame my usual laziness and sat down to write a brief review. You can't say you haven't been warned. Plot: humanity has bred a small group of superhuman soldier-criminals (the "thirteens") who are now either dead or locked up somewhere. One got out and is now killing lots of people. Another one is sent to track him down. Which he does. That's it!
As was the case with previous books by this author, the plot involves lots of gratuitous violence - which is getting real old.. This is science fiction but there isn't a single fresh idea in this book. No new technology, no new social concepts, nothing. Everything in this book is recycled from somebody else's ideas, the language is cheap and tired, the characters are flatter than cartoon characters and the plot is la-di-la. All characters, regardless of their cultural, ethnic, linguistic or social background use the f-word liberally. There doesn't seem to be a page in the whole book where it isn't used. People are always "shooting sharp glances", or "grin" or clench fists.. you get the idea. The lazy language is an insult. Nobody should charge money for this.
In this category, read Walter Jon Williams instead, for example "Voice of the Whirlwind".
Book Review: Enjoyable, but not Morgan's best
Summary: 3 Stars
Set a hundred years in the future, when Mars has been colonized, genetically modified humans exist, and the United States has fractured into several smaller nation-states (including a backwards, southern stereotype-filled republic nicknamed "Jesusland"), Thirteen reads like a gritty detective novel.
I give Morgan credit for having some interesting ideas about what it might mean to be an enhanced human living in a less-than-accepting world and a few other smart future extrapolations from today's realities. I also give him points for giving his protagonist (trained as an assassin and used in shady wars, after all) a credibly dark sense of morality.
However, to me, Thirteen couldn't seem to make up its mind whether it wanted to be a thriller or a novel of ideas, and wasn't as strong as it might have been in either category, though it has moments. The convoluted plot is sometimes uninvolving, there are a lot of talky scenes in which characters muse philosophically, and Morgan has a tendency to inject his own 2005-era political views in a heavy-handed way (see any scene dealing with Jesusland).
All in all, I thought that Altered Carbon gelled a bit better as a novel and is the place to start with this author. But, if you're a fan of Morgan's tough guy characters and future noir style, this is still a decent enough book to read next.
Book Review: Spectacular: thoughtful, intense, and action-packed
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been on a sci-fi kick lately, and Morgan is my newest discovery. I've been binging on his books like a prom queen on nonfat ice cream.
A lot of people write off sci-fi without exploring it, a problem that I think has something to do with the plot summaries, which almost always sound either lurid and low-rent or impossibly high-brow and abstract. For that reason, I'm going to limit my summary here; let me just say that it's a book about a manhunt, and that the protagonist is the result of a government program to produce genetically enhanced soldiers.
More important than the specifics of plot, though, is the incredible breadth of territory Morgan covers -- racism, politics, science, religion, sex, love, biological determinism, the role of government, on and on. Better still, he has that rarest gift, the ability to explore philosophical questions while simultaneously making you tear through the pages. The action is relentless, the sex is hot, the twists are multiple, and yet on almost every page there is something worthy of more serious consideration. Highly recommended.
Book Review: Alpha Females--What A Ridiculous Notion
Summary: 1 Stars
In the introduction to Thirteen Richard K. Morgan makes reference to the fact that he recently lost his mother. Also, that his mother taught him this that and other things. Unfortunately, she did not teach him that if he really believes that the half of the species that beats, tortures, maims and murders children, are actually paragons of non-violence, and that female rulers have never invaded or attacked another country, then she really taught him nothing. There are too many studies, "Odd Girl Out", for one, about bullying and aggression in women, that puts the lie to most of the theories that he puts forth. Thirteen is crap. I could only get through a third of it before I wanted to ask for my money back and put it down, never to pick it up again. There is a very good book, "Warrior Women", that proves that Mr. Morgan, for all his need to extol women, really proves that he is terrified of women. Don't purchase this, why waste the money?