Thirteen
Richard K. Morgan has reached the next level.
Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs books – ALTERED CARBON, BROKEN ANGELS and WOKEN FURIES – were great. Full of the dark nihilism, noir stylings, cool tech and awesome action that supremely catered to the hardcore post-cyberpunk science-fiction scene, these books brought Morgan to the fore. Luckily for us, he’s not sitting on his laurels.
Set in the future America in which the “red” states have been left to rot by the majority of the “blue” states on either coast, THIRTEEN, at its beginning, seems a bit obvious, cliched, even; calling the red states “Jesusland,” while funny, isn’t exactly original, but that’s all part of the plan.
Slowly but surely, Morgan pulls back the sheet on a future that has been utterly transformed. Unrestricted genetic engineering has gone wild, creating all sorts of freaky human variants. The most feared and reviled of these are the variant “thirteens”: beings with the violent, hypermasculine traits of pre-social man who were created and raised in camps to serve as soldiers for a kinder, weaker mankind. Unfortunately, they’re now outcasts, rounded up into camps or sent to colonize Mars because society has deemed them monsters.
Enter Carl Marsalis, a variant thirteen, UN-sanctioned bounty hunter who’s been hired to track down a mass murderer. He’s a science-fiction superman who’s begun to think about his career – perhaps too much – and as policework and fight scenes flesh out the plot, he gets an inkling that maybe there’s more to life than being just about the toughest mother on the planet.
For most authors, this would have been more than enough to lay an entire novel on, but the author’s gone and outdone himself, turning the great, sexy procedural video-game adventure of THIRTEEN into a study of the essence of monstrosity, which is inextricably tied to the essence of humanity. For while the “monsters” of THIRTEEN are indeed frightening, so are most of the “humans,” and by the end of the book, all previous assumptions will be thrown out the window.
With the success of his previous books, Morgan could have made a perfectly fine living for the rest of his life churning out one after another of body-jumping sequels to ALTERED CARBON. It’s heartening to see him take the high road, venturing of into places he hasn’t been before, because THIRTEEN is his best book yet. –Ryun Patterson
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• WOKEN FURIES by Richard K. Morgan
hehe…I thought it was his worst book yet.
Worse than MARKET FORCES? That’s too bad. I loved his earlier stuff, too–I first read ALTERED CARBON in a seedy guesthouse in Bangkok, and my “vacation” ended up as me holed up in my room with buckets of KFC and six-packs of Coke as I read it cover to cover.
Those books defintely have a place in my heart, but THIRTEEN is more than the sum of Morgan’s previous work in that it tries to answer the moral questions it raises, rather than punt them around, complaining about the unfairness of it all.