Saturday, April 7, 2018

Thirteen


(original title "Black Man")
Richard K. Morgan
Completed 4/7/2018, reviewed 4/7/2018
4 stars

I must say I like Richard K. Morgan’s prose.  That’s the first thing I noticed in this book.  Morgan writes with a smooth fluidity that is simply remarkable.  He doesn’t just write a lot of similes.  He uses lots of strong nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  It makes for very easy reading.  I screamed through this five-hundred-plus paged book in just a week, mostly because of the writing.  And of course, because it’s filled with lots of action.


I’m not always a fan of thrillers.  I like a little action in a book, but generally, I don’t go for dark, cyberpunk action novels.  But this one I liked a lot.  There were parts of the middle that seemed slow going, but they generally built up to something exciting.  While this was hard science fiction, it wasn’t too heavy on the cyberpunk themes.  Usually I get lost in the terminology, but I didn’t here.  There was just enough to feel futuristic but not to be lost in the technology.

The plot revolves around Carl, a thirteen.  He’s a genetically modified human who is generally dangerous to the public.  Most thirteens are either ensconced in camps or sent to work on Mars.  Carl however is an assassin whose mission is to kill renegade thirteens.  He’s hired by agents to help track down one such renegade thirteen who has escaped from Mars on a shuttle back to earth and has tortured and eaten his co-travelers on the long journey.  Since crash landing in the Pacific, he has since been leaving an undecipherable trail of blood across the country.  Carl must contain his own violent urges to work with the agents to get this renegade.

Yes, the book is pretty violent.  There’s enough gore for an R-rated movie.  But throughout the violence there’s some pretty terrific world building.  Carl is British, but the majority of the book takes place in what’s left of the US.  There was a great secession.  The Northeast is now one country.  The Pacific rim is another.  What’s left is the Republic commonly referred to as Jesusland, where religion and white supremacy reign.  The Rim and the Northeast generally work together, but their relationship with Jesusland isn’t too great.  In one section, Carl is incarcerated in southern Florida without charges or a trial.  Carl, by the way, is black.  It is reminiscent of the violent prison drama Oz and it gives a real flavor of what the Republic is like.

I have to hand it to Morgan for writing about a lot of topical things like racism, bigotry, and general intolerance.  He doesn’t shy away from the dystopian multicultural society.  Like his other books, there’s a lot of moral ambiguity in his main characters.  Carl is definitely an anti-hero.  He gets the bad guys, but his tactics are questionable at best.  After all, he was bred to be a killing machine. 

I could see this novel being made into a successful film, although one I wouldn’t necessarily want to see.  Morgan creates a dark, gritty, violent world that in a film would would make Sam Peckinpah proud.  It’s one thing to read it, it’s another to see it on the big screen.  Still, I enjoyed the heck out of this book.  I think Morgan is a terrific writer.  This is the fifth novel of his I’ve read.  It was another 1.99 purchase at the Kindle store.  I give the book four stars out of five, but don’t recommend it for the squeamish. 

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