In a near future Earth, after a series of wars the USA is fractured into separate countries, and genetic engineering was used to create special warriors, called Thirteens, built from extinct ultra-male archetypes, incapable of accepting any authority. A Thirteen returns from the colony on Mars and starts killing people, apparently randomly, as he suspected of being psychotic after being awake, and not in hibernation, for most of the long journey back from Mars. The "Black Man" of the title, Carl Marsalis, is also a Thirteen, whose speciality is in neutralising rogue Thirteens, and he is released from jail in Florida to track down the serial killer,

As a thriller this novel never lets up. Tough guys slug it out in demi-monde locales, typically bars, while swearing profusely. The best have superfast hand-to-hand fighting skills. They are joined by "tough" women who engage in their share of the mayhem. Once the fighting is over, there is time for plenty of "tough boy meets tough girl" sex. Everything is a conspiracy, each conspiracy unwraps to contain another and most of the characters turn out to be involved in some conspiracy or other.

As science fiction though this novel is unremarkable. There is no realistic and innovative future world view here. Why would anyone be daft enough to build Thirteens when they are intrinsically uncontrollable? There is supposed to be prejudice against Thirteens, and more so for Carl, since he is black. Yet there is no physical difference between a Thirteen and a human, and apart from recidivism in the ex-USA Southern States, there seems no rationale for the persistence of racism. Even the violence looks old-fashioned when compared to the remotely controlled weapons droids in Ian McDonald's Sanjeev and Robotwallah. All in all, this novel is very thin SF, but an effective, if cliched, thriller. ( )

Richard Morgan back on form after a poor showing with Market Forces. Possibly a bit overly long, but exceptionally well written and plotted. Highly recommended. ( )

Excellent thriller with a nice twisty plot.

I do have to wonder about the basis of this society, 200 years hence, and it's purported " virilicide". It seems like despite the supposed disempowering of the men, nonetheless ALL the institutionally powerful players in the novel were male. So: where was this feminization again? because although it was cited, it didn't seem to actually appear (even though, by the narrative, it seems like it'd be a really good idea...). ( )

Damn Richard K. Morgan can write! It's almost as if this stuff is happening in some alternate universe and he's just there copying it down. His universe is so completely fleshed out you almost expect that he's got a set of encyclopedias sitting around his house with information that relates to the world he has created. In this case it helps that it's set in America but it's a completely different future version of America.

All that said, I didn't enjoy this one as much as his Takashi Kovacs novels but that's mostly because they're more "sci-fi" than this one and I tend to like aliens and gadgets. This had modified humans, combat enhancements, and a station on Mars but it wasn't really all that out there. ( )

Fast paced thriller rife with thoughts on history evolution, racism and religion. ( )

An intriguing work of SF. It's definitely grounded in the conventions of the blockbuster thriller-- there's some act of violence or sex in nearly every chapter, and it's a long book --but it's smarter than it looks, and Morgan emerges finally as an author who is deeply interested in the complex interplay of ideas about genetics, identity, and race. ( )

The premise: Carl Marsalis is what they call a variant Thirteen, the result of a failed experiment to essentially create super-soldiers. Now, Carl makes his living hunting down illegal thirteens, and takes on a job that might prove too big for him. A fugitive from Mars crash-landed a ship in the ocean and has been murdering his way across what the reader recognizes as the United States. The problem with this fugitive is that like Carl, he's a thirteen, but this one might just get the better of him, and there's more than one person who wants to make sure Carl never finds the guy, let alone kill him.

My Rating

Give It Away: in the end, I'm glad I finished it, but if I'd bought this as a hard cover, I would've been very disappointed. I didn't want to finish the book at all because it takes so long to really find its footing and bring the story together, and even then, it takes its sweet, meandering time doing so. There's certainly pay offs: the main plot comes together nicely in the end, though I still feel like something's missing, and the characterization felt solid too. The problem is that the book could've been much shorter, and while it would've required sacrificing some of the insane amount of world-building, commentary, and ideas presented, I think it might've made for a tighter, more focused book. The biggest problem is that I felt ambivalent reading the whole thing: this book lacked the siren's call, and it never made me want to pick it back up again after stopping. However, in the end, it's not all that bad. If you give this book a shot, give it until you complete a chapter in PART TWO (that's 100+ pages in) just so you can see how it comes together before making any decisions on finishing the book or not.

The full review, which does include spoilers and cover-art commentary, may be found in my LJ. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome.

REVIEW: Richard K. Morgan's THIRTEEN

Happy Reading! :) ( )

Solid new book by one of the strongest modern authors, Richard K Morgan. Although I did not enjoy it as much as Altered Carbon, it still had all the elements that have made Morgan's previous offerings so strong - gritty violence, tight dialogue, adult themes, and varied characters in a fractured, postmodern world typified by corporate control and lax morals.

I thought the story was a little over-satured with religious and ethical expose, but still enjoyed the portrait painted of racism in a color blind society.

Recommended for fans of Morgan's writing who aren't offended by the negative portrait he paints of evangelicals. ( )

This novel (spelled "Th1rte3n" on the cover) is a noirish, science-fiction thriller, with some degree of psychological insight. Science fiction, in that it is set in 2107 AD, and concerned with Mars colonization, the political balkanization of the USA, and genetically-engineered humans. Carl Marsalis is a variant thirteen; he and those like him are exceptionally strong, quick, agressive, lone wolves who have trouble walking away from playing dominance games with other men - or from a fight. This is a good profile for a noir antihero, and the story provides themes of corruption in high places, the investigation of crimes, tough-guy talk from both sexes, and violent encounters: thus the thriller aspect. The variant thirteens were bred and raised in secret government programs aimed at producing soldiers, and their agressiveness may stem as much from their upbringing as from their genes; this possibility leads to psychological introspection on Carl's part - when he's not putting bullets through someone.

Thrillers are not a particular interest of mine, but I was interested to sample Morgan, about whom there has been much discussion. The book is competently written, with very well-done action sequences. It's a plus that Carl is no superman, and must fear injury from ordinary humans. The noir feel is done well, although the book perhaps has too many arias and not enough recitative, so to speak, where more variation in tone would have been welcome. And the discussion about where the thirteens' agression really comes from makes Carl more of a real person. The SF extrapolation is solid - I liked that Mars here is almost impossibly remote by ordinary human standards. Quite possibly, a fan of thrillers and SF would like this book much more than I did. ( )

http://tyranist.blogspot.com/2008/10/... ( )

Black Man opens with a fairly long dedication, in which Morgan thanks his mother for teaching him "to hate bigotry, cruelty and injustice with an unrelenting rage". Morgan has certainly mastered the rage, but I'm not sure the novel works quite as well as an attack or cruelty or injustice. As a piece of fiction, it's certainly enjoyable (though the narrative rather runs out of steam towards the end), yet the author seems unsure what message, if any, he intends to convey.

Like Altered Carbon, Morgan's award-winning debut novel, Black Man is perhaps best characterised as a cross between near(ish) future cyberpunk and a hardboiled detective story. Indeed, the similarities between the two works don't stop there: the setting - with an increasingly powerful United Nations, a divided United States and a growing human presence on Mars - is deeply reminiscent of the universe of the earlier book and its sequels (though Morgan has insisted that Black Man is not a prequel to the Takeshi Kovacs series). Kovacs and Carl Marsalis - the protagonist of Black Man - are also rather similar: both former members of elite military groups, both returned to Earth from time in the colonies, both generally feared by the bulk of the human population, both with a history of working for the UN or its agencies, both former mercenaries and both employed to solve criminal cases. Indeed, the only obvious difference between the two - though it is, admittedly, a rather fundamental one - is that, while Kovacs abilities were purely the result of training and technological augmentations, Mersalis is a "twist"; a genetically altered solider raised and trained as such from birth, known more officially as a "variant thirteen". Thus, while Kovacs opted for Envoy training, Marsalis had no choice in becoming who he is. This theme is certainly explored in the book, though in not as much detail as it first seems it will be.

As the novel opens, Marsalis is on Earth, employed by the United Nations Genetic Licensing Agency to track down other thirteens, who have escaped from the detention cells and reservations they were forced to move into following the UN's decision to outlaw them at the end of the 21st century. But when a spaceship returning from Mars crashes into the Pacific - and its passengers are discovered to have been eaten alive - Marsalis is dragged into a globe-crossing manhunt to find the ship's sole survivor and the people responsible for bringing him back to Earth.

While Black Man is primarily about Marsalis (the Black Man, both literally and figuratively, of the title), several other characters are looked at as well, particularly in the first half of the book. The most significant of these is certainly Sevgi Ertekin, a former New York City cop and now agent of COLIN (the rather unfortunate acronym for the Martian Colony Initiative). As the novel opens, Sevgi is in mourning for her partner, Ethan, who we soon learn was himself a thirteen. Sevgi is actually an interestingly conflicted character, a liberal Muslim woman who serves almost as a symbol of the unfamiliar America of the 22nd century that Morgan envisions. As such it's a shame that she ends up being shoehorned into the usual stereotypical role of a female side character in a thriller, forced by the author into a rather implausible relationship with the male protagonist.

The same criticism can be applied to the book as a whole, really. Morgan has crafted a fairly bleak future history, and it strikes me as unfortunate that he's less interested in exploring it than he is in relating what turns out to be a fairly conventional thriller plotline. While the premise of the book raises plenty of interesting questions (Morgan references both Gregory Stock's Redesigning Humans and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, among other works, at the end of the book), too often the issues raised are ignored in favour of cheap visceral thrills and violent action scenes. And all too often, Morgan seems almost to be trying to titillate the reader with scenes of lurid revenge against characters who represent his ideological enemies (a bad habit he shares with, among others, the young Iain M Banks).

Fans of Morgan's earlier work won't be disappointed, but I was left feeling that this book could have easily been a lot better.

Morgan gives us a plausible vision of our world a century hence, in which the world is coping with the ramifications of human genetic engineering. One particular group is the "thirteens": artificially created throwbacks to our hunter-gatherer past, lacking the evolved need to fit in to the rest of society; most of them are in internment camps or exiled to Mars. Our hero, Carl Marsalis, is one of the few thirteens loose in society-- and he hunts other thirteens who are out of control.

A ship comes back from Mars and crash-lands in the Pacific Ocean, and the only survivor seems to be a thirteen skipping on the terms of his exile. Marsalis is brought in to try and hunt him down. The story unfolds as a mystery with a thriller's pacing and similar levels of violence to Morgan's other work. ( )

Morgan's latest offering delivers yet another cool world from his expansive imagination. I was drawn to his writing by going through the Philip K. Dick award winners and finding Altered Carbon, which was an awesome story. He doesn't dissapoint this time either, the mercenary thread is back in his main character yet the newly created world that this novel lives in is very different from the Takeshi Novacs novels, but still really well developed and described.

Thirteen challenges our notions about what it means to be human, how environment, or genetic modification might change behavior. It makes you think about the implications that led to the adbandonment of our hunter/gatherer ways in favor of settling, farming, and paying obedience to authorities. It offers a way of thinking about this pivitol point in human history that most people have never considered, that the traits most neccesary to survive became the least desireable trait in the settling of humanity. It makes us think about what it is to be human ourselves, what exists in our biology or physchology to create bonds with other people, to garner absolute hatred, or any other feelings and relationships that we experience.

This novel is much longer than any one of the Kovacs novels, but promises action and turns in every chapter. I agree with another review which criticized it's length in some scenes, dragging the page count on unnecessarily, but for the most part, the depth he gives us, and subleties he hints at between the characters is great. The range of emotion displayed by his characters in this work is leaps and bounds beyond Altered Carbon. For a cyberpunk fanatic, this is a must read. There's something about describing technology that can't exist today, and could never exist with the laws of physics, that makes you wide eyed with wonder.

Again, Morgan excels, and I would thouroughly recommend this one to any fan of Altered Carbon, or other author's such as Gibson, Doctorow, and Dick. ( )

An interesting mix of science fiction and murder mystery. The main character is Carl Marsalis, working for the UN hunting down his own kind, genetically engineered men, designed as super-soldiers, called 13's or twists, unwanted and despised.

He's currently in a Florida prison, held for some nebulous time because he was caught financing an illegal abortion. Released to hunt another 13, a man who was woken too soon on a trip back from Mars and resorted to cannibalism to survive. Now there's brutal slayings across America. Carl teams up with some others to hunt this dangerous man.

It could have been shorter and lost some of the lag. I didn't really feel drawn to the characters and somehow felt that it was just filling time to the rest of the story. A good read, but not the best I've read. ( )

Black Man by RKM.

Quite good, I must say. A considerable leap from Altered Carbon, IMO.

As a preface, I liked Altered Carbon very much, though I did find some of the violence gratuitous, and objected to parts of the concept of the digitizable human mind, which I think was woefully oversimplified. Which might have been more forgivable to me if he had written that concept with a lighter pen, or left more room for the imagination, or maybe even fleshed it out more fully. But it lay in the middle, and it troubled me.

Black Man is a much more ambitious work from a literary point of view. His characters are very well conceived , almost exceptionally so for the SF genre. Especially --but not only -- the protagonist, Marsalis, whose full realization ought be applauded. Morgan captures subtleties of Marsalis' perceptions and his insights into others despite that Marsalis is not entirely human -- he is a genetically altered human whose thinking and emotional makeup differs from that of the ordinary human in entirely convincing ways. So Marsalis' perceptions and observations ring true, but in a way that is as satisfying and consistent as it is alien and alienated. And in the final analysis, we see him as intensely human after all.

The book can be described as fast-paced, thriller, crime-SF. The plot is intricate. The world-building is admirable. It is not a short book.

One has the feeling that Morgan has grown considerably as a writer from the days of Altered Carbon. I did not read the sequels to that book, so I don't know whether this growth was evident later in the series, but I relate to a reviewer's comment cited by Morgan to the effect that this is Morgan's best work "by a considerable margin".

It is not a perfect book, but my criticisms are small compared to what is good:

I found the plot to be a bit too tidy, with connections among the characters stretching credulity. I question whether this degree of plot intricacy was really necessary; could the book have been improved with further editing? As a rule, there is an overuse of the word "f***". Why is a Haag gun more terrifying than one that kills you right away? Dialog tags have frequent and undue adverbial modification, especially when Thirteens are speaking, and particularly via the word "evenly".

As you can tell, I liked the book a lot. I recommend it strongly. It is not an easy read, but it would be tougher were one not so powerfully swept along by the action. If you were bothered by the violence in Altered Carbon, you will find no relief here either. ( )

This is quite a hard book to review because there are so many things going on it.

If you're a fan of Morgan's you'll feel at home with the "alpha male" soldier character who is central to the book, although the milieu is much more cyberpunk than far future sci-fi. Except, it's not cyber, it's a genetically engineered future and the aftermath of accords to limit the effects of a range of GE experiments on people including the "super soldier" variant 13's. For the scientists out there, like me, there's a neat side step of the nature v nuture argument, because the super soldiers were also trained from birth as special forces soldiers, although the society they are in is firmly in the "nature" camp.

It's also a rather dystopian future of America vision - and a fascinating one. We don't find out everything about the new America, but there is a North Eastern (and basically only mentioned) coalition, a Rim (Pacific states) high-tech, high-finance state, and Jesusland - a fundamentalist, racist, collapsed republic.

Then there are all the discrimination issues - against the variant 13's and other "twists", in Jesusland against black people and so on.

Then, just to add to the fun, there's supernational agencies. There are basically only two, the UN has teeth now, and COLIN, the Colonisation Initiative, who run their own police, trample over local law enforcement and all the rest.

And that's all BEFORE you get to the plot.

The plot is basically that one of the variant 13's is on a killing spree. It's apparently random murders, but a "tamed" variant 13 is called in to hunt him down. There are stories and strands around the themes above that change and twist this, plus a love story or two and a few other wonderful little side trips.

Truly excellent. ( )

Soldiers really do need aggro.

The background is that the USA was losing wars by becoming too girly. This in fact causes a secession in the country, with the fundamentalist friendly states splitting from the Rim States to form different countries, eventually. So, they came up with the thirteen genetic variation to make a warrior breed that had the aggro back, with the ability to boost reflexes, and be more resistant, as well as be more charismatic. It also happens to make them paranoid loners.

Mutants like this scare everyone, so were heavily regulated. The protagonist of the piece is getting sick of his existence, and after getting into trouble gets hired to track a rogue thirteen, who has done a spot of killing and eating.

Said guy manages to make a friend, and find out a few secrets, while utilising his special talents.

If you liked Altered Carbon, not too much doubt you will like this book, too.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/07/black-man-richard-morgan.html ( )

Good, but getting a bit samey. ( )

Th1rte3n by Richard K. Morgan is a satisfying blend of his previous novels, equal parts of his hard-boiled Kovacs series and Market Forces, his recent Road Warrior meets Halliburton social treatise. If Andrew Vachss wrote science-fiction, this is what he’d write.

As with all of Morgan’s work, you’ll get a healthy dose of pulse-pounding action sequences and grisly crime descriptions. I’m not a horror buff and I don’t generally like gore. However, Morgan makes it accessible by delivering these sequences without the giddy glee or overly dramatic flair others employ. It’s a very straight-forward factual description - a nearly academic deconstruction of the brutality of what he’s envisioning. You’ll understand the appeal if you like CSI or Criminal Minds.

Read my full review at the Used Books Blog:
http://usedbooksblog.com/blog/th1rte3... ( )

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/node/... ( )

http://rivkat.livejournal.com/176760.... ( )

A note: "Black Man" by Richard Morgan is also marketed under the title "Thirteen".

The book has a fair amount in common with the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy ("Altered Carbon", "Broken Angels" and "Woken Furies"), in that it's a mix of Science Fiction and noir detective drama. The book is set about a hundred years in the future, and the science is accordingly a shorter leap from the present day.

I'm continually impressed with how well Morgan can tease new variations out of concepts that he and previous writers have already explored. In the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, the key concept was that of stored human experience and the ways in which it would change individuals and their society. Class dynamics, warfare, family, death itself were all still present, but were changed by the key concept. The key concept in "Black Man" was genetic manipulation, and that was similarly explored, although again, not extrapolated as far because of the shortened projection into the near future rather than the distant future.

A secondary concept in the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy was that of virtuality. The same concept is touched on lightly in "Black Man", but as befits a nearer future, it's not as widely explored. Given that, it was all the more surprising that Morgan managed to tease out another variation on the territory he mapped so extensively in the Kovacs trilogy. My favorite concept from his earlier works was the dilation and contraction of perceived time in virtual environments. In "Black Man", the concept of a virtual visitor's ward in a hospital is put forward, such that the terminally ill can interact with visitors free from the weakness and pain of their flesh, such that their final days are lived in greater strength and confidence.

Although there is certainly a fair amount of technical flair, "Black Man" is more firmly focused on the human condition, and what could happen if we as a society had the ability to produce less domesticated humans to deal with challenges civilized people are unable or unwilling to handle. The undercurrent of both "Black Man" and the Kovacs trilogy is that it is experience and discipline that make the indvidual, even if their physical and mental abilities are enhanced by technology or superior genetic material.

On the whole, a good read, and I look forward to further work from the author. It will also be interesting to see if a reasonable film can be made from "Altered Carbon" (aimed for release in 2009, apparently). ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.a... ( )

http://cephyn.com/library/richard-k-m... ( )