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A review by mburnamfink
Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan
4.0
Morgan continues the kind of neo-noir scifi that made him famous with Thirteen. Carl Marsalis is both a cutting-edge genetically engineered super-soldier and a dangerous throwback. The product of a secret program to create the ultimate warrior, Marsalis is stronger, faster, and more vicious than any baseline human, a sociopathic monster modeled on a pre-agriculture alpha male. The world used the Variant Thirteens to fight a dirty counter-terrorism war, and then when blowback proved too much, proscribed all the existing Thirteens to exile on Mars, or prison-reservations. Marsalis is legal; his job is hunting down renegades Thirteens. When a Thirteen does the impossible, hijacking a ship from Mars and brutally murdering people across the fragmented remains of North America (broken up into RemPac, Jesusland, and the Union), Marsalis teams up with a tough Turkish-American female cop to unravel dark conspiracy at the highest corporate levels.
There's a definite deja vue to the story. Marsalis and Sevgi are a lot like Kovacs and Ortega from Altered Carbon. The bounty hunter tracking down deadly super-humans is straight out of Blade Runner. The setting of a USA fragmented on political lines is well-done, but nothing surprising. The only truly novel elements are a dash of evo-psych to explain the Thirteens and other semi-proscribed genetic variants, and a heavy dose of Andean altiplano as a stepping stone to Mars.
Thirteen is more generously paced than Altered Carbon. Morgan takes his time setting his pieces up, and letting the game play out. Style-wise, it's fairly restrained, stepping back from neon technological excess, but also a coherent picture of new technological world. As someone with a background in bioethics, I enjoyed the snippets of the 'Jacobsen Report' which proceeded each chapter, but I feel like Morgan comes down firmly on the boring side of genetic determinism.
There's a definite deja vue to the story. Marsalis and Sevgi are a lot like Kovacs and Ortega from Altered Carbon. The bounty hunter tracking down deadly super-humans is straight out of Blade Runner. The setting of a USA fragmented on political lines is well-done, but nothing surprising. The only truly novel elements are a dash of evo-psych to explain the Thirteens and other semi-proscribed genetic variants, and a heavy dose of Andean altiplano as a stepping stone to Mars.
Thirteen is more generously paced than Altered Carbon. Morgan takes his time setting his pieces up, and letting the game play out. Style-wise, it's fairly restrained, stepping back from neon technological excess, but also a coherent picture of new technological world. As someone with a background in bioethics, I enjoyed the snippets of the 'Jacobsen Report' which proceeded each chapter, but I feel like Morgan comes down firmly on the boring side of genetic determinism.