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pinenoodle 's review for:
Thirteen
by Richard K. Morgan
I find this hard to rate, first because there are some over arching issues that isn't usually a factor in how I rate a book. In this the author sets out to talk about race, gender, and religion. Sometimes that works for me, sometimes it doesn't. The problem here is two fold; once is the use of Jesusland where an entire country, and a larger former part of the US is used a whipping boy so that the characters can explain what's wrong with -isms (not that everyone else in the world is fair mind). In the end there is no subtlety, no room for fiddly issues on the edge. Second, the discussion of gender, while perhaps somewhat nuanced, relies so heavily on ideas of sex determinism of gender, conflating sex and gender, and ignoring societal on gender roles that it's hard to take him seriously even when he is talking about the dangers of masculinity (because he therefore condemns what he seems to see as the inherent, hard to alter, behavior of half the population). One particularly annoying part was where characters took the extreme male brain theory of autism (which they also didn't seem to fully understand) as gospel, even though the theory is controversial at best and has a minimum of support among researchers.
So there's that. As far as the things that I normally rate books on, plot, characters, believability, etc, this was fairly solid for a while. But I felt like it fell apart to the end, bringing much of the resolution to the mystery out from left field with an organization that may have been mentioned before (I didn't really check) but not one that the author had made this reader, at least, pay enough attention to for it to stick in my mind down the road. That's not the only thing that derailed the story for me, but it was the most prominent.
Also, the Haag gun reveals that the author just doesn't understand viruses (which isn't that much of a surprise). The real issue here is that most any type of virus, if it were generic enough, would have worked. But he choose to make it an HIV like immunodeficiency virus. HIV/AIDS takes years if not decades to kill; why build a killer virus off of that when there are viruses that cause something nearly as deadly as what is described. But Morgan seems to realize that AIDS deaths are painful and ugly and stop there without realizing that the reason they're painful and ugly is that HIV virus itself doesn't kill, rather it (over time) weakens the immune system so other very nasty infections can get in that a healthy human would fight off.
So there's that. As far as the things that I normally rate books on, plot, characters, believability, etc, this was fairly solid for a while. But I felt like it fell apart to the end, bringing much of the resolution to the mystery out from left field with an organization that may have been mentioned before (I didn't really check) but not one that the author had made this reader, at least, pay enough attention to for it to stick in my mind down the road. That's not the only thing that derailed the story for me, but it was the most prominent.
Also, the Haag gun reveals that the author just doesn't understand viruses (which isn't that much of a surprise). The real issue here is that most any type of virus, if it were generic enough, would have worked. But he choose to make it an HIV like immunodeficiency virus. HIV/AIDS takes years if not decades to kill; why build a killer virus off of that when there are viruses that cause something nearly as deadly as what is described. But Morgan seems to realize that AIDS deaths are painful and ugly and stop there without realizing that the reason they're painful and ugly is that HIV virus itself doesn't kill, rather it (over time) weakens the immune system so other very nasty infections can get in that a healthy human would fight off.