Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Violent, imaginative thriller. A scary view of tomorrow, 29 Nov 2007
If you've read Richard Morgan's other sci-fi novels, especially those featuring Takeshi Kovacs, then you might think twice about picking up Black Man. It's set in a different scenario and Kovacs (a compelling and complicated character) is no where to be found. So the unfamiliar setting and the weird cover design (it almost seems deliberately constructed to distance this book from Morgan's established series) might sway you to put down Black Man and buy something else instead.
Mistake!
The world of Black Man is another brilliantly constructed, plausible near future. It's scarily close to ours, so many of the superstates are recognisable evolutions of the current political structure. America has fractured into a bible-belt 'JesusLand' and the Union. The major global superpower is the Rim (the Pacific Rim). The technology is based on extrapolations of what we have now -- evercrete replaces concrete, and coffee comes in instant-heat containers -- but the majority of the players are still humans. Just.
There's a colony growing on Mars, corporate influence corrupting the push into space, space-elevators lifting raw materials to and from the surface of earth into low orbit, and shuttle running on the long, long journey to and from Mars.
Into this situation come a set of believable characters; the augmented, hyped-up 'good' guy; the demobbed uber-soldier spawned by genetic experiment who shouldn't be on earth but is; the weary, chemical-assisted police woman. Their paths knit together as the plot progresses -- and Morgan nevers shies away from hot-blooded action and eye-raising plot twists. The only downside is the sheer volume of new stuff which is slung at the reader in the first couple of chapters; you have to get up to speed with a whole new universe pretty quickly. The political situation is slippery and take some getting used to, as do the fragmenting and re-forming factions of current societies. There's a lot of info to absorb so you feel like you're playing catch up until the plot really hots up.
Then the action is brutal and harsh, and the social comment is cutting. Black Man is set around 100 years ahead of us, and most of Morgan's insights apply to here and now. He sees a future when the 'feminisation' of society has led us to breed throwback warriors -- it's a bleak idea, that all our progress is what undoes us in the end.
So initially Black Man wasn't what I really wanted to read, because what I really wanted to read was another Kovaks novel. But Black Man grabbed and held my attention, and I rattled through it in three days (not bad, given its substantial length). More than that, I'd buy another book set in this scenario, so Morgan has plainly got it right...
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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Might be the scifi book of the year!, 10 Jun 2007
Carl Marsalis is a variant Thirteen -- one of the genetically engineered subjects of a failed government/military program to create the deadliest of soldiers. He is now a hit man with a UN mandate to find and dispatch rogue Thirteens. The problem is that Carl has lost the will to kill. When a job takes a turn for the worse and he's arrested in Miami, Carl believes that he can now leave his troubled past behind him. Unbeknownst to him, what appears to be a mentally unstable Thirteen returns from Mars and crashes the ship he's on in the Pacific, only to reappear later and leave a trail of corpses in his wake for no apparent reason. Soon afterward, government officials show up to bail Carl out of jail. In exchange, they want his expertise to help them deal what those seemingly random murders. Unfortunately, it won't take long for him to realize that there is much more to this than meets the eye.
Morgan's writing style and his fine eye for details make the narrative leap off the pages. The author truly knows how to make the story come alive, and I found the imagery quite compelling.
The worldbuilding is interesting, though Morgan doesn't delve too much on how it all came to pass. The USA have imploded and the country has split into three separate States: the Pacific Rim, the North Atlantic Union, and the Republic, also known as Jesusland. China is now a superpower and the rest of the world appears hard-pressed to keep up with them. It is a fascinating backdrop, to be sure, and it's too bad Richard Morgan didn't spend a bit more time explaining how it all unfolded.
The characterizations are well-done, the dialogues gritty. The author knows how to keep the readers interested by allowing us to learn more about the characters by increments. The Carl Marsalis/Sevgi Ertekin tandem provides a nice balance between the Thirteen and the COLIN agent. The supporting cast is comprised of a good bunch of characters, including the Norton brothers and Carmen Ren.
The pace is great -- Black Man/Thirteen is a veritable page-turner! However, the storytelling is at times a bit uneven. Nothing that really takes anything away from the novel, mind you. But Morgan sometimes takes the "easy" route, and Marsalis' hunches prove to be on target, though they're coming from way out of left field. With such a absorbing and convoluted plot, I felt decidedly short-changed when that happened.
My only true complaint in what is an otherwise nearly flawless work of science fiction lies in Morgan's depiction of Jesusland. I am well aware that the southern States of the USA are a land of contradictions, not easily understood by outsiders. But to portray the majority of their inhabitants as God-fearing, Bible-waving, racist dumbasses is quite a stretch, in my humble opinion. As I mentioned, Richard Morgan's backdrop is an interesting extrapolation of a possible future for the United States of America. Yet his depiction of the Republic goes a bit too far -- as if there's not a single soul in those States with a single shred of common sense and judgement. I mean, when it comes to human rights, they have as much moral celirity as countries like Libya. Again, that's pushing the envelope a bit too far. Honestly, there is a lot more to those States and their citizens, and the differences between the north and the south are a bit more complex than that. Hence, although most people likely will not even notice this (it doesn't particularly have much of an impact on the tale), it made me grit my teeth on more than one occasion. I guess I'm just tired of what has become a somewhat Western European misconception about the southern States, namely that religious fundamentalism is the norm everywhere. Heck, not everyone born there is a traditionalist right-wing inbred hillbilly idiot! I figure it irked me to such an extent because everything else is so well-crafted that it appears that Morgan let his Leftist side take over for just that facet of his creation. As I said, this doesn't affect the overall quality of this novel, but it left something to be desired.
Black Man/Thirteen is a high-octane, action-packed and violent book. It is also an intelligent and thought-provoking thriller, one that will even satisfy readers from outside the genre.
Like Ian McDonald's Brasyl, Morgan's latest is a sure nomination for a Hugo Award. Moreover, despite its flaws, Black Man/Thirteen might well be the book of the year!:-) I commend this one to your attention, as it is one of the books to read in 2007.
Check out my blog: www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com
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15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Underwhelming Bloated Thriller, 17 Sep 2007
Like many many others, I loved Morgan's amazing debut, Altered Carbon, and have been waiting for something similarly exhilarating from him ever since. I liked the second and third Takeshi Kovacs books (Broken Angels and Woken Furies) well enough, but Market Forces was terrible (to be fair, it was written before all his other books and only published after the success of Altered Carbon). This fifth book (published in the US under the title "Thirteen") is neither particularly good, nor particularly bad, it's a bloated thriller filled with mostly familiar futuristic concepts, underwhelming social commentary, all undermined by a woefully undeveloped protagonist.
The story revolves around Carl Marsalis, a genetically engineered soldier (aka a "variant thirteen") who works for the UN as a freelance hit man/bounty hunter, seeking out "thirteens" who have gone rogue. (Shades of Blade Runner, Terminator 2, and Universal Soldier.) Alas, when a job in Peru goes wrong, he finds himself stuck in a Miami prison with no reprieve in sight. That is, until a seriously psycho thirteen somehow hijacks a transport from Mars, eats the crew, crashes into the Pacific and starts running amok on the west coast. The escalating body count leads the UN to spring Carl and team him up with a female Turkish-American investigator to track down the killer.
The book is essentially more of a crime novel or thriller with science fiction trappings, as the hunt for the killer leads across the former U.S. (now splintered into a Northeastern Union, the south-central "Jesusland", and the western Rim States), to South America, Europe, Turkey, and Mars. It's an incredibly convoluted chase, which is often driven forward by little more than Carl's inexplicable "hunches," which have a remarkable tendency for being correct (something a true crime novel would never rely upon). The story takes far too long to unfold, but with Carl never really getting developed as a character, it's hard to stay connected with what's going on. Morgan's prose is tough and tight, but there's about 200 pages too much of it.
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