I finished Richard K. Morgan’s Thirteen last week. Being an unabashed Morgan fan, this one had been on my list for a while. Unfortunately, Thirteen despite being quite ambitious is a little disappointing.
The major reason for disappointment is the fact that Carl Marsalis, the main character, feels a lot like Takeshi Kovacs, the protagonist of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies. He also shares a lot of alpha-male tendencies with Chris Faulkner, the lead of Market Forces. If I didn’t know better I’d call Thirteen an Altered Carbon prequel, modulo the former’s romantic thread. Marsalis is genetically altered, psychotically mean, and military-grade lethal maneuvered into a violent journey of mystery and revenge.
Thirteen is set a little closer to our own times, so Morgan takes the opportunity to unload upon the good old US of A. In his world, the federal government has collapsed, leaving a Northeastern Union, Pacific Rim federation, and the rest a Republic, commonly referred to as Jesusland. Needless to say the worst tendencies of conservative Christianity emerge once the holy rollers get to run a nation. We also get a good bit more of a female perspective then Morgan’s other books, including some perspective from a complex, Marsalis love interest of Turkish-American descent.
Stuck in a Florida jail early in the story Marsalis is freed to hunt down a similarly genetically modified “thirteen variant”, with seeming connections to Jesusland. Here Morgan digs into the nasty racial underbelly of the US. Then the whole political angle essentially fizzles. I honestly think that as a Brit, Morgan didn’t have a deep wellspring of American culture to draw from and flesh out the story from that perspective, falling back into a comfortable internationalized mult-culti zone. There’s only so much you can get from reading about and visiting America. I was expecting some serious clash of civilizations and cultures, with American exceptionalism at the center, but that’s not the direction Morgan took.
Don’t get me wrong, Thirteen is a good read, but I would have preferred 500 more pages of Takeshi Kovacs.
Published in 2007, I wonder how Morgan interpreted the events of the 2008 Presidential elections. Must have sort of felt like contradiction and vindication at the same time.